This past week, the FTA issued letters to one, Mr. Frank Wilson, CEO of Harris County Metro, informing him that the FTA has moved the North Corridor and Southeast light rail alignments back into preliminary engineering status for fiscal year 2009. Of note, Metro stated in its FEIS for the Southeast alignment (see page 50 of this document) that a light rail component would cost $329 million (2006 dollars). The FTA PE approval letter now states, two years later, that the updated cost estimate is up to $663 million for the alignment. As for the North Corridor alignment, the FEIS for it stated that the North Corridor would cost $354 million (see page 50) in 2006 dollars. The FTA letter now states that the alignment will cost $677 million in year of expenditure dollars. The FTA administrator and outside auditor wrote in the accompanying report that Metro's estimated annual increases of 3.25 percent were optimistic because of volatility in commodities markets, uncertain scope of the project, and items like utility relocations. In other words, the cost of these two alignments has gone from $682 million to $1.34 billion in inflationary dollars, a rise of 96 percent. If you factor in inflation, the project's cost rise is about 63 percent and the outside auditor says these numbers are optimistic.
Folks, the word is now official. This 30 mile of the Metro Solutions Phase 2 expansion will cost over $4 billion - which I had predicted 4 months ago - and Metro will go bankrupt ponying up a mere one third of that money. Houston Chronicle transportation beat writer Rad Sallee wrote on March 28, 2008 that there is a problem with the Harrisburg rail alignment crisscrossing Union Pacific rail tracks. No problem if the money can be found to build an overpass. With the cost escalations however, this means that the 4 mile, 4 stop Harrisburg rail alignment will cost $500 - $600 million and will presumably be replacing a local bus route with many more stops. It will only cover a short stretch of the #50 Harrisburg bus route, which in 2007 carried a mere 4,192 riders per day. This is down some 20 percent from the pre-Main Street rail line peak patronage Metro achieved with the Harrisburg bus route in 1999 of 5,499 riders and in 2000 of 5,277 riders.
As for travel forecasts for both proposed rail alignments, Metro stated in its FEIS for the North Corridor in 2006 that a rail alignment would draw 14,000 riders per day. That's right folks. $677 million for 14,000 riders per day. For the Southeast alignment, Metro forecast in its FEIS that a BRT alignment (not a light rail alignment) would draw 13,900 riders per day. It's quite possible that light rail would draw more riders. Either way, we are looking at two rail alignments whose capital costs approach 50 percent of the entire cost of the Katy Freeway refurbishment and expansion, but will probably only carry about the equivalent of two lanes of passengers and do nothing to expedite the movement of freight or goods. Transit ridership is up about 10 percent over 2007, but transit still carries only 4-5 percent of work trips and only 1-2 percent of overall trips. Moreover, transit patronage is up for both bus and rail.
Mobility is what matters, not mode. There is a very strong argument to be made that patronage would also improve if Metro simply installed dedicated bus lanes, decreased the frequency of stops to improve bus travel speeds, and increased headway frequencies to cut down on catastrophic wait times. This could all be done at a fraction of the cost of $130 million per mile light rail lines.
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But enough of today's troubles. The purpose of this post is to talk about a wonderful book that every transportation fan should have in his or her library and that book is Steven M. Baron's Houston Electric - The Street Railways of Houston, Texas.
Baron, a rail fan, writes that the book - which he published in 1996 - was a time consuming process and gives much credit to a number of streetcar enthusiasts who are no longer with us. The amount of material Mr. Baron managed to uncover was tremendous, considering that hard evidence on Houston's streetcar system is very scarce. He still managed to publish a book that is 223 pages long, including footnotes and sources. I should thank Mr. Baron for his efforts.
Baron starts off, appropriately, at the beginning. In 1868 Houston was, in his words, a 1 square mile hustling place with nothing but dirt roads which of course turned to mud when it rained. Nearly everyone walked. That is when Houstonians were greeted to the news that a horse car would be utilizing some old tracks from the Houston Tap & Brazoria Railroad which had been built years earlier, but had fallen into disrepair. Mule pulled cars started operating along Houston roads. Mules were preferred because they were steadier than horses and did not frighten or bolt. Baron goes on to describe the schemes which various early pioneers tried to get regular rail service into operation during the 1870's and 1880's.
Baron says that many figures were involved in the initial construction of Houston's early streetcar system, but perhaps the one man who was best known and identified with it was Henry MacGregor. MacGregor, who was born in New Hampshire but moved to Houston as a young man, became a secretary of the Galveston City Railroad, then later bought out and became general manager of Houston's budding streetcar lines (along with William Sinclair) in 1883. He had a swath of real estate holdings and eventually became involved in the effort to widen the Houston Ship Channel. He left MacGregor Park along with North and South MacGregor Way (which lie on either side of Braes Bayou, south of the University of Houston) to the City in his will. MacGregor and Sinclair took over a company called Houston City Street Railway, which had received a state charter in 1870, but regular service did not really start until years later. HCSR faced competition from another rail line, but Sinclair and MacGregor stepped in and acquired the assets of both companies.
Things went well until April of 1888 when another trio of ambitious men received a franchise from the Houston City Council to start a competing streetcar system. For a while in 1889, Houstonians experienced the drama of two companies laying track, a battle where City Council members led both sides and which led to legal fights, injunctions, and a handful of arrests. Despite this, Houston lamentably still had chronically muddy roads.
This state of affairs improved dramatically in 1891 when enough capital and technological expertise was available to electrify the streetcar lines. In scenes that were reminiscent of the Main Street rail line, Baron describes how service was often dangerous. Still, the electrification of the streetcar lines were a tremendous boon to the city, even in the midst of the nationwide depression of the 1890's.
Streetcars in Houston, as they did in every city of the world, also aided and abetted suburbanization and sprawl, just as the automobiles which succeeded them did. In a letter written in 1893 to the newspapers, a person who signed the letter "A Poor Man" wrote:
The adoption of electricity as a motor by the streetcar company in Houston is a blessing to the poor people of this city, because it allows a man of limited means to rent a house or to build a home in the outskirts of the city where rent is cheap or lots can be bought for a very small price, and live there and at the same time get into town early enough to attend to business. Rapid transit is the only thing that can enable a poor man to own his own home.
Real estate was big business after the 1890's and no savvy developer would really want to develop without streetcar access. Most famously, the Heights was developed with the streetcar in mind, but most other neighborhoods were also.
