Reddit reviews The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Creating the North American Landscape)

http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Society-Subway-Washington/dp/080188246X is the book most often mentioned.

Edit: fixed link

I spent my senior year of high school studying gentrification and demographic patterns in the District for my senior thesis and used these three sources extensively, they're superb books that are great reads for anyone even remotely interested in the District. They're pretty pricey to buy, but DCPL has each book, and the last one is available for Kindle.

City of Magnificent Intentions is an amazing book. It's the DCPS textbook for D.C. History (mandatory to graduate high school) and is filled with great facts, photos and drawings. Although it's formatted like a textbook, it is still a fantastic history of the city. It does a great job addressing planning and general demographics. It's probably one of the best books on D.C.

Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C. is a fascinating read on the politics and racial history of the District, and it's co-authored by Harry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood! It has a great section on the riots, how they affected the District, and the rise (and I believe also the fall) of Marion Barry.

The Great Society Subway is an incredibly detailed history of Metro, but might also interest you based on the way it details the impact it made on various sections of the city and suburbs (For instance, it goes in depth about how the green line was the last line built and how that impacted the neighborhoods it passed through, often the poorest in the city).

If you wanna know why it happened the way it happened, I highly recommend reading The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro.

If you're interested, there's a great history of the metro that goes into detail about how much those design decisions were originally fought over.

Great Society Subway

It is.

If you're interested in the design of the DC Metro system I strongly recommend the only book on the subject, The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro. This book is fascinating and offers really good history and explanation of why things on DC Metro are as they are, including why there is carpet in the cars, why you don't see bathrooms in the stations (they are there!), and more.

Excellent read!

Yes and no. The idea was that the Metro would serve as both a subway system and as a commuter rail-- thus the bad seating layout and the decision to have carpets. They wanted it to feel more like a commuter line.

If you looked at a map of NYC that included the full length of the NJT and Metro-North lines, it would look far more absurd.

I do think that there's path dependence between the Metro and sprawl, but I think that saying it's a causal relationship like you are is overstating it.

Also, might be of interest to some in this thread: Zachary Schrag's The Great Society Subway.

The book they reference there is pretty fantastic. Incredibly thorough and comprehensive history of WMATA and Metro, right from the start.