The original round-the-world public transport travelogue. Award-winning author Taras Grescoe rides subways, streetcars, bikes and ferries from Toronto to Tokyo, Phoenix to Bogota, to find out what makes some cities work, and why the car was never the answer for the cities of the 21st century.
"[A] passionately argued and important book." —The Guardian
"A sort of love letter to mass transit—and an oddly compelling and entertaining one at that." —The Wall Street Journal
"A marvellous investigation of urban transit....Comprehensive, insightful, and well written." —The Globe and Mail
"Treating us to a first-person account of what works — and what doesn't — Grescoe delivers the goods on transit with intelligence and wit." —Toronto Star.
"All the cities we admire most in the world—the places young people want to live—boast great public transit systems or are in the process of building them. Taras Grescoe explains why: there's nothing more civilized than a great subway, or a bus rapid transit system, or a squad of ferries, or any of the other ways we've learned to move ourselves around urban space. As this splendid account makes clear, a car isn't liberation: not needing a car is liberation!" —Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth
Taras Grescoe's books have changed the way we look at illicit substances (The Devil's Picnic) and how we think about the world's seafood (Bottomfeeder). In Straphanger, Grescoe hits the commuter trails in a global quest to understand and illuminate the challenges of a post-automobile age.
Straphanger is the most entertaining and thorough examination of car culture yet written, as well as an empowering tool kit for anybody seeking alternatives to an automobile-based lifestyle. Ultimately, its subject is the city. Through encounters with bicycle commuters, subway drivers, city planners, professional boulevardiers, idealistic mayors, and trolley campaigners, Grescoe takes us on a global tour of urban transportation. Along the way, he meets libertarian apologists for the automobile, urbanists fighting for walkable cities and suburbs, and commuters in cities as disparate as Copenhagen, Vancouver, New York, and Shanghai. More than a decade on, Straphanger's argument has only grown more urgent, as cities from Paris to Montreal reclaim their streets from the automobile.
Taras Grescoe writes about sustainable transportation in his weekly newsletter, www.highspeed.blog