Baron also describes the strikes from labor unrest, management difficulties, and financial problems which plagued HCSR until out of state bondholders created a reorganization plan which brought the engineering firm Stone and Webster into the management picture. S&W brought capital, expertise, and some financial stability to the management of Houston's streetcar system and in fact provided management services all the way until the system went through its final shutdown in 1940. S&W helped oversee bus services during WWII and for some years afterwards. S&W reorganized the company and renamed it Houston Electric Company. The streetcar company was known by this name even after Houston Lighting and Power came along, and which in fact contracted to sell power to HEC in the 1920's, an idea that alleviated HEC from having to produce its own power. He also tells of the innovation and design of the Birney car and the resulting cost savings that were reaped by HEC because of the ability to do away with a conductor needing to be on board the vehicle.
In November 1914, a booming Houston, fresh with a new ship channel and flowing oil fields, witnessed a new competitor into the transit picture - the jitney automobile car. Baron goes on to write how competitive pressures from jitney cars drove HEC management absolutely crazy for the next decade, as jitneys eventually captured some 22 percent of the market. It didn't help that inflationary pressures from the First World War crippled finances, as did rising capital expenditures. Efforts to raise fares were usually met with petition drives from Houstonians opposing the measures, which often passed in elections.
Intriguingly, in 1920, the City of Houston hired a traction consultant named John Beeler to do a thorough study of Houston's transportation system. Beeler wrote, amongst many other things, that two-thirds of the streetcar routes were losing money. But he also wrote:
One of the reasons why the jitney bus has made such inroads into the railway business is because it saves time... The public demands rapid transportation.
Beeler went on to note that the average speed of travel achieved by streetcars was about 9 miles per hour, whereas the jitneys were averaging 14 miles per hour. Successive ordinances were implemented to subject jitney cars to ever increasing regulatory measures over the following decade. They were opposed by jitney drivers, but in 1924 City Council unexpectedly shutdown and banned jitneys altogether.
Baron goes on to state what is well known in historical and transportation circles in Houston, namely that the streetcar network reached its apex in 1927 with 90 miles of routes. What few know however is that as early as 1924, Houston Electric started trying out substituting or supplementing shuttle and commuter bus services to neighborhoods instead of going through the massive capital expense of extending streetcar tracks. The now affluent Southampton area of Houston got bus service, as did Harrisburg alignment in February 1928 - ironic considering that Metro now is going to spend huge sums of money to bring rail back to the street. The famous Bellaire streetcar route was abruptly replaced with bus service in September 1927 because the track was falling into poor condition. By 1929, Houston Electric was operating some 70 buses on 16 routes. Meanwhile, the City of Houston was implementing a paving program on its streets and was requiring that Houston Electric pay for paving of lanes where its streetcar tracks were, which proved to be another massive drain on HEC's coffers. The Depression proved to be a hard blow to HEC, with patronage and farebox recovery plummeting and transit losing patrons to an ever growing fleets of private automobiles. Baron includes a telling photo, dated approximately 1938, where a streetcar is pictured going south on Fannin, but which is seemingly lost in a crowd of ever increasing automobile traffic.
The story Baron tells is one that Houston's streetcar system did not abruptly collapse. Instead, the story that emerges from his book is that Houston's streetcar network experienced a steady switch from streetcars on rail to buses from the period of roughly 1924 - 1940. The company executives at HEC knew something that so many people who argue and fight over transit today do not, namely that the capital costs of running buses was - and always will be - a tiny fraction of the expense of trying to maintain and extend streetcar rail networks. They knew as early as the late 1920's that the future belonged to the bus. Moreover, the per capita number of rides that people took on transit had been in steady decline for decades. The peak ridership per person was in 1913 where people took over 220 rides per year on streetcars. This number had declined to 159 per year by the late 1920's and decline accelerated over the decades of the 20th century and into the 21st. Baron writes nothing about alleged conspiracies to put streetcars out of business and replacing them with buses.
Baron tells the story of how Houston's new bus network served Houston during WWII. It was ironic that Houston dismantled its streetcar network just before the war, as patronage went from 56 million in 1940 to a record 130 million in 1945, a figure that has never been equaled. Conceivably, this surge in ridership, caused by wartime banning of automobile production and gas rationing, might have helped HEC keep its streetcar network alive until perhaps the early 1950's, but nearly all cities except for a few older cities in America dismantled their rail lines as the 20th century moved onwards.
Baron has a chapter on the aftermath of the dismantling of Houston's streetcar network, telling readers that patronage continued to decline during the 1950's and bus headways were steadily lengthened. Municipal ownership was discussed as early as the late 1950's. He tells of Bernard Calkins's valiant efforts during the 1960's to keep bus service running, but Calkins was unable to reverse declining ridership and had to sell out to National City Lines. He tells of the City of Houston's purchase of the bus system from NCL in April 1974 for $5.3 million, with the new company being named HouTran. Metro was voted into existence in August 1978 and, armed with a 1 percent tax on commerce, the rail plans started coming immediately, heedless of the fact that transit only was carrying 1-2 percent of all travel trips in Houston. In 1988, Baron notes that Metro carried 76.9 million passengers on 980 buses on 106 routes. In 2008, Metro is on track to carry about 112 million boardings using about 1,000 buses on a similar number of routes. On a per capita basis, there has been practically no change in the past 20 years in per capita ridership despite the fact that gasoline is now nearly $3.50 per gallon.
Baron's general history of transit comprises about half the book. The later half of the book describes individual neighborhoods and the lines which served them. In what can only be described as a godsend, Baron also includes yearly patronage and farebox numbers that HCSR and HEC achieved in their years of operation. This alone makes his book a wonder to read.
In summary, the Wizard think this book should be required reading by every political figure, both elected and appointed, in America. I think that every political interest group should also read this book. I think that every person who voices or writes an opinion on public transportation in this country should also be required to read this book and should keep their mouths shut until they do. There just might be a small chance that the world might become a far more rational and saner place if they did.
Wizard
This is the fourth of a series of redirects from previous static web pages from which I had written book reviews. Wizard
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January 6, 2004: The Closing of the Western Mind - The Rise of Faith and The Fall of Reason by Charles Freeman.
Bear in mind while you read this review that I am an agnostic.
Charles Freeman has written a book about an extraordinarily important historical matter, one that is almost always glossed over in the history books. That question is, Why was it that Europe went through a 1000 year period known as the Dark Ages, and later the Middle Ages, between the Fall of Rome and the Renaissance?
Although I love reading history just as much as the next history buff over, I had never seriously considered what the real answer to this question might have been. For years, I assumed that a standard answer (if there is one) to this question would have been something like this: Rome was sacked in 410 A.D. (and again in 476 A.D.), and with it books were burned by a bunch of barbarians like the Huns, Goths, and Visigoths who were not accustomed to living a cultured life the way that the Greeks and Romans were. Ergo, the wealthy and civilized Roman Empire in the West faded into memory, and its cultural achievements were not appreciated by those who came thereafter, learning didn't pick up again for a 1000 years.
