Table of Contents

Preface vii
Introduction ix
1 Making Connections: Early Public Transportation for Boston 1
2 Unification and Electrification: Trolleys Take Hold 47
3 America's First Subway 81
4 Grand Terminals for Commuters 127
5 Rapid Transit Takes Shape 195
6 Pocket Maps and Transit Improvements in the Early Twentieth Century 289
7 Catching the Bus 339
8 The Rise and Fall of the MTA 391
9 The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority 421
List of Figures 567
Bibliography and Sources 569
Index 572

About the Author

Steven Beaucher is an architect and the cofounder and proprietor of WardMaps LLC, a retail store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, specializing in antique maps and public transportation artifacts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Reviews

"If you want to know what Boston transit could look like in the future, it certainly helps to know what the city's trains, buses, trolleys, ferries, and other public transportation systems looked like in the past. And if you want to know what it looked like in the past - well, you're probably not going to find a better one-stop resource than Boston in Transit...the book is a historical resource."
-The Boston Globe

"In his lively and enlightening new book, Boston in Transit: Mapping the History of Public Transportation in The Hub (MIT), Beachuer tracks the ways transportation in Boston has shifted and evolved over its history, from 1630 to today. Packed with hundreds of images - charts, maps, archival photos, diagrams, ticket stubs, tokens - the book explores design, costs, challenges, disasters, failures, and forward movement. This thorough, deeply researched book will speak to people interested in infrastructure, in urban planning, in the evolution of how we get from one place to another, or to anyone who's rattled along on the Red Line and wondered: How long have these tunnels been here? Or: Why is the Red line red?"
-The Boston Globe, New England Literary News