The Great Society Subway, originally published in 2006, and revised and re-released in 2014, is a book about the construction of the Washington, DC, Metro, which broke ground in December 1969 and opened its initial lines in March 1976. At the time, it was the largest post-war mass transit project in the United States.

It was a system conceived, planned, and built during the ascendancy of the automobile. As such, the automobile acts like a kind of great foil to the star of the show—the 103-mile system designed to give residents a chance to get around the DC area without a car. The first half of the work is like watching a boxing match between the supporters of two apparently antithetical modes of travel, and each fighting for their share of the Federal transportation dollars.

One cannot help but think that it's nothing short of miraculous that it was built at all. As Zachary Schrag discusses, the process of creating it required the complicity, if not outright cooperation, of a vast network of citizens, experts, engineers, neighborhood groups, committees, panels, municipal governments, Federal agencies, politicians, and branches of government. Each brought to the table its own agenda and its own means of getting things done (or not). As New York builder Robert Moses was fond of saying, “You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Schrag's book is not only on how the omelet got made, but also who were providing, and who were withholding, the eggs in the first place.

So many seemed against it, so why did it happen? The answer to this question is what makes Schrag's book so interesting, as he forces us to think deeply about the purpose of having mass transit. Subways do not just keep people out of their automobiles and allow them to move freely and efficiently throughout a region. If done well, they can enhance the quality of urban life and promote the density and diversity that makes the city so important and vibrant.

But it would not be easy; there was no Baron Haussmann or Robert Moses to take the dictatorial approach. Rather, the Metro, an octopus with its tentacles in two states, numerous suburban communities, and the District of Columbia (at the time a non-autonomous municipal entity), would have to be hashed out and built among all of the interest groups who wanted to have a say. Like anything big, it takes only one “no” to stop it and million “yesses” to make it go forward. This is the central theme of this book: how a city and its surrounding region lined up a million “yesses” and the resources to make it possible in post-War America.

One way this happens is when all involved engage in collective denial, as they tell themselves it will be cheaper, easier to build, more profitable, and more effective, then it ever turns out to be. This is necessary for all to order the omelet on the menu. Then when reality shows it costs more or didn't quite get the ridership numbers, it's too late; the thing must be completed after all the time and money sunk (sunk costs are never really sunk costs). This is not to say, the Metro was a failure; it has, in fact, been very successful. It has maintained strong and growing ridership, and has helped revitalize neighborhoods and increase property values. However, its salability had to be made on the direct promises of efficiency and economy.

This book lays this all out. Each chapter focuses on one particular aspect of the system, from conception, to construction, to financing, and, finally, to its impacts (and this makes the time issue unavoidably a bit complex, since the chapters go back and forth over the same period). The first chapter details the history of Washington DC, as a slow-to-mature, capital of a nation. But by the end of WWII, it was clear that the large Federal Bureaucracy was here to stay and the city needed to move thousands of workers into and out of it each day.

The next few chapters then chronicle the creation of the system. Chapter 2 tells how it was conceived, how the various agencies each had a stake, and how the politicians acted to help or hinder it. Chapter 3 moves on to the debates about the stations and the design: what would they look like and how would they efficiently move riders? Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the larger region and the voice that the states and suburban communities would have in creating and planning the Metro, and it how it would relate to the larger program of highway and bridge construction. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on the actual endeavor of building and paying for the system.

Finally, Chapters 8–10 discuss the effects of the subway and how it altered land use throughout the region. In some cases, the subway helped fuel local economic development, such as with Old Downtown DC and Arlington County's Rosslyn-Ballston corridor; and in other cases, transit-oriented development remained an idea-in-waiting, such as with the sprawling Tysons Corner, which just recently welcomed the opening of the Silver Line.

Schrag's book is very detailed, and it requires an interest in, and patience with, reading about the multitude of individuals, agencies, panels, and authorities that saw this project through, and how they hashed out a large, expensive project in the political arena. This book is fundamentally a story about the messiness of the resource allocation process—the making of an omelet—in a decentralized democracy, and how, despite the fights and disagreements, the people and their governments can come together to collectively see through a modern Public Work that reflects both the wishes and the spirit of a region.