A review by robertrivasplata
The Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been by Jake Berman

adventurous informative medium-paced

4.5

City-by-city history of urban transit systems in North American cities. The history of mass transit systems in North America reminds me of the trajectory of the internet (especially social media), with public services and infrastructure being built by private companies on the basis of speculation, followed by market consolidation by ever more hated monopolists, finally followed by the service being run into the ground once it's found to be unprofitable (or not sufficiently profitable). The maps in this book make are a great accompaniment to Arcadia Publishing's Images of Rail books that you see seemingly everywhere. The chapters on Rochester and Cincinnati are very interesting and informative. I wish that the chapter on San Francisco had more about the other Bay Area transit systems such as the Key System and the Southern Pacific Interurbans. I also wish there'd been a chapter about Denver which has been investing heavily in transit since the 90s, & one about St. Louis, which was a center of the U.S. streetcar industry (until the demise of the U.S. streetcar industry). Each of the chapters in The Lost Subways of North America could be expanded into a book, and there could have been many more chapters, and the result would be a kind of Borgesian library of mass transit history. I'll have to content myself with the further reading section at the back.