Discuss the role of urban transport systems in shaping the modern city.

Abstract: The rise of urbanisation and industrialisation meant that the nineteenth century city expanded, both in terms of area and of population, at a rate that had never before been seen. As such, this era had a lasting effect on the shape and structure of many modern cities. This essay discusses one development that played a large role in this shaping of the modern city; that is, the invention of mass transport technology and its diffusion throughout Europe and the United States. These new means of transport - omnibuses, trams, suburban trains and underground trains - meant that cities no longer needed to be physically small enough to be traversable by foot. It was now possible for people to live outside city boundaries while still working within the city. Residential suburbs and daily commutes became a part of working life, opening up formerly residential areas in the centre of the city, which were redeveloped and turned into business and commercial zones. Although suburbanisation benefitted many people, it also exacerbated previously existing social problems for the poorest members of society. The divisions between rich and poor areas became more sharply delineated as the newly built suburbs allowed the middle classes to escape the city while the lower classes were forced to remain in the inner cities, squeezed by the rising cost of rent brought about by commercial redevelopment. This was particularly true of London and certain American cities, while the negative effects of suburbanisation in Paris, Berlin and Leipzig were mitigated by tighter municipal regulation of transport networks and a culture that was more predisposed to apartment living, even for the well-to-do. Although there were variances from city to city, depending on their individual cultures, geographical characteristics and municipal policies, the development of urban transport networks in the nineteenth century had an enduring effect on the shape of the modern city.

The nineteenth century saw a huge wave of urbanisation across Europe and the United States. Towns expanded to become cities, while cities that were already in existence increased in size to become metropolises on a scale that had never before been seen. In Europe, cities such as London, Paris and Berlin boomed, with populations doubling, tripling or even quadrupling in the period between 1850 and the outbreak of the First World War, while New York, Boston and Philadelphia in the United States expanded to a similar degree. Smaller cities also grew, as the percentage of the population living in urban areas increased to 44% in France, 60% in Germany and just under 80% in Britain.1 More notable even than the growth of urban populations was the expansion in terms of area and the changes in spatial structure of the modern city. These cities were not simply larger-scale versions of an urban type that had existed before; instead, they formed a new structural type of urban area. Modern cities had vastly larger populations than earlier cities but were often less crowded, as instead of piling an increasing population within the city walls they tended towards urban sprawl and the formation of suburbs. These suburbs, some of which were country villages which had been subsumed into expanding cities, were themselves a new type of spatial form, where the ease of access provided by transport networks made it possible to combine urban and rural ways of life.2 Early nineteenth-century cities had primarily expanded in terms of population, and less so in area, which had resulted in huge overcrowding. An example would be that of Lille, where the city population almost doubled between 1804 and 1860, from 59,000 to 100,000, without growing outside the city walls.3 In the second half of the century, however, the growth of suburbs such as Fives, which grew up around the railway line to the east of the city, meant that population density in the city decreased even as total population increased.4

Lees, Andrew and Hollen Lees, Lynn, Cities and the Making of Modern Europe, 1750-1914, (Cambridge, 2007), p. 5.
2 3

Kern, Stephen, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, (Cambridge, Mass., 1983) p. 191.

Bessel, Richard, Transport, in Chant, Colin (ed.), Science, Technology and Everyday Life, 1870-1950, pp. 162-199 (London, 1989). p. 163.
4

Dickinson, Robert E., The West European City: A Geographical Interpretation, (London, 1998), p. 136.

One of the impediments to spatial, as opposed to population, growth in cities in the early nineteenth century was the lack of a reliable means of city-wide transportation. Without transportation, it was difficult for the physical boundaries of a city to expand past the point where it could be traversed by foot.5 Only those wealthy enough to own private carriages could live more than a mile or two from the city centre. Thus, although the early nineteenth century saw the development of a few wealthy suburbs in areas such as Kensington in London and Jamaica Plain in Boston, suburbanisation could only become a truly mass phenomenon with the development of an urban transport network that was accessible to all classes of society.6 The necessity for some form of mass transportation within cities was recognised as early as the 1830s, with the advent of the horse-drawn omnibus. The 1870s then saw the development of horse-drawn trams, which allowed a smaller number of horses to pull a heavier weight than had been possible with the omnibus.7 The growth of suburbs along intercity railway lines which could be used for commuting into the city, as seen in the example of Lille above, also increased throughout the second half of the century. In London, for example, between 6,000 and 10,000 people were commuting into the city by rail each day as early as the 1850s.8 However, that was a small percentage of those commuting into London by the end of the century, as railway lines at that point were not designed for suburban traffic and, particularly in the north of the city, consisted of only a few lines connecting London to other British cities.9

5 6

Kern, p. 191.

