Road Geek Book Club

[silverback1065]

Does anyone have any book recommendations that are about roads, geography, maps or things related to roads?

[noelbotevera]

Does anyone have any book recommendations that are about roads, geography, maps or things related to roads?

Does an outdated 2009 PA book atlas still showing PA 60 going up to I-80 count?

[silverback1065]

yes, but literature is what I'm more interested in.

[theline]

Good idea for a thread. How about Matt Dellinger's fine I-69? It's been discussed in other threads. It's an even-handed account about the genesis of that highway.

[oscar]

"Blue Highways", by William Least Heat-Moon, about his circumnavigation of the lower 48, is a classic of road trip literature.

[Thunderbyrd316]

   Don't forget the John Steinbeck classic, "Travels with Charley" (Non-Fiction, it is about a road trip he took with his dog in a camper around America in 1960.). Also, not quite literature in the literary sense but the February 1968 National Geographic had a fairly well written article entitled "America's Growing Interstate System" which also included some really cool pix.

[Mergingtraffic]

I'd say "Traffic" is about driver behavior.  I forget the author.  Interesting read about why people drive the way they do. 

[briantroutman]

Growing up, my local public library had precious few books on highways, and those it did have I checked out several times.

The one I remember best is Divided Highways by Tom Lewis. I understand that it was a companion to a PBS documentary series of the same name. Essentially, it's a history of the Interstate System and the story progression is pretty predictable (Eisenhower's 1919 convoy, Futurama, PA Turnpike, the 1956 act, sociocultural shifts, freeway revolts, gas crises, and general hand-wringing about suburbanization and car dependence in the modern world).

The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission has an official history credited to Dan Cupper. It's pretty sanitized but an interesting read nonetheless. At least in the past, the PTC handed them out for free at almost every opportunity. I remember getting one mailed to me (along with a bumper sticker, litter bag, map, and several pamphlets) back in the mid '90s after checking their "for more info"  box on the postcard attached to the PA visitor's guide.

[kurumi]

Erik Slotboom's Houston Freeways is an incredibly thorough treatment of that subject. It's out of print now; I bought a copy when it came out, even though I've never been to Houston. You can look for used copies, or get a PDF from Erik's site. I'm very impressed by the amount of research, talent, care and hard work that went into that book.

There's also a Dallas Freeways book, released in 2014.

[Mergingtraffic]

I also remember reading books on highways and roads as a kid in the children's section of the library in 1984-1985, it was a hardcover and on the cover it had a nighttime view of an interstate in the big city with "streaks" of headlights moving through and non-reflective BGS signs lit up.  I don't remember the title at all.  I'd love to flip through it with what I know now.

[Pete from Boston]

For some of the fun obsessive studies of specific roads:

Bruce Radde's The Merritt Parkway is a well-illustrated survey of the history and design of the Parkway. 

Angus Gillespie's and Michael Rockland's Looking for America on the New Jersey Turnpike goes from history to institutional culture to pop iconography. 


There are countless Arcadia Publishing ("Images of America" series, etc.) books on roads and related subjects, of course.

[Rothman]

I like Michael Wallis' Route 66: The Mother Road.

Regarding Blue Highways, I respect its influence on American travel literature (i.e., not only a description of the places visited, but an overarching story about a guy finding himself).  However, it spawned a deluge of copycats all the way to the present day.  Sort of sent travel writing down a cul-de-sac that it hasn't gotten out of.  Now everyone has to write their story about how their travel help them "find themselves" or have some sort of profound experience.  Reading writing by people that are writing about themselves gets old fast.

[catch22]

America's Highways 1776-1976, a book published by the FHWA for the Bicentennial.

It has two parts, the first is a history of roads and road building in the United States, the second is a study of the financing, design and construction of modern-day (at least in 1976) roads and infrastructure.

[Alex]

The Big Roads by Earl Swift. We got to read a copy of the book when it came out and do a Q & A with the author.

Erik Slotboom's Houston Freeways is an incredibly thorough treatment of that subject. It's out of print now; I bought a copy when it came out, even though I've never been to Houston. You can look for used copies, or get a PDF from Erik's site. I'm very impressed by the amount of research, talent, care and hard work that went into that book.

100% agree with kurumi on Houston Freeways. I was able to borrow Andy's hard copy of the book and mowed through it in little time. 

[dgolub]

I'm surprised that no one has yet mentioned The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro, a biography of Robert Moses.

[froggie]

Amongst those not mentioned yet (all of which I have in my collection, as well as most of those already mentioned):