Buzzer goes off. AAAAA wrong!
Actually, I was kinda sorta close in a few regards. In his book, Freeman leads the reader through the classical Greek age of the competitive city states. He relates how the Greek civilization of the 5th century B.C fostered a remarkable culture and spirit of tolerating intellectual inquiry into every sphere of human interest. This went for the sciences, math, philosophy, rhetoric, religion, and architecture. Indeed, there was something of an atmosphere of one upsmanship and competitiveness amongst the Greek intellectuals which would accept the achievements of the great, while trying to improve on previous achievements.
Meanwhile, another aspect of Greek civilization and rationality asserted itself. The Greeks, especially Aristotle, denoted boundaries between what was knowable and would could not be known. They ascertained and denoted the ideas of deductive and inductive reasoning. They also tolerated inquiry while remaining pious to religious (and to remind the reader that the Greeks were pagan) tenants. There was tolerance between Muthos and Logos. This spirit of inquiry survived through the age of Philip of Macedonia and his son Alexander "the Great," and eventually spread to other areas of the classical world where Greeks eventually settled, such as Alexandria and Sicily.
The Romans picked up on this spirit of the Greeks when they conquered the Greek peninsula before the coming of Christ. I've read elsewhere the when the Romans encountered the classical Greek culture, they were definitely had their eyes opened. Some aspects of Greek life, such as participating in sporting events in the nude were abhorred, but Romans loved rhetoric (think Cicero), and added their own achievements, such as road building, public baths, and architecture. Scientists such as Ptolemy continued to make advances in fields such as astronomy.
Moreover, in the sphere of religion, the Romans were as tolerant as the Greeks about the faiths of conquered peoples. Deities were swapped and matched between faiths, and faiths such as Mithraism were widespread. However, one faith that was founded during this time was not tolerant of others - Christianity.
Freeman's book lays the downfall of inquiry and reason in the Roman world at the feet of Christianity. Mind you, it was not the teachings of Jesus Christ that were to blame for this. Jesus, being without sin, preached in his ministry the message of love, forgiveness, charity, and walked with sinners and the downtrodden. The stellar ethics of Jesus were those of Excellence. They were worthy of one whom could be a Son of God.
Freeman blames much of what turned into what we know of as Christianity today at the feet of the apostle Paul. He points out that Paul had a bit of a precarious position amongst the early Church leaders, as Paul did not have personal knowledge of Jesus the way that Peter and others had. Freeman characterizes Paul as someone who seems uncomfortable with sexuality, to which this day is still a hot button issue in both Protestant and Roman Catholic faiths. Also, Freeman believes that when Paul went on his ministry to spread the Good Word, he eventually reaches Athens, where Freeman thinks that Paul may have taken an intellectual beating at the hands of the wise and learned in the Great City. Freeman thinks that this leads to Paul articulating a strain of thought within Christianity that frowns on the thinking of human philosophers. Better to not strain the brain about the world around you. Place your trust in God as man will not profit from inquiring too harshly of the world around us. Indeed St. Augustine warns of and condemns the "dangers" of having a mind of curiosity in his Confessions, written some 400 years later.
Two other major developments warrant mention. The first is that eventually the emperor Constantine makes the decision to adopt Christianity as the state religion in the year AD 323. Freeman characterizes this decision as one of pragmatism on the part of Constantine, who is trying to keep the empire together. Indeed paganism continued to flourish for some time.
However, the early Christian Church was a church that was plagued with many internecine wars. These wars were due to the fact that an entire swath of ideas and versions of Christianity had sprung up in the centuries that followed the death and resurrection of Christ. Writings and movements, such as the Gnostic Gospels, Arianism, and Donatism all had wide followings. Eventually accusations of heresy were tossed between the followers of various Church movements, which threatened the stability of the Church and broader social stability within the Empire. Added to this potent stew of social unrest was the fact that after Christianity was adopted as the state religion, there was money to be made via patronage. Eventually, various emperors in the later days of the Empire step in to enforce their own version of orthodoxy in an effort to quiesce matters.
All of these matters combine eventually to stifle the atmosphere of tolerance that was needed to sustain the freedom of inquiry that is so crucial to progress in other forms of human endeavor. Reason was squashed in favor of Faith. In all, Freeman's book is a must read for non - academic students of history.
Addendum: In one of my earliest blog entries, I exchanged emails with Mr. Freeman, which he allowed me to publish.
Wizard.
As noted earlier, this blog entry is part of an ongoing redirection of old static web pages of book reviews. Wizard.
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Febuary 1, 2004
It took me about 2 weeks to get through Elaine Pagels' 1979 academic smash, The Gnostic Gospels. It wasn't because the book is long. At 151 pages, it isn't. It mainly had to do with the fact that I had other things going on, which made my reading of this book come in fits and starts.
Pagels, a professor of Religion at Princeton University, is famous for having written a series of book length studies having to do with the the discovery of the so - called, Nag Hammadi books, after the area in which these documents were discovered. Pagels starts off The Gnostic Gospels by telling the riveting story of how in December 1945, an Egyptian peasant named Muhammad Ali al - Samman discovered a meter high jar while out in the desert. Inside were 13 papyrus books that were bound with leather. He took them home and laid them on the ground next to the family's oven. His mother later admitted that she burned much of the papyrus in the oven along with straw to kindle fires.
Reading that fact makes one's heart sink after finding out what was on those rolls of papyrus. For indeed, amongst the texts were such priceless writings such as, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Phillip, the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel to the Egyptians, the Secret Book of James, the Apocalypse of Paul, the Letter of Peter to Phillip, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Gospel of Mary, the Secret Book of John, amongst many other texts. They were written in Coptic, the language of Egyptian Christians, and were probably translations of earlier Greek writings. Pagels later writes that scholar Frederik Wisse has suggested that monks in the nearby monastary of St. Pachomius may have had the Nag Hammadi texts within their Devotional library. In 367, when Athanasius, the Archbishop of Alexandria sent orders that "apocryphal books" should be purged, the St. Pachomius monks may have hidden the books and buried them on the nearby cliffs, only to be found 1600 years later.
Nearly as insane was the political and academic wars which were set off by the discovery of these texts. The Egyptian government claimed control of the texts, which had leaked onto the black market. Meanwhile, scholars battled for access to the Gnostic Gospels, which they recognized would make their careers. Reading this early part of Pagel's book easily beats anything found in a Hollywood film.
