The orderliness hypothesis: The correlation of rail and housing development in London

Journal of Transport History

Volumn 29, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 98-114

  Levinson, David ^a,b  

^a IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

HOUSING MANAGEMENT; RAILWAY TRANSPORT; TOWN PLANNING; TRANSPORTATION DEVELOPMENT; TRANSPORTATION HISTORY;

ENGLAND; EURASIA; EUROPE; LONDON [ENGLAND]; UNITED KINGDOM; WESTERN EUROPE;

EID: 57749131155     PISSN: 00225266     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.7227/TJTH.29.1.8     Document Type: Article

References (38)

1. M. C. Reed, Investment in Railways in Britain, 1820-1844 (Oxford, 1975), p. 22.
2. E.g. T. C. Barker and M. Robbins, A History of London Transport I, The Nineteenth Century (London, 1963);
3. T. C. Barker and M. Robbins, A History of London Transport II, The Twentieth Century to 1970 (London, 1974);
4. C. Barman, The Man who built London Transport: a Biography of Frank Pick (London, 1979);
5. H. P. White, A Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain III, Greater London (London, 1963).
6. Many of these are reviewed in David Levinson and Bhanu Yerra, 'Self-organization of surface transportation networks', Transportation Science 40, 2 (2006), 179-88.
7. Zipf's law, or the rank size rule, suggests that the second largest city is half the size of the largest, and the third largest city is one-third the size, and so on. This distribution of city sizes has been found in a number of cases, and there are a few theories as to why it might be the case, for instance Xavier Gabaix, 'Zipf's law for cities: an explanation', Quarterly Journal of Economics, August (1999), 739-67. Zipf's law would provide economic support for connecting the largest places first (if costs were equal), as those places are notably larger than smaller places.
8. William L. Garrison and Duane F. Marble, A Prolegomenon to the Forecasting of Transportation Development: Technical Report (Washington DC, 1962).
9. Mark Casson, The Evolution of the British Railway Network, 1825-1914, ESRC report R000239586, http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/ ViewAwardPage. aspx?AwardId=1782 (accessed 6 February 2007).
10. Michael Batty and Paul Longley, Fractal Cities: a Geometry of Form and Function (London, 1994).
11. According to the 1831 UK census, the area that is now London had 1.099 million people living there. Vision of Britain, A Vision of Britain through Time (London, 2006), http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/index.jsp (accessed October 2006).
12. Dan Bogart, 'Neighbors, networks, and the development of transport systems: explaining the diffusion of turnpike trusts in eighteenth-century England', Journal of Urban Economics 61 (2007), 238-62.
13. Edwin Course, London Railways (London, 1962).
14. S. R. Hoyle, 'The first battle for London: a case study of the Royal Commission on Metropolitan Termini', London Journal 8 (1982), 140-55.
15. The 'box' keeping railway lines out of the centre of London was penetrated at Victoria, Charing Cross, and the extension from Blackfriars to Farringdon.
16. The City of London, the original centre of Greater London, is now an administrative district within London.
17. Accounting in the early years of the Metropolitan Railway, especially prior to the Regulation of Railways Act of 1868, was a bit dodgy, and dividends were reportedly paid out of capital. To quote Jackson in London's Metropolitan Railway, p. 38, describing the era of 1865, 'It was... a house of cards, a precarious game in which the level of dividend was kept up at all costs, by finding money from somewhere, with no regard to sound accounting or financial rectitude.'
18. Jack Simmons, The Railway in England and Wales, 1830-1914 I, The System and its Working (Leicester, 1978), p. 121. This large number of Bills involves duplication both within firms-lines proposed one year and not approved might be proposed again with minor modifications-and between companies-substantially the same line proposed by more than one company.
19. Course, London Railways, p. 198.
20. J. Thorn, Handbook to the Environs of London (1876), p. 31, quoted in Simmons, The Railway, p. 127.
21. Alan A. Jackson, London's Metropolitan Railway (Newton Abbot, 1986), especially chapter 9.
22. Desmond Croome and Alan A. Jackson, Rails through the Clay (London, 1993), pp. 4, 45.
23. H. P. White, A Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain III, Greater London (London, 1963), p. 100.
24. Clive Foxell, Rails to Metro-land (Chesham, 2005), p. 105.
25. Alan A. Jackson, London's Metro-land (London, 2006).
26. Dennis Edwards, London's Underground Suburbs, 2nd edn (London, 1986), p. 106.
27. Douglas Rose, London Underground Diagrammatic History, 7th edn (London, 1999).
28. H. V. Borley, Chronology of London Railways (Oakham, 1982).
29. Vision of Britain, A Vision of Britain through Time (London, 2006).
30. Future analysis should attempt to obtain the density of opportunities (e.g. employment) to examine the strength of correlation of station location with the non-home end of trips. It may be possible through use of historical GIS data to develop surrogate indicators for employment or commercial activity.
31. 2 where x and y are the two variables to be correlated and x̄ and ȳ are the expected values of those two variables.
32. Dave Wetzel, Vice-chair of Transport for London, personal conversation, November 2006.
33. Brian Taylor, 'Unjust equity: an examination of California's Transportation Development Act', Transportation Research Record 1297 (1991), 85-92.
34. Simmons, The Railway, p. 50.
35. Croome and Jackson, Rails through the Clay, p. 150.
36. White, A Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain.
37. Bent Flyvbjerg, Nils Bruselius and Werner Rothengatter, Megaprojects and Risk: an Anatomy of Ambition (Cambridge, 2003).
38. Paolo Capuzzo, 'Between politics and technology: transport as a factor of mass sub- urbanisation in Europe, 1890-1939', in C. Divall and W. Bond (eds), Suburbanising the Masses: Public Transport and Urban Development in Historical Perspective (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 23-48.