num_pages: 208
description: No Bus, No Bicycle, No Job has analyzed how workers’ mobility and job accessibility changed over time, and how blue-collar workers, employers, and thegovernment have shaped this change in twentieth century Netherlands. Byclosely examining workers’ past mobility options and barriers in differentperiods, this book has shown that factors considered key in contributingto ‘transport poverty’ today are of all times, and have been addressed byvarious actors in the past, including workers and employers—unrecognizedforces in historiography.Against the background of what historians Gijs Mom and Ruud Filarskicoined the “mobility explosion,” I have shown that the relative distance,time, and cost of bridging distances, decreased for most workers over thecourse of the twentieth century. In addition to rail-based modes, bicyclesand buses led to greater time-space compression for manual workers andjobseekers during the interwar period, complemented by mopeds and cars inlater decades. Not everyone, however, enjoyed the benefits of widening travelhorizons. Like elsewhere in Western Europe, new transport technologies—bicycles, buses, mopeds, and cars—became more affordable and availableto manual workers. Still, I have shown that Dutch workers used these modesthat were curtailed in various ways by the spatial organization of livingand working, mobility barriers, and company politics of control—therebyshying away from a technological determinist take on historic changes inworkers’ mobility
language: English
title: No bicycle, No Bus, No Job
publisher: Amsterdam University Press