Pagels divides The Gnostic Gospels into six chapters, each pertaining to important questions which the Gospels raise about the early Christian Church. The texts raise questions over whether the death and resurrection of Jesus should be viewed historically or symbolically. There were battles over what the roles of an institutionalized church and its officially ordained bishops should play in guiding faith. There clashing views over the role of women in the faith and the church. The early members of the Church was often persecuted. Should believers be martyrs, or should they spare themselves? What is evil? Is the faith one of self knowledge and the pursuit of spiritual self discovery, or is it a faith where you share your beliefs and participate in a wider community? Pagels' book shows that there were many, many sharp dividing issues which split the Christian church in its first 400 years.
Pagels also believes that the institutionalized church is what preserved the faith. Otherwise, the teachings of Christ may well have fallen by the wayside, as have the teachings of so many other faiths throughout history. She goes on to give other reasons why the Catholic Church prevailed over the Gnostic teachings. Among them are ideas such as the issue that the Catholic faith was non - discriminatory in whom it taught, whereas some Gnostics were very judgmental in whom they believed were ready to receive teaching. Also, the Catholic faith tried to make the faith touch you, whereas the Gnostic teachings required more of an effort on the part of believers.
Pagels shows what kinds of heretical charges were tossed between Gnostics and the Catholics. She goes on with this issue, showing that it was quite probable that heretical charges - and what types of heretical charges - were often tied to the political and social situations in which theologians found themselves in.
The Nag Hammadi texts have reopened an entire Pandora's box of questions regarding the followers and teachings of Christ. Pagels points out that it is rather extraordinary that these texts were found in our time, which is one of atheism, agnosticism, and belief in man's power. It would have been an entirely different story if these texts had been found 1,000 years ago. In all, Pagels has written an admirable introductory book to subject that should fascinate all open minded people, the subject of the foundations of Christianity.
British classicist Anthony Everitt, a professor, arts council advisor, and a writer for the European press about cultural matters, has greeted the Third Millennium by writing a wonderful introduction to the life and times of the man many people think of as the greatest Orator and lawyer of all time - the classical Roman politician Marcus Tulllius Cicero. The book Everitt produced is - at 330+ pages - easily accessible to modern readers, explaining not only the life of his subject in a clear eyed, lucid manner, but more importantly Everitt takes time out to explain the breathtaking and momentous events in Roman history in which Cicero himself was a player. It was Cicero's fate, to have lived (and died) in the death throes of the Roman Republic, when it finally collapsed into being an dictatorial Empire.
Everitt starts his story on March 15, 44 B.C. where he tries to describe the scene of the assassination of Julius Caesar from what it must have been like for Cicero, who happened to have a front row view of the grisly scene. But in a deft manuever, Everitt quickly shifts his tale to a 12 - 13 page synopsis which covers of the overall socio - political situation that Rome finds herself in during the last 100 years before the failure of the Republic. He shows us the Roman Constitution, describing the formal political posts within the government, including the Roman Senate, the roles of Tribunes (representing "the people"), Quaestors (officials who collected taxes), Adeiles (which put on civic events - at their own expense!), Praetors who acted as Judges and administered laws, all of which had to be served before one could run for Consul - the supreme executive in the Republic. During this part of the story, Everitt also discusses the origins of the terrible problem of land reform and redistribution within the Republic, which threatens powerful vested interests. By doing this, Everitt provides the reader a clear eyed account of the the main tectonic forces which were causing the Republic to tear itself apart. He plainly states his belief that the Roman Constitution had too many checks built within its system and that major social questions and problems of the day were left to fester simply because they could not be resolved within the political system as it was during Cicero's day.
Everitt then starts his tale with Cicero's beginnings in 106 B.C. when he was born to a well to do provincial family in the town of Arpinum, which was about 70 miles southeast of Rome. Cicero and his brother were given a good education by their father and when they came of age, their father arranged to have his boys educated by some well regarded rhetoricians of the day in Rome itself. Cicero's background as an provincial outsider, who did not belong to any of the old time prominent families of the city, was to have an interesting effect on his career. It was remarkable that this outsider was, within a span of 20 years, to go from being an unknown lawyer to reaching the highest pinnacles of power within the Republic.
Along the way, Everitt shows us glimpses of Cicero's teachers, such as Scaevola, Diodotus, and Philo. We see the young Cicero meet his wife Terentia, his children - especially his love for his daughter Tullia, as well as some of his contemporaries, - the young Julius Caesar, Pompey (whom he met during his brief military career), and his greatest friend the urbane Titus Pomponius Atticus, known to us simply as Atticus. It is to Atticus that we owe a huge debt of gratitude for much of our knowledge of Cicero. For it was with Atticus that Cicero kept up a 25+ year correspondence of letters, many of which have miraculously survived and have come down to us.
We also get to see Cicero, who was an extremely precocious boy, got swept up in the excitement of watching the great orators of the day slug out in (often corrupt) legal duels held the legendary Roman Forum. Early on, Cicero resolved that he too would be a lawyer. Cicero worked hard at studying rhetoric and perfecting his oratorical style, eventually writing a book on the topic. It would be his sheer ability to persuade jurists and public opinion that would bring him to the pinnacle of Roman life and ensure his memory.
Everitt shows us the effects of the acts of the ruthless dictator Lucius Felix Sulla, Consul when Caesar, Atticus, Pompey, and Cicero were in their teens and twenties. Sulla, was to cast a long shadow over the career paths of each of these men. Sulla was an army general and politician, who among other things had instigated a proscription amongst the Roman elite when the boys were young. This was to have differing effects amongst the young men: Caesar was to become something of a radical, who eventually decimated the Republic. Atticus, though staying involved at the edges of public life, essentially moves to Greece and settles into a life of making money and living Epicurean values. Meanwhile, Cicero who was horrified at the chaos and turbulence that afflicted his youth, became attached to a conservatism in which he felt the Republic had to be saved by means of bringing the various social groups together and uplifting "better" men into public life.
Everitt guides us through the long arc of Cicero's career, where after he reaches the pinnacle of power, he is ruined by a political rival, Clodius, then later rehabilitated. Early on, we see Cicero's famed corruption trial against Verres, the governor of Sicily, by which Cicero first comes to public notice. We see Cicero being banished from Rome by Clodius and later on govern a province. Everitt shows us Cicero's interest in training and promoting the careers of younger men, his retreat into books when things weren't going well, and he covers Cicero's incredible burst of writing in the last years of his life before he at last falls victim to a new Civil War era proscription by Marc Antony and Octavian at the age of 63. Everitt also touches points at times in his narrative on some of the great "what if" questions that might have changed the fate of what happened. Everitt includes a post mortem, where he concludes his narrative over the outcomes of the Roman Civil war between Caesar and the Republican forces.
