Not counting my college thesis, my first project concerned urban mass transit, primarily in the Washington, D.C., region. In the 2020s, I returned to the subject.

• Rail Against Sprawl: A History of the Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project
  Since early 2022 I have been writing a follow-up volume to The Great Society Subway, covering the sixty-year, $6 billion effort to connect Metro to Tysons, Dulles, and points beyond. My most complete description of my goals is the narrative I submitted to the National Endowment for the Humanities in September 2023, which you may read by clicking above.
• The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro
  Published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 2006, and issued in paperback, with a new preface, in 2014, this book argues argues that Metro can only be understood in the political context from which it was born: the Great Society liberalism of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.
• Zachary M. Schrag, “‘Things That Should Look Permanent Forever’: The Challenges of Preserving the Washington Metro,” APT Bulletin: The Journal of Preservation Technology 53, no. 1 (2022): 19–28.
• “How Congress Undercut Its Own City’s Subway System,” POLITICO Magazine, 16 March 2016.
• “Thinking Big: Lessons from the Washington Metro,” TR News 249 (March-April 2007): 18-20.
• “How Metro Shapes D.C.,” Washington Post, 7 May 2006.
• “The Freeway Fight in Washington, D.C.: The Three Sisters Bridge in Three Administrations,” Journal of Urban History 30 (July 2004): 648-673.
• “Mapping Metro, 1955-1968: Urban, Suburban, and Metropolitan Alternatives,” Washington History 13 (Spring/Summer 2001): 4-23, 90-92.
• “‘The Bus is Young and Honest’: Transportation Politics, Technical Choice, and the Motorization of Manhattan Surface Transit, 1919-1936,” Technology and Culture 41 (January 2000): 51-79