| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro. By Zachary M. Schrag. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. xviii, 355 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-8018-8246-X.)

This is an exhaustively researched, engagingly written study of the planning, designing, building, and operating of the Washington Metro. Zachary M. Schrag's book is as politicized as the system he analyzes; he intends it as an intervention in ongoing urban transportation policy debates. Schrag celebrates the Metro's contribution to the development of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area and to the people who live, work, and visit there, especially its role in sustaining a vital, pedestrian-oriented downtown area. He also acknowledges that the system has thus far fallen short in some ways of fully achieving the goals originally articulated by its champions. For example, patronage is below what was projected; transit-oriented development has occurred around some, but not all, stations; the system costs much more than project sponsors forecasted. He defends the Metro vigorously against critics who argued, based on what he considers to be excessively narrow, quantified cost-benefit calculations, that cheaper bus- based alternatives would have been more cost- effective, and other critics who thought that the system would not do much for African American Washington, D.C., residents.

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