This book is a first rate book for those who want to read a solid introductory tale of what classical Roman life was like. Everitt also includes a bibliography for those who are interested in further reading into a topic of Roman history and the lives of its notable citizens, as well as including some questions that readers can discuss (or ponder) once they have finished his tome. Trust me, Everitt has written a book that is a page turner. Once you have started reading this book, you just can't wait to see what's going to happen next. And that's how every biography or history book should be written.
The Wizard rates this book an A+.
Wizard.
I am wishing everyone out there a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
The Wizard is celebrating some of his 2007 Christmas by doing a bit of site clean up. Notably some static web pages that I have had hanging out there for years, and which look as though they were created in 1997, are being redirected to my blog page. Hence, the next 5 entries to be found here are redirects from elsewhere.
Enjoy!
March 27, 2004
Some time in 2002 or 2003, I was at home one evening watching The History Channel on television, when a curious television program came on. The program was entitled A History of God. Broadly speaking, the program was essentially about how our ideas of God have taken shape over time and what forces may have been involved in how the process took place. Being the history buff that I am, I was absolutely spell bound by both the subject matter and by the things that some of the people who appeared on the program had to say. In particular, there was one dignified British woman by the name of Karen Armstrong who enunciated some fascinating thoughts about the matter of God, and how our concepts of the Divine have both stayed stable and how they have evolved. The program mentioned that Ms. Armstrong, a former nun but who is now practicing writer / journalist, was the author of a book called "A History of God," so I wrote down this information and promptly headed over to a nearby bookstore to hunt down the book.
As for the book itself, I've read a lot of books in my life, but A History of God is a challenge to read. The paperback version of Armstrong's tome tops off at 399 pages, with another 60 pages of definitions, citations, notes and bibliography thrown in for good measure.
The book is composed of 11 chapters. The book's first 5 chapters start, as one might imagine, at the beginning of faith, and take the reader through the time of Muhammad. All of this was worth reading. However, in chapters 6 - 7 (and part of chapter 8), she writes about how God became the God of the philosophers and mystics during the era of the Middle Ages. This part of the book proved to be rather difficult to read because there are a few times where she - in a sense - repeats herself because by this time, many of the ideas of God that our ancestors had are now familiar to the reader. The book does pick up towards the end when in the last 2 - 3 chapters, she starts to approach more recent centuries. She begins to write about the rise of human rationalism and science. Topics like the "death of God," what ideas may we have about God in the future, or whether God even has a future are examined.
This is a difficult book to review, not because the topic is difficult, but because it is hard to distill so many ideas and thoughts into a relatively short review that touches on the many topics and ideas in this book. I may find that I might rewrite this book review sometime in the future in order to encompass matters I might have missed, or to extend the review so that I write more about the last half of the book.
I should clarify what I mean by the book being a challenge to read. The book is in fact quite readable and quite extraordinary. Ms. Armstrong has a gift of being able to delineate and get to the root of some complicated matters involving monotheism (the book does touch on Buddhism and Hindu ideas too), and do so in a way that a layman can grasp. Where the book becomes a challenge is that the reader has to make sure that he / she is staying alert and following along with the vast, ongoing train of Ms. Armstrong's great story. Readers encounter many personages, nation states, conceptual ideas, and conflicts that Ms. Armstrong covers in the course of this book. For example, at different times in history, men of different times and places have reached similar ideas about God, but in order to remember who had reached these ideas before, one has to look back at who had reached such conclusions before and why they had come to these conclusions. I found that in order to really get the most out of this book, I had to reread the book a second time and take notes in order to keep track of everything.
Armstrong starts the book off with her own story of her religious and spiritual journey. She clearly had some experiences that I think most people can smile at. For example, she writes about how easy it is for most people to conceive of Satan, but how are we to conceive of God? Or, for that matter, isn't the majesty of God supposed to be inconceivable to begin with?
I myself went to a parochial school growing up and I had to chuckle at Ms. Armstrong's efforts to "find God" when she was a nun. We all know full well that Satan is a red colored fellow with horns, but are we supposed to think of God as some huge, old, bearded fellow with a book that has everyone's name in it. Doesn't God look down on us from the heavens, waiting for us to die so that He can look at our report card and check off whether we are allowed into Heaven? Well gentle readers, things are not quite so simple in this world, and I'm sure things aren't so simple in the next one either!
There have been many theories about the origins of religion, but Armstrong writes about the idea that the ancients may have had ideas about religion because they may have been trying to deal with issues of the Unseen. She writes that what makes religious belief come alive for people is that religion works for them. Ideas and thoughts that may be relevant at one point in time might very well make little sense years later. People are spiritual animals, Armstrong points out that there are other ways in which we can have deeply meaningful experiences other than those experienced by religious belief.
Armstrong writes about the influence of Babylonian and Sumerian gods and their influence on monotheism. The Babylonians (and later the Greeks) thought that gods were not distant, unaccessible, or shut off from humanity. Ergo there was not any need for revelation. Faith wasn't something intellectual, or organized into Dogmas. Rather faith for the ancients was something that was held because the God Yahweh (or any other belief that was held) made good on his / her promises. Because of this view about faith, the Israelites had quite a struggle trying to let go of their old deities like Baal, and embrace Yahweh.
The God Yahweh was, as many Christians know, a jealous God. He (Armstrong traces how God became a "He"), also is a partisan God. Yes, Old Testament incarnations of Yahweh were later to be a source of frustration and consternation to later Jews and Christians. Similarly, the Unmoved First Mover of Plato and Aristotle seemed to many to be elitist. Later admirers of Greek thought, including educated Muslims and Jews, were to admit this. There must be some kind of Anthropormophism in religion, because we won't be able to identify with any faith that doesn't have such an element in it.
Religious faith needs to be effective in order to be successful, writes Armstrong. We watch while as the Israelites are overrun and exiled to Babylon, Yahweh makes a transformation. Yahweh becomes a Mover of History. Even enemies of the Israelites are His instruments. And yet, God relies on Man to act in the world, which became an important idea in Judiasm.
Later, we see the encounter of Greek philosophy with the Jewish faith. Armstrong devotes an entire chapter to the coming of the New Messenger, Jesus of Nazareth. She writes about the slow development of the concept that Jesus was Divine, which takes place over the next four centuries. She writes about the theological struggles that took place in early Christianity as Christian thinkers from all over the Roman empire battled to come up with a "workable" theology of The Trinity, which could encompass the story of Jesus and how Jesus the Man could also Divine.
Some interesting issues that Armstrong writes about were about how Jews, who used to be proselytizers of their faith, stopped doing so. This was because groups of monotheists, called God Fearers, who did not want to adapt all of the "baggage" of Judiasm, such as diet and various Laws, eventually convert to the new Christian faith. Jews became much more suspicious of converts. There were many converts to the new faith, but in the early centuries, such people were often slaves or lower classed people. What Armstrong believes brought "socially better off" people towards Christianity was the impressive social welfare efforts of the Church, as well as the intellectual efforts on the part of some educated Romans to expound on the new faith. Eventually of course, Constantine makes Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire.
