‘Transportation’ Archives
Motorboat
Motorboat Motorboat, vessel for travel on water, propelled by an internal-combustion or electric engine and used for recreational, commercial, military, or research purposes. Motorboats are also called powerboats. Built in a variety of sizes and styles, motorboats are typically powered by engines that are outboard (a self-contained, [...]
Commercial Aviation
Commercial Aviation From its invention through the space race, aviation continually invokes speed, progress and futurity. Yet American air travel has been shaped by longstanding patterns of government-fostered markets in public goods and competition among corporations and cities for consumers. Unlike other nations, the US government never [...]
Jitneys
Jitneys The jitney, a form of paratransit, is a small motor vehicle that operates as a common carrier on a regular route, but without fixed stops or schedule, picking up passengers wherever they hail it. Its name, California slang for a 5-cent coin, is reportedly of Creole slave origin, from the French jeton (token). In the United States, [...]
Bicycles
Bicycles When Lance Armstrong won the Your de France with the US Postal Service team in 1999 and 2000, American media focused on the personal odds he had overcome in beating cancer. For most Americans, competitive bicycle racing remains a foreign sport, even though American Greg Lemond won the tour in 1986, 1988 and 1989 (overcoming his own [...]
Commuting/Mass transit
Commuting/Mass transit The sprawling of many postwar American cities has made the movement of massive numbers of people from home to work, school and other places an everyday planning nightmare, especially when done by car. Nevertheless, while mass commuting is constantly proposed as a solution to resultant dilemmas of cost, time and pollution, [...]
Trams and Trolleybuses
Trams and Trolleybuses Tramways had long been in use in collieries and were the origin of railways. They also spawned the street tramways which became popular as public transport for passengers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They originated in the USA where, due to the soil conditions and the lack of plentiful stone for road [...]
Motorways
Motorways A motorway is defined today as ‘a limited access road with grade separation, completely fenced in, normally with hard shoulders…for the exclusive use of prescribed classes of motor vehicles’. The motorway concept is remarkable in that it originated so early: only some twenty years after Benz and Daimler produced the first motor [...]
Tunnels
Tunnels Tunnelling, for canals, roads and railways, is a relatively modern technique where any sort of mechanization is involved, although though irrigation tunnels, called qanats, are found in Iran and have existed for many hundreds of years. These tunnels, dug by the Persians and Armenians to bring water to the towns, are ten, twenty or more [...]
Mass Transit
Mass Transit Mass transit consists of multipassenger conveyances that operate along fixed routes, with regular stops, on frequent schedules, and with set fares. There are now more than 1,190 mass transit systems in the United States that carry a total of 8.1 billion passengers annually. The major transit service, or mode, today is the bus, [...]
Highways
Highways The planning and use of highways, or motorways in the U.K., have profoundly altered the speed, scope, and meaning of individual transport as well as the face of the environment in many developed countries, especially during the second half of the twentieth century. Cars, which were originally designed as intraurban alternatives to [...]