Reeder, D. A., A Theatre of Suburbs: Some Patterns of Development in West London, 1801-1911 in Dyos, H.J. (ed.), The Study of Urban History, (London, 1968 p. 254 and Warner, Sam B., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900, (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), p. 53.
7 8 9

Lees, and Hollen Lees, p. 140. Lees and Hollen Lees, p. 138. Kellett, John, R., The Impact of Railways on Victorian Cities, (London, 1969). p. 283.

Trams and buses could only be used by a small section of the population, as they were slow, of limited availability, and relatively expensive.10 Furthermore, they were reliant on horses and could be thrown into chaos if disease struck a citys equine population. This happened on a number of occasions, the most disastrous of which was the Great Epizootic of 1872, which killed 2250 horses in Philadelphia in three weeks and was almost as devastating in other cities in the eastern United States.11 Episodes such as the Great Epizootic made clear the unreliable nature of transport systems which were dependent on horses, and further encouraged the development of an electrified system of urban transport, which was eventually invented in 1888 by the American, Frank Sprague. The electrified tram developed by Sprague was exponentially better than anything that had come before. It was capable of carrying three times as many people as the horse-drawn tram, immediately reduced journey times by half, and was cheaper to operate, although it did require a larger capital upfront to establish.12 Later versions improved on these figures. As a result, the electrified tram was able to serve a much larger proportion of city dwellers than had earlier forms of mass transport. Across Europe, by the late 1890s, the average number of journeys taken per urban dweller using electrified trams was approximately four times as many as had been taken using horse-drawn transport systems. This increase was particularly marked in the larger cities. In Germany, approximately 50 more journeys per person per year on electrified trams were taken in cities with a population of above 400,000 compared to those with populations of between 200,000 and 400,000 (185 journeys per person per year, as against 137).13

10

McKay, John P., Tramways and Trolleys: The Rise of Urban Mass Transport in Europe, (Princeton, 1976) pp.10-12
11

Hilton, George W., Transport Technology and the Urban Pattern, in the Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 4., No. 3. pp. 123-35 (1969) p. 124.
12 13

Warner, p. 28. McKay, pp. 192-4.

This was made possible by the decreasing price of transport, with the average cost of a tram fare in Germany falling from 10.1 pfennigs to 9.7pf between 1901 and 1911, a more significant fall in real terms than it seems as the general cost of living increased by 15% during this period.14 There were similar decreases in the cost of transport in Paris, London and Boston.15 At the same time, fixed fares per journey became more common, encouraging longer commutes. Shorter working hours also made it more viable to live further away from the workplace.16 The electrified tram thus increased mobility among all classes of people, and allowed cities to expand beyond their previous limits and, in particular, created suburbs in which the urban working and middle classes could live while still working within the city.17 As mentioned above, wealthy citizens, who could afford private coaches for transport as well as the spare time required for lengthy journeys into the city, had in many cases moved out of the cities prior to the development of mass transport networks. This trend spread to the middle classes as horse-drawn trams and omnibuses became more common, while the working classes were the last to leave, and stayed closest to the city. Finally, the very poor remained confined to the inner city, unable to afford the cost of the new suburban homes springing up while, at the same time, being forced to live in closer proximity to each other as they struggled to pay ever-increasing rents in central areas being redeveloped for commercial purposes.18 The increasing availability of transport networks shaped the modern city by dividing cities into zones based on the income level of its residents much more sharply than they had been before, as is depicted in the diagram of the Greater Boston area below.

14 15 16 17 18

Desai, Ashok V., Real Wages in Germany: 1871-1913, (Oxford, 1968). p. 84. McKay, p. 161; Barker and Robbins, p. 170 and Warner, p. 26. Barker and Robbins, p. xxvi. McKay, p. 26.

Reeder, p. 269; Garside, Patricia L., West End, East End: London 1890-1940 in Metropolis 1890-1940, Sutcliffe, Anthony (ed.) (London, 1984) p. 230. and McKay, 221.

