Co-sponsored with the Boston Map Society.

Event video

Event description

Join Steven Beaucher, the co-founder and proprietor of WardMaps LLC and the author of the new book Boston In Transit, for a discussion of how his new book visualizes several centuries of public transit in Boston. Since Boston’s founding in 1630, public transportation has been critical for the city. Public ferries arrived with English colonists. Horse-drawn coaches, then steam railroads, and later, omnibuses, evolved to support a burgeoning city. Horse railroad and electric streetcar networks appeared in the nineteenth century, allowing Boston to densify and early suburbs to sprout. Unification, initially through private hands, and later, under public management, lead to the multi-modal, regional public transportation network in place today.

Boston in Transit tells the entire story, from that simple ferry serving an English settlement perched on the edge of a “new” world, through the arrival of steam trains and fleets of electric streetcars and buses, to the creation and evolution of the MBTA.

Check out the book here: https://bostonintransit.com

This program will be broadcast live over the Leventhal Map & Education Center’s YouTube and Facebook channels. We encourage Q&A from participants.