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This paper describes the evolution of high-occupancy vehicle lanes (HOV) and high-occupancy toll lanes (HOT) lanes in the United States. It evaluates their performance and analyses the impact on carpooling and public transport. The demographics of HOV and HOT lane users and the implications for equal access are also examined. The paper also proposes ways to apply lessons learned from the success of HOV and HOT lanes to the political challenges of road pricing.

The national petitioning campaign for parliamentary reform in 1816–17 was the biggest such movement before Chartism. It generated more than 700 local petitions with approaching a million signatures, representing perhaps 25 percent of adult males and extending the political nation well into the working classes. It was particularly strong in the Lancashire manufacturing districts, where economic grievances such as hunger and exploitation were converted through petitioning into arguments for political reform. The moving figure was Major John Cartwright, a veteran reformer who emerges as a more radical figure than usually supposed. The rejection of so many petitions by Parliament provided a legitimation for remonstrance and resistance, feeding through into extraparliamentary protests such as the march of the Manchester "Blanketeers" in 1817 and the mass platform movement of 1819 and "Peterloo." The research combines a study of the petitions and the radical press with a close examination of the Home Office material, yielding insights into both grassroots organization and the strategies of the authorities, local and national. While the strategy of mass action was defeated by repression, the right of the unenfranchised masses to engage in political petitioning was conceded in principle long before the advent of formal democracy.

This corpus-based keyword analysis investigates the letters to the shareholders from two commercial banks, Bank of America and Citigroup, over a 3-year period from 2008, 2009, and 2010. The letters were compiled to facilitate a diachronic analysis, an assessment of language change over a specific period, of profit/loss reporting from two prominent financial institutions over a time period in which the recession commenced, peaked, and concluded. To conduct the analysis on the node texts, two sets of reference corpora were compiled. One reference corpus set consists of the letters to shareholders from eight consistently high-performing corporations not within the commercial banking industry for each of the 3 years; the other reference corpus set consists of the letters from the 10 banking institutions that also appeared in the Fortune 500 listings for the 3-year period. The corpus-based analysis revealed that in years of low performance companies create messages that assert a vision and forward a strategy for ensuring future success while also establishing distance between management and past failures. In contrast, when companies perform well, the keyword lists display a clear tendency of the company/author to accept praise and attribute success to actions of management.

Coming from Manchester in 1817, the march of the 'Blanketeers' has generally been taken to be something to do with the industrial revolution: at least an eruption of distress, at most an attempted revolution. This article returns to the sources to show how both the march and the attempted risings that followed were related to a coherent national strategy of petitioning and remonstration for parliamentary reform that began with the London Hampden Club and ended with the Pentridge rebels. Gradualism had not yet been invented. Petitioning, remonstration, and rebellion were all constitutionalist strategies, related to episodes from the English past such as the 'peasants' revolt' of 1381 and the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688. The appeal was as much to the throne as to parliament. Much about the agitation of 1816-17 prefigures the Chartist experience: the constitutional forms of petitioning and remonstrating, the shift of the initiative from London to the provinces, the dilemma over 'ulterior measures', and the appeal over the head of parliament to the crown. The paper identifies a mixed tradition of popular monarchism and 'Robin Hood republicanism' running from the early modern period and the Jacobites to the Chartists and beyond.

The clash between radicalism and loyalism in the early industrial revolution period created the basic progressive-conservative political divide that was to structure British politics until the fall of communism. This is the perspective of Gareth Stedman Jones in his recent book An End to Poverty, which for a landmark work by a major historian has received surprisingly little notice.(1) Discussing it at a seminar in Manchester, Stedman Jones remarked that he couldn't really fathom pre-Chartist popular radicalism – a disarming confession from the author of Languages of Class. He was talking about the early 19th-century generation, between the Paineites and the Chartists, and he had put his finger on something: the popular politics of the early industrial revolution just don't fit progressive models. This is particularly true (oddly enough) in Lancashire, the home of the factory system.

Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Mary Barton has been praised, ever since its publication, for its realistic portrait of working-class life in Manchester during the Chartist years. Yet while Gaskell routinely included real places in her work, she rarely mentioned real people; indeed, she later questioned the "objectionable and indelicate practice" of writing memoirs of living people. "Nobody and nothing was real… in Mary Barton but the character of John Barton; the circumstances are different, but the character and some of the speeches, are exactly a poor man I know." It is nonetheless possible to identify the originals of several working-class characters in the novel. There is also one explicit reference to a real working man. After the trade unionist John Barton reports the crushing failure of the Chartists' march on London to petition parliament, the old weaver-naturalist Job Legh relates the story of his own daughter's lonely death in the capital.

The Peterloo massacre is one of the best-documented events in British history. It was the bloodiest political event of the nineteenth century on English soil. At St Peter's Fields in central Manchester on Monday 16 August 1819, a rally of 50-60,000 people seeking parliamentary reform was violently dispersed by troops under the authority of the local magistrates. The meeting was the climax of a series of high-profile mass gatherings for parliamentary reform. It was transparently peaceful but the frightened magistrates, thinking back to an abortive rising in 1817, sent in the troops. Under the noses of the national press, eleven people were killed (a toll which later rose to seventeen) and over six hundred and fifty wounded, a quarter of them women, some of them children, many of them by sabre wounds. 'This is Waterloo for you!' cried out some of the special constables in triumph, and the event was soon dubbed 'Peterloo' in the radical press. Middle-class and working-class reformers united in outrage, while for several months afterwards armed rebellion appeared to threaten from below.

At the centre of David Worrall's Theatric Revolution a striking tableau is unveiled. It is around 1800, and we are at a private party in London, attended by leading Whigs including the playwright-politician Sheridan. The arrival of a surprise guest is announced, and curtains are drawn back to reveal a cleverly-lit female figure on a pedestal, 'feigning a statue'. An electric ripple of recognition runs round the room: it is Caroline, estranged wife of the Prince Regent, and she is in the character of Hermione in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, a wronged queen turned to stone by a jealous king. From hollow marriage to staged funeral, Caroline's public career was a series of benefit performances. In 1821, after her return to England as would-be queen, Caroline scooped the carefully-laid publicity for her husband's coronation by acting as patron of the Royal Coburg theatre, an illegitimate theatre named after Caroline's son-in-law, Prince Leopold of Saxe Coburg, which paraded an alternative-version royal theatricality from the unruly south bank of the Thames. Worrall's central chapter brilliantly recovers a lost side of the Queen Caroline affair, tracing through this one absorbing episode the roots and branches of the theatrical political culture of later-Georgian England.