[Source: Warner, p. 63]

As the map shows, the trend in Boston in 1900 was that the wealthier a citizen was, the further they lived from the city centre. Middle and upper-middle class families with one working parent could afford to live in areas with only one transport line (described as linear street railway service in Warners diagram),

particularly as they were more likely than a lower middle-class citizen to work in the central commercial district of Downtown Boston, where the linear tramlines terminated. Less well-off Bostonians were more likely to live in the band within 3 miles from City Hall where there were also lateral (or crosstown) trams, allowing all members of the family to travel to their places of employment, which could be in any part of the city.19 In each case, suburbs were homogenised, with people living surrounded by members of their own class and background. In the case of Boston, its shape was, of course, influenced by the fact that it was a coastal city that could expand in only one direction. As a result, the class divisions as laid out in Warners diagram, from the poorest inner city areas to the wealthiest outer regions, were perhaps more stark than in other modern cities. London, for example, had a distinct divide between the working-class east and middle-class west in addition to the division between its inner and outer suburbs.20 Nevertheless, with certain allowances made for each citys individual characteristics, the general trend of transport lines radiating outwards from a central hub in the business district to residential suburbs, as set out in the diagram, can be applied to other modern cities. 21 The trend of depopulation in the inner city and the replacement of its residential areas with a central business district into which people commuted in order to work was a feature of all modern cities, although it was particularly marked in American cities, such as Boston and Philadelphia, and was somewhat less applicable to continental European cities.22 The residential population of the City of London, for example, decreased from 128,000 to 75,000 between 1851 and 1871 and still further over the next decades, while its working population rose

19 20 21 22

Warner, pp. 56 and 62-3. Garside, p. 230. Dickinson, p. 235 and Barker and Robbins, pp. 258-9.

Hershberg, Theodore, Light, Dale Jr., Cox, Harold E. and Greeneld, Richard, The Journeyto-Work: An Empirical Investigation of Work, Residence and Transportation. Philadelphia, 1850 and 1880, pp. 128-173 in Hershberg, ed., Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family and Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century. Essays Towards an Interdisciplinary History of the City, (New York, 1981). p. 136. and Dickinson, pp. 248 and 510-20.

continuously throughout the nineteenth century, reaching 360,000 by 1900.23 Likewise, in Berlin the population of the central district decreased from the 1860s onwards, a process which increased in pace after the electrical tram network was put in place during the 1890s, while in Paris during the same period over 10% of the working population of the north and north-eastern suburbs, as well as areas in the south and east, travelled to work in the city centre each day.24 Nonetheless, neither continental city experienced as dramatic a fall in the number of residents in the city centre as did London or the American cities, as the tradition of apartment living, even for the well-to-do, served to counteract the tendency towards suburbanisation made possible by the development of transport facilities.25 In fact, in Berlin it was not unknown for workers to travel outwards from apartments in the compact inner zones to work in the factories on the outskirts of the city, a phenomenon which was practically unheard of in the Anglophone cities.26 The development of urban transport systems was encouraged by municipal authorities across Europe, who struck deals with the private companies who built train tracks and tramlines. Many saw transport networks as a vital resource for all classes of society and the local authorities in some cities, such as Leipzig, guaranteed monopolies to companies who agreed to construct tramlines to cover the whole city and not to concentrate solely on the more profitable middle-class trade.27 Government regulation of this type was the norm for European cities, including Paris and Berlin. By contrast, in the United States private transport companies tended to be much more lightly regulated, although this was less true in some cities, such as Boston, than in others.28 In the most extreme case, that of the Railway Boss Act passed by the Pennsylvanian state
23

Barker, T.C. and Robbins, Michael, A History of London Transport: Passenger Travel and the Development of the Metropolis. Vol 1: The Nineteenth Century. (London, 1975), p. 200.
24 25 26 27 28

Dickinson, pp. 235 and 248. Lees and Hollen Lees, p. 137. Dickinson, pp. 248 and 510-20. McKay, p.116.

