ABSTRACT
It is possible to view the decentralisation of population, employment, shopping and office activities from the urban core as but the latest episode in interactions between transport technology and urban form dating from the onset of the Industrial Revolution. The rise of mass car ownership and the decline of public transport occurred earlier, and in a more pronounced form, in the United States than in Western Europe. Car ownership growth in the United States was rapid between 1918 and 1929, but was subsequently slowed by the economic depression of the 1930s and checked by the Second World War, before resuming its upward trajectory after 1945. Strong craft traditions in the early German car industry resisted the introduction of assembly-line mechanisation, while in the United States cheap and unorganised immigrant labour could easily be recruited to jobs on mass production lines.
