Böcker av Nicholas Dagen Bloom

A potent re-examination of America's history of public disinvestment in mass transit. Many a scholar and policy analyst has lamented American dependence on cars and the corresponding lack of federal investment in public transportation throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century. But as Nicholas Dagen Bloom shows in The Great American Transit Disaster, our transit networks are so bad for a very simple reason: we wanted it this way. Focusing on Baltimore, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and San Francisco, Bloom provides overwhelming evidence that transit disinvestment was a choice rather than destiny. He pinpoints three major factors that led to the decline of public transit in the United States: municipal austerity policies that denied most transit agencies the funding to sustain high-quality service; the encouragement of auto-centric planning; and white flight from dense city centers to far-flung suburbs. As Bloom makes clear, these local public policy decisions were not the product of a nefarious auto industry or any other grand conspiracy--all were widely supported by voters, who effectively shut out options for transit-friendly futures. With this book, Bloom seeks not only to dispel our accepted transit myths but hopefully to lay new tracks for today's conversations about public transportation funding.

"One of the most enduring American urban myths concerns the death of the Red Car Trolley, an extensive and equitable system in Los Angeles County that some say was weakened and then eradicated by US car manufacturers. Yet as Nicholas Dagen Bloom shows, an array of larger yet less tangible forces together interacted to practically murder public transportation of all kinds in cities nationwide. Most centrally, public transit collapsed because essentially we wanted it to-no conspiracy necessary. Detailing the histories of transportation in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco, Bloom seeks to set all of our transit myths to rest for the sake not only of accuracy but in order to enrich our conversations about public transportation funding today"--

Nicholas Dagen Bloom argues for the centrality of state power in postwar American urban life. In the face of economic and demographic restructurings and the devolution of federal power, states sparked developments in urban planning, transportation, higher education, housing and environmental management. In particular, Nelson Rockefeller's governorship of New York demonstrated the power of an engaged administrative state to condition the fabric and nuance of everyday life. Rockefeller established long-lived bureaucracies that address social health, transportation, human rights, housing, and all the other components of a well-functioning and empathetic state. Many of those innovations came to influence or resonate with similar developments in other states and their cities as well.

In The Metropolitan Airport, Nicholas Dagen Bloom chronicles the untold story of JFK International's complicated and turbulent relationship with the New York City metropolitan region. It is an indispensable book for those who seek to understand the revolutionary impact of airports on the modern American city.

Public Housing That Worked offers a comprehensive history of America's largest and most successful housing authority. The New York City Housing Authority pioneered, and still maintains, rigorous systems of public housing management that allowed it to avoid the downward spiral experienced by most American public housing authorities.