Cheape, Charles W., Moving the Masses: Urban Public Transit in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, 1880-1912, (Cambridge, Mass., 1980). pp. 1-4 and 128-32

government in 1868, regulation of street railway companies by the Philadelphia city authorities was forbidden without specific authorisation from the state assembly. As a result, although there were more miles of tramlines in Philadelphia than in either Boston or New York, the system was also far more chaotic and did not serve the majority of Philadelphian workers until well into the twentieth century. Nor did the promotion of free market competition reduce the cost of transport; Philadelphia bucked the trend mentioned above and the price of transport did not drop as it had in other cities.29 It was not until after the threat of imminent bankruptcy in 1907 that the main local transport company, the PRT, was forced to allow municipal oversight, leading to an overhaul of the system during the 1910s which improved its accessibility.30 Although no other city in either Europe or the United States had as lenient a regulatory policy as Philadelphia, almost all tramlines in the nineteenth century were built by private enterprises. Nevertheless, by the turn of the century transport networks were increasingly becoming the responsibility of municipal authorities. The Boston subway, constructed in the late 1890s, was built by the city government. The United Kingdom led the way in municipalising city tram networks from the 1890s onwards, while almost half of German cities controlled their own tram systems by 1904. The Parisian system remained in private hands for longer but, as it had been tightly regulated from the beginning, it did not suffer from the kind of problems that plagued the Philadelphian network.31 This was due to the growing realisation that systems such as the one in Philadelphia, designed without municipal participation and controlled by the PRT monopoly from the 1880s onwards, could have blind spots which excluded poorer members of the population. This was also true of midwestern industrial cities such as Detroit, which in 1892 had a transport network which was accessible to less than half the citys population.32 In cases such as these, the
29 30 31 32

Cheape, p. 161. Cheape, p. 203 and Hershberg et al., p. 152. Cheape, p. 111 and Lees and Hollen Lees, p. 194. Bessel, p.173.

development of an urban transport network heightened divisions within the city and helped to create a modern city from which certain classes were excluded from participating. The existence of (primarily black) ghettos which were isolated from the rest of the city, and to whom the usual patterns of intra-urban travel did not apply, was a feature of industrial cities in the American midwest and also, to a lesser extent, existed in cities in the north east.33 Nor was ghettoisation restricted to the United States. In fact, in the 1870s the manager of one of Londons largest transport companies, the Great Eastern railway company, explicitly advocated using transport policy to keep the working classes restricted to certain areas while speaking to the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes:
Allow me to say that from the Edmonton district, and from the Walthamstow and Stratford districts, we issue tickets to Liverpool Street, and that these districts are spoilt for ordinary residential purposes. What we would urge is this, that the working classes should be kept to these districts.34

Ironically, the Great Eastern offered the lowest prices of any railway company and had the reputation of being a benefactor to the working classes. They were among the earliest to offer workmen's trains, which offered discounted rates on particular routes during rush hour. The provision of these workmens trains had been mandated by the London city government as early as 1863 and led to a sharp drop in the price of commuting, from 3d for a single third-class ticket in 1860 to 2d for a return trip in 1865.35 (Similar provisions were also introduced in cities such as Paris and New York.36 ) However, despite being mandated by law, these discounts were limited to certain specified routes, which in practice meant that cheap workmens fares were limited to the factories and docks of East

33

Adams, John S., Residential Structure of Midwestern Cities, in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 60, No. 1 (March, 1970) pp. 27-62. p. 38. and Warner, pp. 65-6.
34

William Birt, General Manager of the Great Eastern railway company. Quoted in Kellett, p. 387.
35 36

Barker and Robbins, pp. 116 and 174. McKay, p. 116 and Cheape, p. 210.

10

London.37 This uneven application of municipal transport policy throughout the late nineteenth century resulted in further polarisation of classes as it encouraged the working classes to congregate in the East End, while much of West London remained solidly middle-class. It was not until the construction of the tuppenny tube to Shepherds Bush and Hammersmith in 1901 that workmens fares came to West London, coinciding with the development of a West London working class.38 In this case, municipal transport policy played an active role in shaping modern London, by exacerbating a class division between West and East London which had been in existence ever since the upper classes left for the West London suburbs in the early nineteenth century, and which still exists today. Another London transport policy which created barriers for the working classes was the fact that only omnibuses were able to enter the city centre. This was due to the law that deemed tramlines too ugly to be allowed into the City of London, while the price of land made the construction of central train stations impracticable. At the same time, underground railway lines were not built beneath the city centre because of the prohibitive expense that would be incurred under a law that required the construction company to purchase any building below which the railway travelled. As the third-class tickets offered by the trains, the Metropolitan underground and, later, the electrified tram networks were the cheapest means of travelling and consequently were mostly used by the working classes, this meant that the poorest Londoners were effectively denied easy access to the city centre. Omnibuses, primarily used by the middle classes, were the only type of transport that could travel directly into the Central Business District and the shopping district around Oxford Street.39 As a result, members of different classes were funnelled into particular areas of the city depending on the type of public transport they used. It was now possible for a person to step into a train, an omnibus or a tram in the suburb in which they lived, surrounded by others of a similar background, and travel into the city

