Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age

231 Pages·2011·14.199 MB·English

by  Brian Ladd

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BRIAN LADD
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Contents
List of Illustrations
vii
1
INTRODUCTION: Dream Machines
13
Roadkill: The New Machine Flattens Its Critics
43
2 Buyer's Remorse: The Tarnished Golden Age
69
3 Cities in Motion: The Car in the City
97
4 Freeway Revolts: The Curse of Mobility
139
5 The End of the Automotive Age-or Not
175
CONCLUSION: Road Rage
Acknowled9ments 187
Notes 189
Index 217

Illustrations
1 3
Refusing to face the problems of the automobile
2 19
Country hikers under siege
3 22
The traffic accident as occasion for humor
4 39
A world divided between pedestrians and motorists
5 46
Car-centered recreation in Los Angeles
6 62
Wide streets in East Berlin
7 72
Motorists claiming the street all for themselves
8 76
Policeman directing traffic in Chicago
9
Traffic jam in Washington, D.C. So
10
Automobile and streetcar competing for street space,
84
Luxembourg
11 84
Old town square as parking lot, Salisbury, England
12 87
Traffic-choked British high street, Caerphilly, Wales
13 102
NewYorkparkways
14 108
The freeway in the old city, Albany, New York
15 125
The American downtown: parking lots and skyscrapers
16 168
Pedestrianization from the motorist's point of view
17 170
A typical narrow Paris street, dominated by cars
18 170
A rare Paris pedestrian street
19 178
The dilemma of world motorization

