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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3845 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 25, 2023

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I recently enjoyed reading Romance of the Rails and American Nightmare, two books by Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner. They provide interesting overviews of the history of transportation and housing (respectively) in the United States.

A quote from Romance of the Rails:

The second blow to urban rail transit was a shift in the nature of work. In 1920, nearly 40 percent of all American jobs were in manufacturing, and there were just 1.3 service jobs for every manufacturing job. The number of manufacturing jobs continued to grow through 1980, but that growth was vastly outpaced by the growth in service jobs, so, by then, there were three service jobs for every manufacturing job. While manufacturing jobs were concentrated, most service jobs were diffused across urban areas. I call this the nanocentric city, because, to the extent that jobs had centers at all, there would be uncountable numbers of such centers in major urban areas. "Nanocentric" also sounds a bit like "noncentric", meaning there is no one center.

Just as urban planners were beginning to recognize the demise of the monocentric city, the service economy was leaving the polycentric city in the dust. Transit did a poor job of serving the polycentric city, with buses working better than rails. Transit is even less suited to serving a nanocentric urban area, especially a growing region whose job locations and patterns shift almost daily.

That's very interesting, I always see reasoning that the shift was due to corporate and government intervention shifting users toward cars.

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