Station Archive

Jake Berman, who lived in Davis when he was younger, has developed a writer’s interest in something Davis has never had — subways. So he wrote The Lost Subways of North America — a Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been, a new book about transit and how it reflects a city’s personality, interests, and other attributes.

He writes this about the Bay Area, for example -- that after the Freeway Revolt a half century ago, in which San Francisco turned away seven of 10 freeways planned for the city, “the Bay Area adopted a posture that any changes to the urban fabric were presumptively bad, and that exhaustive study of any such changes would be necessary.” We're living with the aftermath of the attitude, which he believes is also present in Davis and other California communities.

Jake, now an attorney in New York City, will speak about his book Nov. 29 at the Avid Reader bookstore in downtown Davis, and joins us today on Davisville. (He also created the transit illustrations in the book -- this image is an excerpt from his map of San Francisco's cable cars in 1892.)