Armstrong also delves into the difficult legacy that St. Augustine left Christianity, especially regarding the roles of women and sexuality. Of course, this was only part of St. Augustine's legacy. St. Augustine was having to deal with the world shaking fact that Rome herself had been sacked by barbarians in the year 410 A.D. This event literally marked the end of the empire, and nobody knew what was going to come next. His great polemic, The City of God, was partly written to answer the charge made by pagans that Rome had abandoned her earlier gods, which had protected her for over 1100 years. It was when the new God had been adapted, so went the thought, that Rome fell.
Another strong area of the book revolves around the story of Muhammad. She writes about the changes that were going on in Muhammad's world, and about how the Last Prophet, who had never read the Bible, nor had ever heard of any of the Patriarchs, ended up having a story that nearly parallels the stories of all of the previous Prophets and Messengers of God. She writes about the political genius of Muhammad, who managed to weave together a workable faith that synthesized the traditional laws and customs of Arabian tribes, along with a strong element of togetherness. His message was that all men were the same before the One God. All peoples of God, including Jews and Christians, were to be seen as brothers. This chapter is a must read for anyone.
The story of Muhammad reminds me that one of the strongest points of this book is that it gives just enough insight into the character of each and every person who makes an appearance to make the book nearly as much a history of religious figures as it is a history of God. There are many more figures in the later half of the book. I will not write about the last half of the book because that would make this review twice as long as it already is. I hope that reading this review will give you enough of a feel about what the book is like to read. I may add a "part II" to this review in the future.
If that is not enough for you, I will end this book review with one last story. I purchased two additional copies of this book for two co - workers who were the type of people who I thought would be interesting in reading Ms. Armstrong's book. One of my co - workers was a girl, a college student in her early 20's, who happens to be from a practising Muslim family. She told me that this book just absolutely blew her away and that this was one of the best books she has ever read! She told me that her father, who is a highly educated man, saw her copy of this book and immediately stole the book out of her backpack! She told me that her father was so amazed and enthralled by this book that he would not give the book back to her so she could finish it. This book was a New York Times best seller and the Wizard highly recommends that you find yourself a copy and see for yourself why this is so.
Wizard.
One thing that I've kept promising myself about over and over again, but never actually do, is write more book reviews. One of my ambitions in starting this site was to write lots of book reviews instead of posting them to Amazon or elsewhere. I do get plenty of views for my Karen Armstrong book reviews (which I will be transferring to my blog page), so there are people out there who are interested in such things.
This review is of course about the book Sprawl: a Compact History, by University of Chicago historian and Architecture professor Robert Bruegmann. I actually was loaned a copy of this book from a fellow activist, which saved me the immediate trouble of ordering my own copy. I still think I will get around to purchasing a copy sometime soon.
I've certainly gone through my share of academic tomes over the years. Bruegmann's book clocks in at 230 pages, along with 50 pages of footnotes and reference pages. For an academic publication, Sprawl is a fairly easy read, with no dense calculus equations, a mere 10 graphs and 23 images of various cities and urban layouts, along with replications of various plans of cities and models. The book is simply laid out, with three parts. The first describes sprawl from a historical perspective and looks into ideas as to why sprawl takes place. The second part covers the various anti-sprawl political campaigns which have occurred over the past century. Last, Bruegmann looks a prescriptions and remedies for the alleged problems.
Amongst items I noted were the following:
1) Early in chapter 1, Bruegmann notes that there is no agreed upon definition of what constitutes sprawl. His footnote on the topic is over a page long. In the footnote, Bruegmann argues that "it has been the non measurable, especially aesthetic aspects of sprawl that have constituted the emotional heart of the debate on the subject."
The term sprawl has a negative connotation, much like the terms elitism or conspicuous consumption, but what's funny is that the target of that negativism has been rather ephemeral. An implied undercurrent is that sprawl is caused by other people and that it results from the poor choices by which others have decided to live their lives.
My comment: The definition issue should be of no surprise since we are largely talking about the study of social sciences and of urban settings. The entire field of urban studies is rife with definition problems, which often contribute to spill over problems such as having to control for data comparisons and mismatches. In case you want to debate the point, try determining what the population of the Houston metropolitan area is. Do you want to determine the population of the City of Houston, Harris County, the SMSA, the PMSA, or the H-GAC metropolitan area? Bruegmann notes that frequently when the urban population spreads outward, it triggers the addition of a new county to the metropolitan area by the U.S. Census Bureau. Metropolitan density may appear to plummet simply because of the addition of the new county, no matter whether the density of the actual urbanized portion of the area was rising and falling.
Since we don't have a firm definition of what exactly sprawl is, then anti-sprawl campaigners find themselves falling back on the old saw that I know it when I see it.
2) Bruegmann says that many of the things that anti-sprawl campaigners fear is based upon outdated data or evidence. For example, there is a pervasive fear amongst some that sprawl is accelerating and spiraling out of control. Bruegmann shows where the rate of new sprawl in most metropolitan areas is actually slowing down and that many cities are slowly growing denser. That statement is in fact true for Houston.
Bruegmann states that lot sizes reached their peak in the 1950's and 1960's, while houses built on newer lots since then have been getting larger. He says that quite a bit of newer development at the edge of urban areas consists of row housing and apartments.
3) Bruegmann writes that distant "exurban" sprawl, what could be described as very low density development in rural areas past the urban periphery, has been accelerating. This is mostly because the parcels of land are very large and there are more people (often very wealthy) moving out to those areas who still want to be within striking range of towns and cities to access their amenities. At the same time, we have seen the creation of affluent, distant work areas far away from cities where people make very long commutes to get to them.
4) If you are a James Howard Kunstler fan, it may be of interest to you (I already knew this) that the large cities of the ancient world, such as Rome, had population densities of 150,000 people or more per square mile. It's possible to imagine that Mr. Kunstler, who lives in a town whose density is less than 1,000 people per square mile, would be thrilled to live in such a city.
5) The first sprawl in ancient cities and those of the Middle Ages was due to activities which were performed that were often objectionable within the city walls, such as smoke arising from metal working or burial of the dead. Bruegmann correctly notes that historical cities faced the crushing economic burden of building and maintaining walls around their perimeters. As Barton Smith told us in class one day, there were economies of scale in defense, so sprawling outside of city walls was a problematic issue in a world where your enemies could come from out of nowhere. Suburbanites of the ancient world lived outside the walls of cities because they could not afford to live in them. They gave up access to services and protection of the walls in return for living in tiny hovels near roads. Meanwhile the extremely wealthy of the ancient world lived in extravagant villas near the seaside or other desirable country areas.
