Dissertation Research: America's Subway: The Washington Metro as Vision and Vehicle

This dissertation research project focuses the evolution over half a century of the Washington, DC metro system with the intent to better understand the role of urban rail systems in the postwar age.

The study draws on two bodies of scholarly literature. The first is a long-running debate over the wisdom of investments in new urban rail systems since the 1970s. Many planners applaud these systems as the best hope for combating the ills of automobile dominated sprawl, with its attendant problems of pollution, energy wastefulness, and social isolation. But many economists deride rail as a shiny toy that consumes public funds better used for bus transit. Neither side of this debate has examined the detailed, qualitative history of a rail system. This research project hopes to show that in the real world, decisionmaking and the settings of goals are more complicated than the factors considered by economic models. The second body of scholarship is the study of the history of technology, especially the myth-and-symbol approach of Leo Marx and his followers and the study of the social construction of technology. Applying these approaches to postwar rail transit can explain how one intensely public technology accumulates functions as it evolves.