Dear Pen-L'ers, I am doing a dissertation on regional transportation policy and planning and commercial freight movement vs. urban environmental health. Does anyone out there know of any good _Marxist_ books on U.S. transportation policy and planning which not only covers the rise of the "auto-industrial complex" (in conjunction with so-called "Fordist" accumulation), but also critically investigates recent shifts in national approaches toward "congestion management" as emblematic of the neo-liberal, "post-Fordist" U.S. state ? The basic line in my thesis is that to the extent that most if not all aspects of U.S. state policy are geared toward export competitiveness, national and regional transportation systems are being re-engineered to increase the timeliness and reduce the cost of containerized commodity shipments (with ramifications for investments in mass transit, as well as "externalities" borne by mostly poor and minority neighborhoods adjacent to commercial freight corridors). The ideal book would use categories such as turnover time of capital, the costs of reproducing labor power, rising organic composition of capital (and productivity) among freight carriers, and so on. Maybe no book touches on any, much less all of these things, and I'll have to write it myself. Thanks in advance, John Gulick Ph. D. Candidate Sociology Graduate Program University of California-Santa Cruz (415) 643-8568 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