INTRODUCTION
Dream Machines
Where would we be without cars? Stuck in the mud, or in the nineteenth
century, we are told. Cars have been the basic tools and the great glories
of the modern age. They liberated the farmer from isolation and igno­
rance. They helped lift millions out of poverty: remote country dwellers,
stranded ghetto residents, American auto workers, and then the entire
working class of the industrial world. Cars bring people together. They
permit ordinary folk to go places once reserved for the exclusive few.
Even today, in poorer lands, an automobile can transform lives, not only
providing a family-or perhaps a whole clan-with convenient trans­
portation, not only making it possible to reach a new job, but often itself
becoming a source of employment-as a taxi, as a jitney, as a carrier of
commercial goods around a city or across the countryside. But those are
not the only reasons poor people dream of the car in their future. They,
too, yearn to sit proudly behind the wheel of a gleaming machine, and
to floor its accelerator-to feel, for a moment, that they are leaving the
world behind. The car combines the promise of thrills with the sover­
eign assurance of mobility. Mobility is freedom-freedom is mobility­
and before the car, mobility was unavailable, or slow, or (as with trains)
dependent on the whim or goodwill of others. No wonder cars have the
power to stir the blood like no other modern invention.
And yet the contrarians have never been silenced. Where indeed, they
ask, would we be without cars? Liberated, in a word. Cars are the scourge
of civilization. They make us fat and lazy, unfeeling and selfish, prison­
ers in our steel cages. They poison the air and change the climate. Their
voracious appetite for natural resources yokes us to the whims of dis­
tant dictators with oil wells. They kill the equivalent of a dozen jumbo-jet
crashes every day, and cripple and sicken far more. They devour the land,
forcing us apart until we are helpless without them, stuck on clogged
roads and hardly able to get around at all. When we lament suburban
sprawl and the decline of community, we are looking at the handiwork
of the automobile.
Few of us identify wholeheartedly with one side or the other, with ei­
ther the industry shills and radical libertarians who offer paeans to the
car, or the technophobes, tree huggers, and killjoys who curse it. From
time to time we worry about our personal contribution to energy short­
ages and air pollution and global warming. Yet few of us ever cancel a
journey, or go on foot or by bicycle or train, merely to reduce our car­
bon footprint. In fact, the idea of taking away our cars, or forcing us into
smaller vehicles, or charging us fees to drive or park, or closing streets
to cars, makes many of us indignant in defense of our right to drive. But
then: one frantic errand too many, plus a traffic jam, and a flash of road
rage-and the convenience of driving, much less the thrill of it, pales in
the face of an uneasy realization that we are not really our best selves be­
hind the wheel, and that there ought to be a better way.
A rational discussion about the merits of automobiles is scarcely pos­
sible. It is too hard to imagine our lives apart from our driving. Nor can we
picture our cities and suburbs arranged around anything but highways
and parking lots. Cars have fundamentally shaped our age-in the thor­
oughly car-centered United States, and no less profoundly in the clogged
lanes of Europe and the exhaust-choked chaos of the world's largest and
fast-growing metropolises, from squalid Lagos to splendid (if smoggy)
Shanghai. Once we have cars-and especially once there are nearly as
many cars as drivers-we can fully benefit from the great convenience
they offer. Yet as we organize our lives around their needs, the freedom
they bring can begin to feel more like slavery. Certainly they have come to
dictate our living arrangements. Cities in the automobile age have been
shaped by a search for space to drive cars and to park them, along with
the countervailing desire to escape their dangers and their noise-but to
escape by car. The sinews of city and country are highways where pedes­
trians and bicyclists are out of place and in peril. Homes present just a
garage door to the street. Indeed, new houses often look like garages with
drivers' quarters attached, much as early garages were converted stables
with chauffeurs' quarters above.
2 INTRODUCTION
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Figure 1. Refusing to face the problems of the automobile. Tom Toles cartoon. © 1989
The Washington Post. Reprinted with permission of Universal Press Syndicate.
After a century at the wheel, have we-and our planet-had enough?
Could we be reaching the end of the automotive age? Car critics tout re­
vived mass transit, renewed possibilities for bicycling, and newly de­
signed walkable communities. These glimmers of hope, they believe,
may soon become indispensable models for people forced to cease tak­
ing their cars for granted. Cars are the largest contributor to what we are
told is our "unsustainable" lifestyle. Volatile gasoline prices go up much
more than they go down, and it seems clear that oil supplies will only get
tighter. One in eight barrels of the world's oil production is burned on
American highways alone, with the rest of the world's automotive share
growing rapidly. That means our driving becomes ever costlier. It means
helpless dependence on unstable regions of the world. It means contin­
ued air pollution. It means that Americans' per capita contribution to
global warming dwarfs that of other countries (and the total U.S. share
was by far the largest until China began its rapid motorization), because
the automobile's contribution exceeds that of any other source except
electrical power generation.
DREAM MACHINES 3
Add the astonishing price in human lives that we pay for our automo­
bility: thirty million dead in the twentieth century and 1.2 million more
every year since, most of them young and healthy. Plus all the hassles of
the three-car suburban family: the utter dependence on automobiles to
get everywhere; the hours spent commuting to work, running errands,
transporting the kids to every single activity-even to school, and cer­
tainly to friends' houses that cannot be reached any other way. Add the
longing for a friendly neighborhood amid the reality of closed garage
doors and, at best, a quick wave to a neighbor through the windshield.
Something has to change. Clearly the end is near. Or is it? Many of us
remember hearing, and perhaps saying, similar things during the 1970s,
when acute if brief fuel shortages awakened a more universal awareness
of our precarious dependence on cars, just as a new and robust environ­
mental movement demanded action against the choking clouds of urban
smog. Wise critics predicted the imminent end of the automobile age.
Since then, however, the number of cars on the road has more than dou­
bled. That was an end that never came.
Even when worries about oil supplies were new, the cry to abandon
our cars was not. The years before the oil crisis, the late 196os and early
1970s, may have been the golden age of car-bashing in the U.S. and Eu­
rope, when exposes of the freeway-industrial "road gang" such as Helen
Leavitt's Superhi9hway-Superhoax jostled for attention alongside man­
ifestos of revolt like Kenneth Schneider's Autokind Mankind. West­
R. vs.
em Europe was quickly catching up to the United States in the size of its
car fleet and in its collective outrage at the destruction of cities by noise,
fumes, blood, and pavement. Public outcry was finally demanding action
against the huge and growing death toll from traffic accidents. Yet that
revolution, too, faded to a whimper and vanished out the rearview mir­
ror, along with books like Dead End and Road to Ruin. People kept buying
cars and driving them.
For that matter, those militant car critics seemed to be recycling ob­
jections that perceptive intellectuals had been raising for years. There
are many reasons to think of the 1950s as the pinnacle of the car culture,
at least in the United States. The era's paramount symbol of prosperity
was the gigantic chrome-laden sedan. It was the golden age of drive-in
restaurants and drive-in movies. Certainly it was the high-water mark
of Detroit's role in the American economy. Yet by the time the postwar
auto boom was a decade old, the carmakers were under fire for their high­
handed disregard for the needs of ordinary Americans-for their inef-
4 INTRODUCTION