The state on wheels
Public Transportation, Politics, and the City: The ETCE, 1945-1981

The text addresses public transportation precisely as a problem and as a life experience; the avatars of the ETCE construct a social history and far surpass the description of machines and routes, plans and documents on the subject. To this day, the ETCE has been the only urban collective transportation experience where the State assumed direct responsibility in the difficult task of navigating the city-labyrinth. Its workers, moreover, were perhaps the only ones who, because of this, generated an experience, a public voice, and a memory that managed to be established alongside the opinions of “experts,” career politicians, and businessmen on the topic.