By Knute Berger
Crosscut
Anyone who negotiates Seattle on a regular basis asks at some point: Why can’t we just get around? It’s easy to blame geography — squeezed as Seattle is on a narrow, hilly hourglass isthmus surrounded by water — for our city’s transportation woes. But it’s much more complicated than that.
By complicated I mean that some basic, and not always pretty, elements of human nature have come into play to give us what we know today. And a little history and perspective are helpful as the $930 million transportation ballot measure, Move Seattle, heads for the November ballot.
An excellent, enlightening new book from the University of Washington Press is Bike Battles: A History of Sharing the American Road, by James Longhurst, a bike-commuting associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. Longhurst looks at how cars came to rule the road.
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