• The A to Z history of London (MappingLondon)
• Virtual transit of the Thames under water (BBC)
• When is efficient too efficient? Tech lessons from Hamburg (Spacing)
• Gothenburg electrical circuit tram map (TransitMaps)
• The commuting principle that shapes every city (CityLab)
• Abandoned 1960s NYC rail line may be brought back (RT&S)
• What is microtransit for? (HumanTransit)
Whilst you wait for the next installment, check out our most popular articles:
- How Uber operates in London and why it is being banned
- On Our Line Podcast #8: Talking Uber, Lyft and Mobility disruption
- You Hacked – Cyber-security and the railways
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Interesting as the commuting principle article is, it does not really address European experience over the last hundred years or so. Cities based largely on cars hardly happened, with the 1940s-1960s new towns coming as close as UK got to that. Green belt policy prevented the further expansion of cities and most European cities did not have the space in the centre to accommodate everyone in cars.
Furthermore, in Southeast England, at least, many people travel for much longer than half an hour to get to work. It is now common for people to travel through the countryside from other towns to get to work in a city. The article suggests that this may happen to a much lesser extent in the US, but can anyone comment on that, please?
Much comes down to overall population density. The article refers to the point where US cities started to run into one another as the point at which expansion had to stop. It’s quite recent even in the North East corridor. It marks a sharp change from the typical US response for more than 150 years – that if you don’t like it here, move on out to somewhere else as there’s always somewhere better. This happened at both a small scale and a large scale.
European countries have not had the luxury of space to do that for a long time, whether constrained by other towns or cities or artificial constraints like green belt. So increasing density has been a longer standing and more common answer. As the article points out, this cannot be serviced by cars.
Incidentally, the US ‘move on out’ principal has applied culturally and socially as well as physically as exemplified (at an extreme) by the movement of the Mormons to Utah, and the development of both racial and political ghettos. The higher densities in much of Europe, certainly in the south-east of England have prevented this and forced greater social and cultural integration – for better and worse.