From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry (review)

pioneered joint rapid transit–expressway development when a ground-level segment of a subway was built on a right-of-way in a highway median in the 1950s, or that Cleveland became the first U.S. city with a rapid transit link to its airport, in 1968. This approach can be enlightening, but Middleton’s preoccupation with “firsts” and with improvements skews the historical record by presenting rapid transit in an overly favorable light. For instance, he plays down the collapse of the transit industry in the 1920s and 1930s, overlooking the business incompetence and political corruption that contributed to its failures as much as postwar inflation and misguided public policies did. Middleton’s conclusions about transit’s recent renaissance are also questionable. He rightly observes that “[t]he last decades of the twentieth century were good ones for North America’s metropolitan railways” (p. 205), but his prediction that railways promise to be “even more a part of North American urban life in the twenty-first century than they had been in its nineteenth or twentieth” (p. 214) is optimistic, because he does not come to terms with the continued supremacy of the automobile, the proliferation of low-density spatial patterns, widespread opposition to land-use controls, and race. For instance, Middleton discusses a light-rail system that has recently opened in downtown Memphis, but what is most important there is that poverty, racial tensions, and real estate developers have emptied its central business district while pushing the edge of suburbanization twenty-five miles to the east, making light rail irrelevant for most people. Similarly, while the rail construction programs and land-use controls that have been implemented in Toronto and in Portland, Oregon, are admirable, Middleton is unconvincing in his treatment of these two cities as the leading edge of North American urban practices rather than exceptions to the type of low-density construction that prevails in Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta, Denver, and elsewhere. Still, despite his excesses as a true believer, no historian knows more about urban rail technology than Middleton does, and this well-written and attractive book is a welcome addition to the library of American transportation history.