Intriguingly, Bruegmann notes that London was the first modern city in the sense that it abetted sprawl because for many decades it was the only city in Europe which did not have a wall around its perimeter.
6) Bruegmann says that many of the wealthy in today's American cities live in areas which were already inhabited by wealthy people at the turn of the 20th century. Unlike other places in urban settings where neighborhoods may rise, fall, and perhaps redevelop and rise again, wealthy areas stay wealthy.
7) Bruegmann describes the massive sprawl away from urban cores which happened all over Europe and America in the early decades of the 20th century. Until that time, it was the rich who had moved out of urban cores. Now the masses were rich enough to follow them. The availability of public transportation was augmented by the automobile. Curbs, gutters, sewers, street lights and electricity, which we take for granted today, were all installed and completed in this era. Contrary to the belief that it was people moving outwards, it was often the case that jobs in factories and manufacturing that moved outwards first, then families followed the jobs. This in turn left lots of cheap, empty space behind in city cores which later on were often used by new residents or enterprises that in turn helped to revive the cores of some urban areas. (My note - this just goes to show how complicated cities really are).
8) While writing about the central cities of Europe and America, Bruegmann states that he thinks that an average of 10,000 people per square mile seems to be a threshold whereby very extensive use of public transportation takes place. The two cities in America that have higher densities than this are Chicago and New York (I think Bruegmann may be getting a bit sloppy here as San Francisco also has density above 10,000 per square mile). Even then, use of public transportation is mostly a strong force only for transportation into central business districts. Or as Wendell Cox might put it, its all about downtown.
9) Tirades and battles against sprawl are often triggered in periods where there are large economic booms, such as in Europe and America during the 1920's, America in the 1950's, and in numerous places in the world during the 1990's. Those are times when the numbers of people with the means to move grow rapidly. Bruegmann writes that campaigns against sprawl often occur in the largest and fastest growing cities, which strangely enough are often much denser than smaller towns, cities, and villages. Brugemann notes that anti-sprawlers are much more active in Los Angeles than they are in Little Rock Arkansas or Lubbock Texas.
10) European cities have rapidly been approaching American and Canadian levels of automobile ownership and use, but I already knew that.
11) Bruegmann looks at the possible causes of sprawl. Anti-urban attitudes and racism are examined, but Bruegmann notes that minorities are just as likely to move to the suburbs as white people are if they have the money. As for "anti-urban attitudes", Bruegmann says that:
It is probably only possible to call Americans anti-urban if one accepts a specific set of assumptions about urbanity made by members of a small cultural elite. This group likes to think of urbanity as the kind of life lived by people in apartments in dense city centers that contain major high brow cultural institutions. In these dense centers, the believe, citizens are more tolerant and cosmopolitan because of their constant interaction with other citizens unlike themselves. Bruegmann goes on to say that most Americans, and increasingly people around the world, are rejecting or simply ignoring such ideas for an idealized city.
My note here - from my time of having spent 9 weeks in London, I can confidently say that having people live in dense areas does not make them any more tolerant or cosmopolitan than anyone living in low density areas.
Bruegmann writes about the idea that sprawl is "the inevitable unhappy result of laissez-faire capitalism." Bruegmann goes on to say that this assertion is a complete turn around of the thoughts of urban reformers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who believed that unregulated private real estate markets would inevitably lead to massively high densities. Benjamin Marsh, an advocate for the working poor, wailed that it would be logical for developers to crowd as many people into a single acre of apartment housing, as that would maximize their profits.
Bruegmann says of various government created causes of sprawl, such as tax deductions for home ownership, that other countries do (or do not) have such deductions as does America, but sprawl is still taking place. He correctly notes that the home owner tax deduction primarily benefits the rich and not those in the lower or middle class income brackets. Yet people with lower incomes buy homes anyway.
As for the "Americans do not choose to live in the suburbs because they would obviously choose a hip urban lifestyle over the dreary suburban life" argument, Bruegmann writes that this seems to point to an idea that greedy developers are in cabal with politicians to deny what people really want. Bruegmann notes that if developers were really to possess as much fiendish guile that is attributed to them, then they should be able to make as much money developing high density lots in cities as they do in the suburbs.
He also discusses the Who framed Roger Rabbit urban myth, where the demise of rail and streetcars was allegedly because General Motors supposedly bought up all the rail and streetcar lines to put them out of business. More to the point, Bruegmann notes (quite correctly) that motorized automobiles and trucks did not replace rail, trolleys, and street cars. What the automobile replaced were horse drawn wagons and carriages and it is important to note that the first automobiles were known as horseless carriages. It was buses that replaced rail and streetcars.
To get a visual look at this, I consulted my copy of Historic Photos of Houston by Betty Trapp Chapman. For the first 85 of the 216 pages of her book, there are very few photographs of automobiles or trucks. There are many photos showing groups of people who have neatly parked in front of buildings in their horse drawn wagons and carriages. There is a photo of a mule train of men and equipment moving along a road in South Texas going towards the oil fields. There is another photo, taken circa 1890, of volunteer firemen in a horse drawn service truck that looks to be about 40 feet long. When President William Howard Taft visited Houston in November 1909, he had a public procession where he was taken by horse drawn carriages and not in a street car. There are only 12 photographs with streetcars, including one where streetcars are jostling for road space with horse drawn carriages and pedestrians circa 1900 (it looks like the streetcar is going to hit a crowd of them!). In the next to last photo, there is a photo of a street car taken in September 1924 which has the caption, "Please step inside and look me over. I am one of your 15 new Houston street cars. I cost $13,000." That streetcar in 2006 dollars would cost $153,263. After the 1910's, there are no more photographs of horse drawn carriages or wagons.
12) The anti-sprawl campaigns: Bruegmann notes that aesthetic tastes of urban development amongst critics changes over time. When London continued to sprawl extensively in the early 20th century, architect critics at the time raged about the row housing that is a feature of London suburbs like Acton Town. They demanded that such development be stopped on grounds such as that Britain's farmland was being consumed. Fast forward to the turn of the 21st century and the spiritual descendants of those urban planners and critics rave these days about how wonderful those same suburbs are and that this is how developers should build cities because it economizes on space.
Bruegmann also says that the first anti-sprawl campaign in Britain witnessed the idea that building new roads filled up, ergo the argument of later anti-sprawlers "we can't build our way out of congestion" is actually far older than many assume it to be. As a side note, Julius Caesar banned wheeled vehicles from the streets of ancient Rome during daylight hours due to traffic congestion. No wonder when your city has population densities of over 150,000 people per square mile.
