why were interurbans popular? you have a good inkling as a result of looking at those god awful roads, where you have that vicious and viscous mud gumbo, yuck. first of all, interurbans are clean. as one company said, no cinders, no dust, no dirt, no smoke. and when you compare that to the typical steam operated passenger train, you look like you had been down in a coal mine, perhaps, or perhaps too your hat, whether you're a female or male, had pockmarks in it. there were occasions when sparks actually set coaches on fire. not good. now, admittedly, there were a few railroads, the so-called anthracite roads, that burned this hard coal as opposed to this high ash, high sulfur local coal that we would find let's say in illinois. and so there was a limited amount of smoke. so railroads like the delaware lackawanna western, lehigh valley, the erie and several other carriers, used anthracite. but it was expensive. although in the case of lackawanna, the company owned a number of anthracite mines. so we have a kind of

so interurban, between cities. it's the kind of latin that i actually remember from the early 1960s. perhaps it's time for me to just give you some visual images of and interurban. this is a brochure, as you can tell, 1907, that was sold to travelers in the greater new england area. and this is going to be the heartland of what we call rural trolleys. and rule trolleys are simply streetcar companies that have extended their lines out into the suburbs, nearby villages. or perhaps to an amusement park or a cemetery, whatever. this is the kind of early interurban car that was so y ubiquitou ubiquitous. >> you have the sweet summer breezes and it is a way certainly to see the landscape. so this is the first type of interurban car. it has an overhead pole that connects the traction motors with the power source. and there would be literally hundreds of miles of these rule trolleys constructed, mostly in new england, but also scattered throughout the country. this is a view taken in april of 1925, when supposedly the good

and the rise of interurban electric rail at the end of the 19th century. interurbans were similar to electric trolleys and connected cities by small electric train cars, before the rise of the personal automobile, these local systems allowed people from rural areas to get to city centers in a cheap, reliable way. he talks about interurbans and precursors to the urban light rail of today. his class is about 1:10. >>> this morning we're going to begin a three-part study of electric interurbans. certainly one of the least-studied aspects of american transportation history. the overall theme and one that i want to you keep in mind, is that we can make the argument that the electric interurban, or the rural trolley, is that linkage between steam railroad passenger service and the automobile. in fact, if the automobile had been invented perhaps 20, 25 years before, and if we had the triumph of the good roads movement about the same time, perhaps we would not have had the interurban era. also we can make a case, too, that the interurban is the transition between

he talks about interurbans as precursors to the urban light rail of today. his class is about an hour and ten minutes. >>> this morning we're going to begin a three-part study of electric interurbans. certainly one of the least studied aspects of american transportation history. the overall theme, and one that i want you to keep in mind is that we can make the argument that the electric interurban, or the rural trolley is that linkage between steam railroad passenger service and the

i like to talk about the taconic parkway as an example of the interurban parkway because it does a couple things. first, it connects to the parkway system. second, it begins to pioneer new changes to a parkway design to make them faster, safer, more convenient. and third, it brings us toward the post-war era. the taconic parkway crosses through parts of the mountainous east coast, if you will, of new york through the catskill mountains. you can see that the grading of this road was pretty difficult in some places. one of the ways they handled the grading was to separate the two drive lengths, north and southbound traffic lanes, and they have very, very large median structures here. and the two alignments of the roadway were completely independent, right. so they are on completely different alignments. so this side of the roadway does one thing. the other side of the roadway does something completely different. so it's sort of like threading two roads in a wide right-of-way. the divided roadways are reflected in the bridge designs which all have two arches and a center support situated wit

they're actually beginning to think about regions instead of being intraurban, they begin to be interurban. they begin to connect different places, connect cities. and the third thing is they begin to function as planning tools. people start to say, wow, we're going to use the parkway to think about developing not just the city but the region around it. out of the urban and -- out of the heyday of the parkway, two major types of parkways emerge. first is what i call urban or regional parkways, and the second are national park service or scenic parkways. so we're going to talk about both of these. the first, urban and regional, have a couple of characteristics. the first characteristic is that they increasingly following the 1930s begin to focus on transportation over recreation. the second is they are located in and around urban areas. and the third is that they are limited access. a couple of examples. the merritt parkway in connecticut, thbaltimore parkwa between baltimore and washington, d.c. in the mid-atlantic region. we're going to look at the merit parkway and the taconic parkway. o

native population closer to 15 including both inter- move-in-- interurban moves or interstate moves,but it's the end the green line is below the others. so, this is one fact that when i actually got to the data-- i knew it was happening, but i did not realize how much it had happened. this is overall mobility and if you look at what distance moves whether you looking at interstate moves and these are facts people been writing about. it's just the overall mobility has been declining in the us. overall mobility of immigrants has declined faster and that's important to keep in mind. that intercounty nobility rape or immigrants is about a percentage point or more or less than natives. immigrants when they come into the community they are there for the duration and that is something i don't get a lot of or i did not realize, but again some of you may have known this by looking at this data before. some of the differences have to do with things like people skill level, low skilled workers are much less likely to migrate to long-distance moves. this is interstate migration and if you look a