| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Watching the Traffic Go By: Transportation and Isolation in Urban America. By Paul Mason Fotsch. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. xiv, 240 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 978-0-292-71425-0. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 978-0-292-71426-7.)
In Watching the Traffic Go By, Paul Mason Fotsch seeks to explain and finds fault in "the automobile-centered design of American cities" (p. 187). Through the techniques of cultural criticism and history, the author (a professor of communication studies) concludes that the automotive city is the product of a dominant culture threatened by the social groups it marginalized. For middle-class whites, ample motor highways were a means of escape from immigrants, blacks, and Hispanics. Roads offered geographical isolation in racially exclusive suburban subdivisions and a more private mode of transportation that did not ask its users to encounter other travelers of diverse traditions and hues.	1
Those claims will not surprise any alert observer of American cities, let alone scholars of the history and sociology of urban transportation. Nevertheless, Fotsch hopes to offer something new through a study of four core samples (close variations of three of them were previously published as articles) drilled from sites in New York and Los Angeles between 1939 and 1994.	. . .

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