13) The anti-sprawl campaigns in the America of the 1950's came about, as noted above, because of the increases in affluence and population. William H. Whyte, he of the Organization Man fame, sponsored what was perhaps the first conference on sprawl and targeted Los Angeles as its epitome. Interestingly, Bruegmann says that Los Angeles has densified, but he says that the cost of transporting sufficient water to the L.A. metropolitan area has acted as a curb to more sprawl.
New arguments emerged, such as the costs of sprawl, social and environmental problems, arguments in the 1970's were advanced about the limits to growth, and attacks on the automobile became more and more shrill. Bruegmann states that the economic problems of the late 1970's such as stagflation, drove such concerns off the public agenda. However when Western advanced economies recovered and sprawl continued.
Bruegmann then goes on to list the latest wave of anti-sprawl complaints, which now include social concerns and equity problems, sustainability, and global warming. However the old aesthetic issues crop up again, which Bruegmann thinks is because societies have solved basic problems such as food production, shelter, water, and so forth. Since those problems have been solved, then people have time to - well - look for more issues to complain about.
The last part of Bruegmann's book covers various anti-sprawl remedies which have been attempted during these anti-sprawl campaigns, including a sharp analysis of the bizarre political marriage between Britain's Labour Party and the conservative aristocratic landowners of Britain which resulted in the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947. He covers regional planning, environmental impact statements, anti-road building and highway crusades, and the case of the highly successful anti-sprawl efforts employed in building Moscow. I will leave it to the reader's imagination as to why it was that the Soviets were successful in curbing sprawl in the nation's capital. He also notes that the most recent anti-sprawl campaigns have now drawn a backlash in which there are now people who are willing to speak up for benefits that are produced by sprawl.
This has been a long entry, but it hope it provokes interested parties into reading the book and mulling over what Sprawl has to say.
Wizard
Based on the strength of some book reviews on web sites I normally visit, I headed down to a Borders Books near where I live and purchased The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648 - 1815, by Tim Blanning, a Professor of History at Cambridge University and a Fellow of the British Academy. Blanning's book is a tour de force of a wonderfully rich subject - what happened in Europe during the 170 years between the conclusion of the Treaty of Westphalia and Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. I am now about 100 pages into this book.
Of interest here is that Dr. Blanning starts off his book with a most curious topic - the amazing improvement in transportation and communications which occurred, particularly in Britain and France, during this period. Blanning also notes that in Eastern Europe, little changed in terms of infrastructure during this time. Blanning of course gives due to what happened when railroads were invented, but in his first 40 pages Blanning compares the difference of what transportation was like in the middle of the 17th century and what it was like 150 years later.
As a student of history, I knew that for most of mankind's history, transportation was slow and expensive for most and that not many people traveled more than 10 or so miles away from the homes they were born in during their own lifetimes unless something compelled them to. Nonetheless, Blanning's book drives home exactly how expensive it really was for our ancestors to travel and that travel was rarely faster than walking pace.
Some exerpts:
1) (If one desired to travel outside of one's own town - Wizard)
"Four or six draught animals were needed to pull a coach and they had to be changed every 6 to 12 miles, depending on the condition of the roads. In England it was calculated that one horse was needed for every mile of a journey on a well-maintained turnpike road. So, for the 185 miles from Manchester to London, 185 horses had to be kept stabled and fed to deal with the seventeen changes required by the stagecoaches which traveled the route. Those horses in turn required an army of coachmen, postillions, guards, grooms, ostlers and
stable-boys to keep them running. As a coach could carry no more than ten passengers, fares were correspondingly high and out of reach of the mass of the population. A journey from Augsburg to Innsbruck by stagecoach, although little more than 60 miles as the crow flies, would have cost an unskilled laborer more than a month's wages just for the fare."
2) "Almost everyhere the 'roads" were tracks, with no foundations or drainage and consequently deeply pitted by wheel-ruts."
'more like a retreat of wild beasts and reptiles, than the footsteps of man', in the view of an English observer writing in the early eighteenth century.... The roads of Europe were essentially those of the Roman Empire - after fourteen hundred years of neglect.
3) Blanning includes a table of travel times from London 1700-1800 in hours:
1700 1750 1800
Bath: 50 40 16
Edinburgh 256 150 60
Exeter 240 120 32
Manchester 90 65 33
4) Blanning talks about how forced labor from the farming peasantry was not an efficient method of infrastructure improvement. Instead...
"By that time, however, another method had been found. This was the 'turnpike', a word which originally designated just a barrier across a road to keep marauders out."
Blanning goes on to say that one of the beneficiaries of turnpikes were members of Parliament, who could now travel to London much more comfortably from their country homes - and proceed to pass more Acts of Parliament which created more turnpike roads!
5) Improvements in roads and road surfaces greatly dropped freight costs. To quote Blannning:
...but freight too could benefit. Much larger and more heavily laden wagons could pass along the improved roads: in the 1740's three-ton loads were permitted, by 1765 that had been doubled. The improved surfaces meant that fewer draught animals per ton were required. Writing in 1767, Henry Homer claimed that 'the carriage of grain, coal, merchandise, etc. is in general conducted with little more than half the number of horses a with which it formerly was.'
6) Writing in the middle of the 19th century, the German social historian Karl Biedermann estimated that travelling had been fourteen times more expensive two generations earlier!
7) Blanning wrote that the expansion of Europe's infrastructure also created a new class of society - the highwaymen - who would prey on hapless coach riders since cash was demanded up front in exchange for being permitted to use the turnpikes. Some wondered whether all this newly found mobility was worth the crime and congestion. London had streets choked full of coaches and wagons.
8) And perhaps my favorite excerpt:
"The turnpikes brought speed and mobility into a society previously characterized by their opposites. This was a culture-shock which many found upsetting - especially when the lower orders started to move out of their villages, on to the roads and into the towns, picking up insubordinate habits on the way. John Byng complained bitterly in 1781:
'I wish with all my heart that half the turnpike roads of the kingdom were plough'd up, which have imported London manners and depopulated the the country - I meet milkmaids on the roads, with the dress and looks of Strand mistresses, and must think that every line of Goldsmith's Deserted Village contains melancholy truths.'
The reference to Goldsmith's poem is revealing, for it is an elegy for a lost world of rural innocence and harmony, from which the forces of modernization have banished the inhabitants to urban anomie and vice."
300 years later, some people are still complaining that mankind's vastly increased mobility has resulted in the same urban ills. It seems that for some people, the more things change the more things stay the same. At the same time, one really does need to remember that one of the primary reasons why we build the cities we do today is because we can - due to the staggering drops of transportation costs in real terms. Otherwise we would still be living in huddled and cramped conditions.
Wizard.
