The City After the Automobile. - book reviews

Reason, Jan, 1998 by Steven Hayward

The car is rapidly becoming the ultimate Rorschach test of political and social attitudes. Try it: Do you see the car as a means of freedom, a great democratic tool offering mobility and independence to the masses, a symbol of comfort and self-expression, an instrument capable of providing pleasure and enjoyment, a venue for romance? Or do you think of the car as essentially a rolling cigarette, complete with addictive properties and second-hand emissions that are harmful to our children? Do you think the car is a symbol of dependence instead of freedom? Do you speak disdainfully of Americans' "love affair with the car" as though it were a despicable perversion, or at least some kind of serious irrationality? Do you think American Graffiti should be classified as a pornographic movie? Do you think cars lead to aggression and crime (think of "road rage" and those drive-by shootings), and are responsible for despoiling the earth ("They paved paradise/Put up a parking lot")?

The second set of attitudes now constitutes the politically correct view of cars and car culture, and if the car haters have their way, it won't be long until the "car lobby" evokes the same odious connotation as the "tobacco lobby." If you think this is a paranoid exaggeration from a Jeep-driving life member of the Auto Club, just browse practically any page of Jane Holtz Kay's Asphalt Nation, which is the most complete compendium of anti-car claptrap ever assembled. Perhaps we should not be surprised at the result, since Kay is the architecture critic for The Nation. The book would make for hilarious saloon reading - in fact, I thought perhaps the book could be a tongue-in-cheek put-on, which is what I think Click and Clack of NPR's Car Talk had in mind when they provided a dust jacket blurb - were it not for the fact that anti-car sentiments are becoming increasingly accepted. Not long ago I watched a grown congressman on C-SPAN calling for a tax break for commuters "who would like to do the right thing" and ride mass transit instead of driving to work. The premise - that driving to work is immoral - went unchallenged.

You know you're on the wrong side of the elite divide when the very first sentence of the book begins with "It took a village" - I'm not making this up - "to raise this book." "Our transportation is a tangle," Kay writes, "our lives and landscape strangled by the umbilical cord of the car." Cars are bad because they are a means of "instant gratification," which we all know is the modern American vice par excellence. "The licentious motor vehicle" allows for "unleashed consumption." The car is a "voracious icon" of "hypermobility," an agent of "spatial greed," an "accomplice" in the rise of Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell. We need to supplant the car culture, she concludes, because it would be good for our "state of being." We even get a close of postmodern feminism in the mix. Independent mobility is a boon to women, you say? Not only is this thinking like a man, according to Kay, but "it is a false form of consciousness that fails to assess women's enslavement to the motor vehicle."

The only anti-auto cliche missing from this book is the old chestnut about the alleged 1940s conspiracy by General Motors and other auto-related companies to put L.A.'s beloved Red Cars out of business (though the demise of the Red Cars is duly lamented). But while this standard myth is absent, Kay makes up for it with several new whoppers of her own. Car vibration causes muscular and skeletal damage, for example. And those big urban riots in the 1960s that have baffled social scientists for so long? "Freeway construction" was "a major cause." Buybacks of old cars to reduce air pollution are bad - because people will buy new cars. Japan, she thinks, is more competitive than the United States because they pay "truthful" gas prices ($5.00 a gallon) and ride their bikes a lot more. (Apparently Kay hasn't checked on the vigor of the Japanese economy lately.) Meanwhile, Kay thinks "the car culture paved the road to 'Black Tuesday'" (i.e., the 1929 stock market crash). We even have the reductio ad Hitlerum: "Adolf Hitler's emerging autobahn had sparked America's vision for a transcontinental road." Gee, the Nazis built big highways, ergo...

At times it seems as though Kay is striving to find new extremes through which idealism can marginalize itself. Even the Progressives and FDR come in for criticism because they liked cars and roads too much. But far from being marginalized, Kay's anti-car philosophy is the intellectual underpinning of the dominant currents in transportation and urban planning policy today. From the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act ("Ice Tea" to the cognoscenti) to the much in vogue "new urbanism" on the local level, the moral disapprobation of the car is the central premise of policy. For both Kay and Moshe Safdie in his The City After the Automobile, at the heart of the argument about cars is a much bigger argument about land use and urban planning. You know what's coming: a huge expansion of government power.