Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back

by Jane Holtz Kay

anomie

“Cars are filthy abominations,” said Toronto bike activist Anne Hansen. Applause. “Monstrous, dangerous, obtrusive,” she went on. Applause. “Abusive.” Applause. “Did I come to the right conference?” she asked with a laugh. You bet she did.

stolid

dirges,

dalliance

According to the highway administration study one-third of the miles we travel go to consumption and family chores.

hinterlands.

In the great diaspora after World War II, Washington paid for the American dream and it was fulfilled. With the federal government financing 90 percent of the interstate system, the nation took to the highways, and the moving vans headed to the hills. The population of the suburbs tripled; the number of dense, walkable, transit-based cities shrank.

The outside world dominated by the road bores, and television or computer games beckon. A study comparing ten-year-olds in a small, walkable Vermont town and youngsters in a new Orange County suburb showed a marked difference. The Vermont children had three times the mobility, i.e., the distance and places they could get to on their own, while those in Orange County watched four times as much television.

historian Clay McShane observes in his Down the Asphalt Path.

In all but a dozen or so cities, the streetcar or bus taking the teenager to a lively urban core beyond the limits of the everyday has atrophied or disappeared.

Road strips

palliatives,

We are all “temporarily abled,” as the advocates for the disabled note.

recalcitrant

One doesn’t have to adopt a Luddite mentality or the “voluntary simplicity” code of environmental purists to admire this mind-set—and to wonder what accounts for America’s belief scheme based on hypermobility, on an odyssey to nowhere.

comeliness.

The roads not only belt threadbare communities, putting them on the “wrong side of the tracks,” but they create the ghetto itself. The blight and traffic they cause, the ceaseless noise and fumes, sack the weak. The visual detritus of the motorized world is dropped on their doorsteps. Their mean streets hold the repair shops and car washes, the spray paint services and tire marts, the muffler stores, auto parts dealers, and glass vendors. Body shops, used car lots, and parking lots are their neighbors.

bucolic

wrought

doily

antimacassar

genuflecting

maw

pogrom

Ultimately, the phrases “urban planning” and “urban design” become a charade as city builders follow the dotted line defined by the width of the road. “In the United States, the phrase ‘urban planning’ is an indefensible euphemism,” the authors of An Elephant in the Bedroom insist. “Urban planners do not plan. They follow along behind the parade of those who do—the land developers. The role of professional planners is to sweep up and organize the dung.”

berm

chits

ghettoize

Public transportation gets rapped for low profits at best; automobile subsidies are ignored. A one-mile trip for a carload of rail passengers equals six to ten miles avoided by car. Over any given distance, the automobile expends more in terms of energy, amount of lane capacity, and capital. And that’s not calculating the environmental or land use exactions.

scurrilous

The inter-urban, the electric streetcar, and the long-distance passenger train formed a splendid tripartite system of mobility.

“Marriages based on streetcar courtships seemed to stick,” wrote one reporter.

munificence.

The financing and policy of public transportation also helped to nurture road builders over rail.

The developer of a motorcar subdivision could secure a road and city services free from the public. Street railway owners had to finance the tracks plus paving, snow shoveling, and other city fees. Crowding, “gouging,” and poor maintenance were inevitable, and stirred still more protest.

deportment.

At home, too, the war had demonstrated the power of motorization. With hard-pressed trains drafted for war duty, trucks carried food and household goods, the staples of domestic life. As the 1920s began, 1 million trucks were registered. By the end of the decade, that number had tripled, attracting the nation’s goods away from rail.

opprobrium,

Politically, widening a road was expedient, quickly showing its worth, while a rail extension took years to build. Perversely, too, the cars that clogged the city streets were deemed “democratic” and hence were subsidized. The rail that moved the masses was called “corporate business” and was penalized.

Americans willingly dug into their pockets to pay for road expansion. In 1919, ten years after the first gas tax, every state possessed the power to charge three to four cents a gallon. Never before or again have so many Americans so enthusiastically said yes to taxation.

In 1923, less than a decade after Boston had invented the word “jaywalking,” Los Angeles won the dubious achievement of banning it.

limned

No second thoughts beset Henry Ford. “We believe that the automobile is in itself, both directly and indirectly, an important wealth-producing instrument,” he observed in 1930. On the heels of hard times, Ford was still mouthing the enthusiasm of good ones. The next year, production stopped at his Model A plant; the following year, unemployed workers demonstrated at the formidable River Rouge facility, seeking the number-one capitalist in his lair. Four men were killed in the ensuing violence.

compunction

Mass transit secured only one-tenth the WPA funds spent for road improvements. Only one city, Chicago, received subway money from Washington, for a small line under State Street. Funds for roads were free for cars, trucks, and buses; funds for trains were loans. The WPA’s funding ratio of road to rail was twenty to one.

Despite hard times the rail industry managed to make technological progress. Though overbuilt and disowned by Washington, encumbered with $6 billion in debt, and down some 750,000 workers, rail owners cut their expenses and dividends and forged ahead.

At the onset of the Depression, twenty-five electric railway companies formed the Electric Railway Presidents’ Conference Committee, and in 1935 the much-lauded, long-lasting streamlined PCC, the Presidents’ Conference Car, chugged forth.

Though steam rail survived, streetcar companies skidded into ever greater deficits from lost ridership, the reduced workweek, and competition from the car and bus. At the time of the Crash of 1929, 14.4 billion passengers took the trolley; by 1940 almost half had deserted steel wheels for rubber ones.

In 1932, General Motors, the manufacturer of buses and owner of the largest share of Greyhound, formed a consortium of tire, oil, and highway men to buy and shut down America’s streetcar systems. Attacking the trolley mile by mile, the syndicate of General Motors, Firestone, Standard Oil, and Mack Truck, allied as National City Lines, cajoled and bought off local officials. Paired with the ethos of the era, the motor advocates menaced the streetcar’s space and customers. Between 1932 and 1949, they would help persuade 100 electric systems in more than forty-five cities to scrap their street rails. Bus riders rose 20 percent.