Transport of Delight
Subtitle: The Mythical Conception of Rail Transit in Los Angeles (Technology and the Environment)
Publisher: University of Akron Press
Published: January 30, 2005
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 492
ISBN-13: 9781884836947
Subjects: Technology; Science/Mathematics; Local transit; Technology & Industrial Arts; Street-railroads; General; Public Transportation; Environmental Engineering & Technology; California; Los Angeles Metropolitan Area
First sentence: When Copernicus argued in 1543 that the earth rotates daily on its own axis and moves annually around a stationary sun, he was attacked by a Lutheran follower, Melanchthon, since "the eyes are witnesses that the heavens revolve in the space of twenty-four hours."
Description: An analytical assessment of the Los Angeles rail program, with a focus on the Long Beach Blue Line light rail--the first of the new projects to go ahead. En route, it shows that ridership forecasting for this project was not only biased and statistically invalid, but in fact done to justify decisions made on other grounds. This unusual book develops a novel theory of myth to explain the construction of rail passenger transit in Los Angeles when it had little to offer the needs of a dispersed autopolis, whose urgent but dispersed public transportation needs could have been better served by developing the regional bus system. The author conducted interviews and performed the detective work necessary to reveal an unlikely logic that held together a network of symbols, images, and metaphors that together present powerful mythical beliefs in the guise of truth.

A political analysis shows how consensus was reached to proceed with the light rail to Long Beach, but political explanations are ultimately found lacking, because they cannot explain why decision-makers would want to put the rail in place. It is only when provocative metaphors--of the need to connect communities and to restore a mythical balance to a dysfunctional transportation system--and symbols--of escape from the pressure cooker of poverty, of urban success, power and, indeed sexual acumenare surfaced, that we realize that Los Angeles' Transport of Delight is the result of the very human need to transcend complexity by providing mythical creations that appear to offer easy answers to society's deepest problems. [Publisher web site].