Imagine a megacity so congested that traffic makes it “almost insupportable for purposes of business, recreation and all ordinary transit from place to place.”  A city where the working population faces an arduous and difficult journey to the centers of business and employment, and vested interests and concerns over over-ambitious engineering plans for new transport links are delaying radical solutions to a problem that is choking economic growth.  The answer is to build a new mass transit system that will open up the city and enable it to continue to be an economic powerhouse for centuries to come.  And that’s what happened a century-and-a-half ago, in London.  (The description quoted above is by William Malins, one of the founders of the Metropolitan Railway, quoted in London in the Nineteenth Century by Jerry White.)

January 9, 2013, marks the 150^th anniversary of the day the world’s first underground railway was opened in London.  The next day, January 10, 1863, saw the first rush-hour crush, as 50,000 people turned up for the first service (only half could find places).

Running 4 miles from Farringdon Station to Paddington, the Metropolitan Railway, the predecessor to today’s Tube, was the world’s first underground railway and the first urban mass transit system.  The trains were pulled by steam engines.  The idea of an underground railway powered by steam sounds like an image out of a steampunk novel, but as shown by a recent trial for January’s celebration of the Underground’s birth it was, and still is, feasible.

I am not going to suggest that the cleantech industry should take a back-to-the-future look to steam and coal-power for new approaches to urban transportation, but it’s worthwhile reflecting on the ambition and the vision of those London engineers.  Perhaps more than any other element of its infrastructure, transportation networks define a city: what’s possible, what’s impossible, how the city can grow, and what it feels like to live and work and move around in that environment.  Transport policy is also one of the main levers that city leaders have to shape the future of their city.  As I was researching our new Smart Cities report, to be published in January, it became even clearer that the way we look at transport (and its links to energy policy, building services, and various public initiatives) will determine the success of many of our current plans for smart cities.  As London found, and as have many other cities since, the decisions we make today about transit in the city will have repercussions far into the future.  So city leaders in our new megacities, and straphangers around the world, should take just a moment on January 9 to acknowledge those bold Victorian engineers.

If you’re looking to tour the world of urban transportation without leaving your armchair, then Straphanger might be the book for you.  The book describes how people get around in a dozen global cities, including Tokyo, Paris, Copenhagen, New York, and Philadelphia.

Written by travel writer Taras Grescoe, Straphanger (a term used to describe those who ride mass transit and trains), is a whirlwind tour of getting around by train, bus, subway, car and bike.  The writer is upfront about his affinity for public transit as well as his general aversion to cars, and his rants about the negatives of automobiles are somewhat distracting from the narrative.  Despite the author’s bias, the book does weigh the pros and cons of each form of transit, detailing how poorly implemented rail or bus lines can be just as wasteful and destructive as the development of ill-conceived freeways.

Grescoe is at his best when he focuses on the history of how transit has evolved (the digging of the New York Subway, the removal of street cars in Los Angeles) and the role politics has played in bringing each city to its current state.  In addition to the history, the author draws conclusions about how their current transit systems will affect the future development of the cities –  he’s bullish that Bogota, Portland and Philadelphia will do well, while the title of the chapter on Phoenix says it all: “Highway to Hell.”

Straphanger is loaded with take-your-breath-away factoids, such as the fact that in Tokyo, public transit hosts 43 million daily rides per day, or 2.5 times that of the ridership in the entire United States.  Wow.  Cyclists will be amazed to read about commuting by cargo bike in Copenhagen, a city with weather like London’s but more bike-to-workers than the entire US.

Grescoe’s travel writing skills are in full force throughout, as when reading you can imagine yourself being squeezed tight by strangers in the Tokyo subway, or changing radio stations as you sit in traffic in Phoenix.  A nice complement to the paperback would have been at least a few photos to fill in the gaps in your mind’s eye when moving from page to page.  I’m fortunate enough to have visited three-fourths of the places described in the book, and after reading Straphanger, I’m more motivated than ever to leave the car behind when I go to see the rest.