Traffic

Traffic has filled the world, from livable, coastal Trondheim to gridlocked Moscow and St. Petersburg, from the narrow streets of Boston to the bottlenecked 'beltways' that surround US cities and were intended to ease it. So accustomed were town fathers and mothers, city planners, and traffic engineers to accommodating the automobile, that they belatedly embraced traffic control as a solution to city safety problems, including noise, pollution, and pedestrian injuries and fatalities, ignoring such inexpensive solutions as the bicycle. Paul Josephson's Traffic considers the history of traffic, and the political controversies that frame the belated technological efforts to calm it.