Paul Mees Transport for Suburbia – Beyond the Automobile Age. It came out in the UK in December 2009 so I thought it would not get to Australia in summer. I’m reading a copy from the Melbourne University library at the moment and enjoying it.

Don Hale Mallard. This is an interesting story about Nigel Gresley, his career and the technology behind the railway ‘arms race’ of the 1930s that saw the British and Germans go head-to-head to break the world railway speed record in the context of Anglo-German rivalry in the 20th Century. Different from the usual hagiography of ‘great’ CMEs of the steam era.

LS

I’d suggest anyone looking for some summer rail reading track down the relevant Parliamentary Papers in either the State Library or major University library and have a read.

LS

Australia’s Transport Crisis Edited by John Wilkes, Australian Institute of Political Science, 1956.

Thanks for the comments. I think the strength of the Gleeson book is that it recognises that essentially, most Australians come from the suburbs and that if ‘we’ (especially those of us who live in the inner suburbs of our cities) leave those in the middle and outer suburbs who have no hope of escaping to rot, then the existing social and economic polarisation will sharpen and further deteriorate.

Generational welfare dependence and public housing stigmatised as the housing of last resort is not acceptable to me: by the same token, neither are homeless people living under freeways and railway viaducts and the incarceration of the poor and ignorant. Both will increase the tax burden on the predominantly middle-class tax base, but a humanist intervention to alleviate disadvantage and ignorance would cost less in taxes in the long run.

Anyway, good luck with trying to write your book. Having written a fair bit for a living, it’s not an easy job.

LS

But I would like to see a work that caters to the view that ‘more of the same’ ain’t gonna work – more rent seeking, more splashing of taxpayers money, more path of least resistance policy development – will not produce a situation different from what we have now with policy gridlock and discredited institutions.

So I might have to write it myself.

I was going to do a review of the Gleeson book for this board.

Not overly impressed – particularly not with the conclusion (you know the one, Peter Parker!) where we are all brought together for this giant group hug and all our social differences are forgotten.

Dreadlocked lentil eating lefties are supposed to come out from Northcote or Newtown on their bicycles to the suburbs and see how people live, empathise with them blah blah blah. And the favour is supposed to be returned (I don’t know how).

Society will not change because of group hugs. People have valid, conflicting interests (hence the presence of markets and elections). People need to fight for their interests.

And I’m only half joking when I’ve said it would be good if PCs could run on the energy generated from keyboard strokes – mine would run for a good many hours and so would much of our cities from the friction that living in a city or society generates.

And cities exist because of economic spatial efficiency (at the point where congestion begins to threaten that efficiency). Not because humans fundamentally like each other.

LS

McLoughlin is for Melbourne readers, to see how little progress planning in Victoria has made in 20 years. Garreau, Bogart and Levine are at the nexus of land use, economics and transport which I think is the best place to be. I highly recommend the Levine; I haven’t read a clearer discussion of the relationship between transport and density. The Shoup and Brown-May are interesting perspectives from the street level, if anyone has an interest in social transport policy.

I greatly enjoyed reading Garreau’s Edge City and struggled through Flyvbjerg as a set text in my Masters of Urban Planning course.

In my list I was trying to keep things more transport-oriented with a bit of urban planning thrown in to give a very broad context of the kind of political and planning environment transport operates in. The Gleeson book is one of the best texts in terms of how it pulls lots of different strands of planning together with a real humanist touch. I can highly recommend it to you (and everyone else) to read.

LS