"In the late nineteenth century, as cities like Boston and New York grew larger, the streets became increasingly clogged with horse-drawn carts. When the great blizzard of 1888 brought New York City to a halt, a solution had to be found. Two brothers--Henry Melville Whitney of Boston and William Collins Whitney of New York City--pursued the dream of his city being the first American metropolis to have a subway and the great race was on. The competition...

"Why is it that the mass transit systems of American cities are, by and large, inadequate? It's a common question and one that has generated substantial scholarship. But Jake Berman's The Lost Subways of North America offers a new way to consider it: a visual-and fun-journey through the past, present, and possible future of urban transit. Featuring Berman's own colorful maps of old, often forgotten streetcar lines, lost ideas for never-built transit,...

In The Big Dig, we are taken behind the scenes of the Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel Project to discover how traffic in Boston got to be so bad in the first place, and how poor planning led to an elevated highway that divided the city and made traffic worse.