ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that urban transport is best regarded as a technology fully embedded in a constellation of social factors, being both formed by social context and capable of acting back upon it as a powerful force in urban development. For many years the historiography relating to urban development and transport advanced most rapidly, at least in the English language, in the United States. From around 1970 transport featured heavily among the systematic work being done on urban infrastructure there. Work in the 1980s increasingly highlighted formal public choices – politics and public policy – as key factors explaining the adoption in the United States of new kinds of urban transport, the decline of old ones and, sometimes, their retention in a modified form in a mix embracing old and new. Jeffrey M. Diefendorf analyses the impact of traffic planning on German urban reconstruction after the Second World War.