- Maphead:  Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks, written by Ken Jennings (famous Jeopardy game show champion).   He even mentions AARoads and this forum in the book.
- Cartographies of Danger:  Mapping Hazards in America, by Mark Monmonier.
- Reaching Climax:  And Other Towns Along the American Highway, by Gary Gladstone.
- Wrestling with Moses:  How Jane Jacobs Took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City, another Robert Moses book by Anthony Flint.
- Climbing the Mississippi River, Bridge by Bridge, by Mary Charlotte Aubry Costello.
- Covered Bridges:  A Close-Up Look, by Thomas E. Walczak.
- How to Read Bridges, by Edward Denison.
- The Tappan Zee Bridge:  Where Do We Go From Here?, by Robert T. Hintersteiner.
- Wood+Concrete+Stone+Steel:  Minnesota's Historica Bridges, by Denis P. Gardner.
- A Road for Canada:  The Illustrated Story of the Trans-Canada Highway, by Daniel Francis.
- Building the Mass Pike, by Yanni K. Tsipis.
- Down the Asphalt Path:  The Automobile and the American City, by Clay McShane.
- Fighting Traffic:  The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, by Peter D. Norton.
- Gridlock:  Why We're Stuck in Trffic and What to Do About It, by Randal O'Toole.
- Long Road South:  The Pan-American Highway, by Joseph R. Yogerst.
- Paving Tobacco Road:  A Century of Progress by the North Carolina Department of Transportation, by Walter R. Turner.
- Reinventing the Automobile:  Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century, by William J. Mitchell.
- Still Stuck in Traffic:  Coping with Peak Hour Traffic Congestion, by Anthony Downs.
- Tales of the Road:  Highway 61, by Cathy Wurzer.
- The Big Dig, by Dan McNichol.
- The Boulevard Book:  History, Evolution, Design of Multiway Boulevards, by Allan B. Jacobs.
- The Freeway in the City:  Principles of Planning and Design, a late 1960s book from FHWA.
- The Great American Road Trip, by Eric Peterson.
- The Great Valley Road of Virginia:  Shenandoah Landscapes from Prehistory to the Present, by Warren R. Hofstra.
- The King's Best Highway:  The Lost History of the Boston Post Road, the Route That Made America, by Eric Jaffe.
- The Magnolia Route:  1923 to 1927, by Joe Casey.
- The Roads that Built America:  The Incredible Story of the U.S. Interstate System, by Dan McNichol.
- Traffic:  Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), by Tom Vanderbilt.  Full title and author of the book Mergingtraffic mentioned.
- US 1:  America's Original Main Street, by Andrew H. Malcolm.

[kkt]

George R. Stewart's classics, U.S. 40: Cross Section of the United States of America and N.A. 1: The North-South Continental Highway

[roadman]

American Road - about the Army's 1919 cross country convoy - one of the participants was Eisenhower, who was a young Army lieutenant at the time.
Denison's Ice Road - about the early development of the winter roads in Canada.

[Pete from Boston]

America's Highways 1776-1976, a book published by the FHA for the Bicentennial.

It has two parts, the first is a history of roads and road building in the United States, the second is a study of the financing, design and construction of modern-day (at least in 1976) roads and infrastructure.

I'm sure I was not the only one here lucky enough to get a free copy of this when FHWA was clearing them out a few years ago.  Someone posted a tip on MTR. 

[froggie]

A number of MTR regulars jumped on that book.  Unfortunately, I lost my copy to Hurricane Katrina.

[J N Winkler]

Phil Patton's Open Road focuses on the cultural aspects of roads and contains some nuggets of information that are hard to find elsewhere.  (I have been looking for a copy to buy for years, but not found one.  I assume it is available through ILL.)

The FHWA's America's Highways book indeed had a free distribution of surplus copies about ten years ago, and I got my own copy that way.  But it is actually available as a scanned PDF somewhere on the Web and this is easier to load onto a phone for casual reading.

There is an academic literature on roads as well.  Some titles that come to mind:

George Charlesworth, A history of British motorways

George Charlesworth, A history of the Transport and Road Research Laboratory

Francisco Javier Rodriguez Lázaro, Las primeras autopistas españolas (1925-1936) (about failed attempts to build motorways in Spain under the Primo de Rivera dictatorship)

These have a more popular orientation:

William Rees Jeffreys, The King's Highway

Erhard Schütz and Eckhard Gruber, Mythos Reichsautobahn

James Drake, Motorways

I have to say, though, that as someone who both reads and likes roads, books about roads are not my first choice for light reading.  There are a number of reasons for this.  First, I engage with roads mainly at a visual level, so I tend to prefer to read construction plans sets (ideally with signing!) rather than textual material.  Second, I find that roads as a topic tend to attract writers who have little understanding of or interest in the art of storytelling, and thus have difficulty sustaining narrative flow (which is not a problem with other types of nonfiction I have read, such as military history).  Third, the planning history of many roads is quite complex and unless the presentation is carefully structured, it is often easier to get a handle on things by going to planning histories embedded in the primary-source documentation (such as environmental impact statements compiled under the NEPA in the US, or something like the memoria or anejo de antecedentes in Spanish proyectos de construcción) because they are generally organized according to a standard outline that is easy to decipher even if the choice of detail for presentation is often tendentious.

[jeffandnicole]

I have a few, although my favorite was always Looking for America on the New Jersey Turnpike by Angus Kress Gillespie & Michael Aaron Rockland.  Got to meet Gillespie briefly when he talked about the book at the State Library last year.

[Pete from Boston]

For those of us in the Northeast, Frederic J. Wood's 1919 book The Turnpikes Of New England: And Evolution Of The Same Through England, Virginia, And Maryland is a tremendous resource describing how many of today's long-distance secondary (and tertiary) roads came into being.  If you live near an old street in these parts called "[something] Turnpike," chances are good its origins are in here.

I have never owned a copy, but it is fortunately now served on the Internet Archive.

[freebrickproductions]

I believe there's a member of this forum here who wrote a book about the two-color signals that NYC had.

[roadman]

Dan McNichol also did a follow up book:  The Big Dig at Night