37 38 39

Kellett, p. 380. Garside, p. 230; Reeder, pp. 161-2. Barker and Robbins, pp. 99-100 and 196.

11

without being exposed to members of a different class. In this way, public transport helped to shape the mental life of the modern city by heightening the sense that each class had their own, separate, part of the city to which they belonged. In conclusion, urban transport systems had a profound effect on the shape of the modern city by making it possible for cities to expand past the point where it was possible to travel around them on foot. This altered the spatial structure of modern urban areas by comparison with earlier cities, reducing the average population density even as the total urban population doubled, tripled or even quadrupled and the total area occupied by the city increased many times over. This physical expansion of the city led to the development of another structural characteristic of the modern city - a much stricter delineation of zones by their function than had existed previously. Central business districts, such as the City of London and Downtown Boston, began to form, as did shopping districts and residential suburbs. Some of the most profound structural changes that occurred in the modern city were those based on class. The development of an urban transport system had both positive and negative effects on these structural alterations. Public transport allowed middle-class and some lower middle-class people to escape the crowded city and live in healthier, more spacious surroundings in the suburbs. However, the poorest in society, unable to afford suburban dwellings, were trapped by the decreasing amount of space given over to residences in the city centre due to the growth of the area occupied by the commercial sector, and forced into living even closer together in inner-city slums. Most notably of all, urban transport systems caused cities to be further divided on the basis of class, as they allowed for the creation of distinct wealthy and poor areas. In the United States in particular, this included zones in which poor transport provision effectively excluded poor people from participating in the life of the city. This polarisation of classes was the most enduring way in which urban transport systems shaped the modern city.

12

Bibliography: Adams, John S., Residential Structure of Midwestern Cities, in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 60, No. 1 (March, 1970) pp. 27-62 Barker, T.C. and Robbins, Michael, A History of London Transport: Passenger Travel and the Development of the Metropolis. Vol 1: The Nineteenth Century. (London, 1975). Bessel, Richard, Transport, in Chant, Colin (ed.), Science, Technology and Everyday Life, 1870-1950, pp. 162-199 (London, 1989). Cheape, Charles W., Moving the Masses: Urban Public Transit in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, 1880-1912, (Cambridge, Mass., 1980). Desai, Ashok V., Real Wages in Germany: 1871-1913, (Oxford, 1968). Dickinson, Robert E., The West European City: A Geographical Interpretation, (London, 1998). Garside, Patricia L., West End, East End: London 1890-1940 in Sutcliffe, Anthony (ed.), Metropolis 1890-1940, (London, 1984). Hershberg, Theodore (ed.), Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family and Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century. Essays Towards an Interdisciplinary History of the City, (New York, 1981). Hilton, George W., Transport Technology and the Urban Pattern, in the Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 4., No. 3. pp. 123-35 (1969). Kellett, John, R., The Impact of Railways on Victorian Cities, (London, 1969). Kern, Stephen, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, (Cambridge, Mass. 1983). Lees, Andrew and Hollen Lees, Lynn, Cities and the Making of Modern Europe, 1750-1914, (Cambridge, 2007). Lloyd, William J., Understanding late nineteenth-century American cities, in the Geographical Review, Vol. 71, No. 4 (Oct., 1981), pp. 460-471. McKay, John P., Tramways and Trolleys: The Rise of Urban Mass Transport in Europe, (Princeton, 1976). Reeder, D. A., A Theatre of Suburbs: Some Patterns of Development in West London, 1801-1911 in Dyos, H.J. (ed.), The Study of Urban History, (London, 1968). Warner, Sam B., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900, (Cambridge, Mass., 1962).

13