Book Review Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile

書評「Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile」

Taras Grescoe is aggressively, passionately pro-public transportation. And he is also American.

Having grown up riding the 23 trolley to school in Philadelphia, we are the target audience for this book and know whereof Grescoe writes.

Public transportation was not cool or hip back then in the 1970s and 1980s; it was how those without a car got from place A to place B.

Thanks in part to global warming, the image of public transportation has shifted - a bit.

Still, to many suburbanites trains and buses and subways in the US are the last resort of the lower class: dirty, dangerous, and never punctual.

Thanks to US government policy, sprawl, and businesses that favor the automobile - and suburban living - there is some truth to this.

The same people who scorn riding pubic transport in the US are only to happy to gush about how convenient the London Tube or Paris Metro or Tokyo subway is.

In Straphanger, Grescoe is fighting back, angry and full of factoids. (Among our favorites was this: nine out of ten commuters in America drive to work, 75% of them alone.)

He travels and uses the New York, Moscow, Paris, Copenhagen, Tokyo, Bogota, Phoenix, Portland, Vancouver, and Philadelphia public transportation systems.

Moreover, he examines how we can "undo the damage that car-centric planning has done to our cities and create convenient, affordable, and sustainable urban transportation—and better city living—for all."

For those of us commuting by bike in Kyoto, we can only say Amen.


Buy on Amazon USA

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