Our featured writer today is Jake Berman. Let’s give him a warm welcome!
If you would like your talent featured in the Authors in Our Midst series or Artists in Our Midst series, send me an email message. Don’t be shy! I have no more Artists or Authors posts in the queue, so please get in touch if you would like to be featured.
The Lost Subways of North America
by Jake Berman
Thanks to WaterGirl for giving me the space. I’ve been a Balloon Juice reader and lurker since Cole was a Republican. I’m glad to be able to give back to the jackals.
This book exists to explain, through maps that I’ve illustrated, just why public transit is so bad in North America. If you go to Europe or East Asia, the buses and the trains are fast, frequent and functional. That’s not the case in North America. The Kyiv Metro – in the middle of a full-on war – runs more frequent service than the BART subway in San Francisco. It wasn’t always like this. Even big cities now known for their sprawl used to have comprehensive rail transit networks. LA used to have an electric railway network four times the size of the modern London Underground, and Dallas’s old electric railway system used to extend all the way to Waco, 95 miles away.
I became aware of this history, naturally, because of a traffic jam. A decade and change ago, I had moved from NYC to Los Angeles for work. This was my introduction to traffic hell. On one particularly a hot summer day, I was trapped for half an hour on the 101 Freeway behind a guy in a Jeep with too many bumper stickers. (My commute at the time was less than five miles.) My mind started wandering. Irritated, I said to the empty car, “why doesn’t LA have good public transit?” I couldn’t come up with an answer while in bumper-to-bumper traffic, so I went to the LA Public Library a bit later to do some digging. There, I found an old map of the massive Pacific Electric Railway (also known as the Red Cars), the self-proclaimed “Largest Electric Railway System in the World.” It was news to me that LA used to have the world’s largest electric railway system. I started creating maps of the old Pacific Electric system, using modern design language and typography to illustrate what had been lost.
My LA friends were shocked when they saw the maps. Their usual next question was, “why’d we get rid of it?” The answer, notably, isn’t an automaker conspiracy. The old transit companies were widely reviled for their monopoly power in the early 20th century. Often, the transport monopoly would be combined with an electricity monopoly, as in Atlanta, or a massive real estate developer, as in Los Angeles. But the decline of transit played out differently in every city. The Lost Subways of North America recounts some of those stories, covering 23 metropolitan areas in the US and Canada.
The official book description:
A visual exploration of the transit histories of twenty-three US and Canadian cities.
Every driver in North America shares one miserable, soul-sucking universal experience—being stuck in traffic. But things weren’t always like this. Why is it that the mass transit systems of most cities in the United States and Canada are now utterly inadequate?
The Lost Subways of North America offers a new way to consider this eternal question, with a strikingly visual—and fun—journey through past, present, and unbuilt urban transit. Using meticulous archival research, cartographer and artist Jake Berman has successfully plotted maps of old train networks covering twenty-three North American metropolises, ranging from New York City’s Civil War–era plan for a steam-powered subway under Fifth Avenue to the ultramodern automated Vancouver SkyTrain and the thousand-mile electric railway system of pre–World War II Los Angeles. He takes us through colorful maps of old, often forgotten streetcar lines, lost ideas for never-built transit, and modern rail systems—drawing us into the captivating transit histories of US and Canadian cities.
Berman combines vintage styling with modern printing technology to create a sweeping visual history of North American public transit and urban development. With more than one hundred original maps, accompanied by essays on each city’s urban development, this book presents a fascinating look at North American rapid transit systems.
The Lost Subways of North America is on Amazon, Bookshop.org and most other booksellers.
Its official release date is November 3, but if you buy a pre-order copy from me I’ll ship it out a little before the official release date.