Longtime readers here know that I love reading about transportation, and not just Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Ships, horses, bicycles — if it moves, I’ll follow and read books about it happily. A few years ago I delighted in the visual feast that was Kate Ascher’s The Works: Anatomy of a City. She’s also done books on skyscrapers and transportation, so I obviously had to check out The Way to Go. Like The Works, visuals are a core part of the text, as Ascher uses pictures to communicate how these great machines work, in addition to how they look. Such pictures also illustrate the functioning of support systems, like canal locks or the GPS network that helps airplanes and ships get a fix on their location, or bridge design and gas station operations for cars. Ascher works in examples from across the globe, though presumably there’s an American bias to visual and technical illustrations: the commercial truck shown, for instance, is a conventional hooded truck popular in North America and not the cabover kind that dominates worldwide. The color-coded illustration of an automobile indicating different subsystems was especially useful. This is not a picture book, though: instead, text and visuals work together. Ascher explores all aspects of what makes transportation work — the design of roads and rails, equipment like signals, rudders, and ailerons, and larger systems like the design of airfields and the establishment of national air traffic control networks to mitigate accidents. I especially like the section on airfield design, and the illustration of the various tender vehicles that evacuate waste, baggage, etc from airplanes upon landing. The past is not forgotten, either: Ascher often demonstrates the history of a particular microsubject, like the evolution of traffic signals. This is the kind of book that curious minds of all ages could savor, because Ascher avoids being both too simplistic or technical in her explanations. Shipping gets the lion’s share of the book, which is no surprise given that it’s been the lifeblood of economies and power for most of written history: air (space included) and ground transport share the second half of the book, along with a section on The Future, while ships and ship-support systems dominate the first half. Tragically, nary a mention is made of bicycles. I’ve read books all over the transportation field, from histories of shipping containers to the sociology of truck drivers, and even I learned a few things from this on the infrastructure and cultural sides: I didn’t know, for instance, that the peace sign comes from the semaphore alphabet, though I did associate it with a symbol for nuclear disarmament in some fuzzy way. I enjoyed this enormously, even with the appalling oversight of missing bike infrastructure.