A Brief History of Motion

The book offers a good overview of the history of transportation and some prediction about where we're going. It's filled with tons of interesting information, so I've highlighted it all over.

For example, did you know that the oldest actual wheel ever found was discovered in Ljubljana Marshes in Slovenia? Or that wheels were not widely used for thousands of years after their invention.

There are a bunch of fun anecdotes from the history and stories of how various technologies were competing for dominance and why petrol-powered ICE won.

There's even some managerial advice from Ford himself: “the payment of five dollars a day for an eight-hour day was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made.” It turns out that paying higher wages was a way of cutting costs and improving efficiency: it reduced employee turnover and hence the amount of time needed for training.

It also talks about suburban America, how that made them completely car-dependent, and how car drivers “won” over pedestrians over street ownership. In the closing chapters, he also talks about how this trend is reverting in many cities and how a varied slew of public transportation options are better for health and climate.

The book really is all over the place, so it's hard to give it a proper review or, for that matter, five stars. But I definitely recommend reading it.