The Brunch Table

The Age just published a nice history of automobile adoption in Melbourne, Australia. Their development patterns sound a lot like ours. It’s interesting to compare that article to Tim Bray’s recent post about Melbourne. By his account, Melbourne is still very pedestrian-friendly, compared to most North American cities—perhaps they didn’t gut so many of their streetcar lines in the height of the automobile age?

This quote from the first article is interesting:

Soon cars were central to male mating rituals, from the marriage proposal to the Saturday night prowl. Before the ’50s, Davison writes, boys would say of a girl from a remote suburb that she was GI: geographically impossible.

Though I can’t find it now, the Washington Post recently published an article about how many people in the D.C. metro area didn’t want to brave the traffic to date people from distant suburbs. I guess we’ve come full circle.