The growth of cities during the Industrial Revolution was not accompanied by a much needed rethinking of traffic patterns. As a result, cities that grew from tens of thousands of inhabitants to hundred of thousands and even millions found themselves with an ever growing population concentrated in relatively small areas. Delivering goods and food into a city grew exponentially difficult, and so did the circulation of people from home to work and back.
Several attempts were made to reduce traffic, including the omnibus pulled by horses, the trolley pulled by cables, and the elevated train, but none of them were the much hoped for solution. Horses left behind a lot of waste, were smelly, and needed to be fed and housed every day. Cable trolleys did not work well in the sinuous roads of east-coast cities. Elevated trains polluted the sky and stopped running during weather events. The solution seemed obvious: dig down and build a subway system.
But back in the 1860s and 1870s, people still thought that digging too deep would take one straight to hell, or that noxious fumes would kill passengers. The London subway was dirty and noisy, running on coal and spewing dark clouds of sooth. The twin development of the electric motor and better digging techniques suddenly allowed subways to be dug and operated efficiently, be weather resilient, and transport hordes of people while removing traffic on the roads of the cities.
The Race Underground is the story of two cities, Boston and New York, and two brothers, Henry Melville Whitney of Boston, and younger brother William Collins Whitney of New York, and how a revolutionary transportation system was finally built in each city. Fans of history and of transportation will cheer on as, through fits and starts, a solution to traffic snarls was finally implemented.
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