As we reach the end of the U.S. driving season, it’s worth reflecting on the role of the automobile in the American consciousness. There is much talk these days about our dependency on oil, but little about the car-centered way of life that drives that dependency.
In August of last year, President Bush signed two bills into law: one dealing with energy policy, and the other a transportation bill. Despite the fact that he signed the bills within days of each other, there was little discussion of the obvious relationship between the two. Taken together though, the laws make one thing clear: our national commitment to highways and cars at the expense of other alternatives continues unabated. For all the hype, the energy bill was little more than a laundry list of subsidies for energy companies, including now flush-with-cash oil and gas companies, while 80 percent of the transportation bill’s money goes toward highways and bridges (including $223 million for Alaska’s infamous “bridge to nowhere”). One bill supports and expands the car-infrastructure; the other frantically searches for the means to keep powering those cars. As always, no one stops to ask if there is any other way.
Our passion for cars is nothing new. In 1909, the Italian poet F. T. Marinetti announced the birth of a new philosophy of art he called Futurism. In the movement’s first manifesto, published on the front page of the French paper Le Figaro, Marinetti proclaimed a new aesthetic which worshiped machines, speed, violence and especially, the new invention of the automobile. “A racing automobile,” he wrote, “with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath . . . a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”
At the time of the Futurist Manifesto’s publication, the Ford Model-T had a maximum speed of 45 miles per hour, there were no traffic lights in New York City, and the United States had only one automobile for every 19,000 people. In an era when cars were so new and so rare, it’s easy to see how Marinetti and his fellow artists would have been seduced by their glamour and promise of freedom. But what would the Futurists have thought had they been able to race forward to the present day—to see their beloved automobiles crawling on choked highways like ants, as indispensable as they are ubiquitous? As anyone who has sat in rush-hour traffic has learned, life behind the wheel of a car rapidly looses its charm amidst a crowded mass of other drivers.
Or as the great urbanist Lewis Mumford wrote in his 1958 attack on the new Interstate Highway System: “As long as motorcars were few in number, he who had one was a king: he could go where he pleased and halt where he pleased. That sense of freedom and power remains a fact today only in low-density areas, in the open country; the popularity of this method of escape has ruined the promise it once held forth. In using the car to flee from the metropolis, the motorist finds that he has merely transferred congestion to the highway and thereby doubled it. When he reaches his destination, in the distant suburb, he finds that the countryside he sought has disappeared: beyond him, thanks to the motorway, lies only another suburb, just as dull as his own.”
This summer marked the 50th anniversary of the Interstate system Mumford condemned; since then, the endless building of highways and the suburban sprawl that comes with them has only grown and multiplied, to the point where any other way of life seems virtually unimaginable. But as the price of gasoline soars to record highs and we enter a new era of global climate change and the possibility of a rapid decline in world oil production, it would seem like an opportune moment to ask ourselves once again whether our continuing commitment to the highway—to the exclusion of almost any other mode of transportation—represents progress or stagnation.
For the last half century, cities in America have been built to serve cars rather than people, and the result is that in most of the country today, walking to get anywhere—even to the local supermarket—is not only unpleasant, but frequently impractical and dangerous. In the suburbs public transit is often only accessible by driving to a park and ride, and with a few exceptions, even city downtowns have been remade in the service of the automobile and highway. And while the sentimental ideal of a small-town America with lively main streets still exists in the popular imagination, for the most part real main-streets only exist now as tourist traps. For too much of the country, rural America today is centered far more around highway stops and big-box chain stores as it is around local food and small-town values.
Our nostalgic attachment to main-street life is so deep that it has become a cultural cliché. In the Disney-Pixar movie Cars, even the cars are depressed about the highway bypass that has circumvented a once-vibrant rural town and “left it behind”—a bizarrely ironic twist which shows both how much we identify with automobiles as extensions of ourselves and how unconscious we are of the responsibility they bear for destroying any meaningful sense of place in our country. Despite the fact that cars and the soulless landscape of freeway interchanges, parking lots and strip-malls we have built to serve them contribute to obesity, environmental degradation, the atomization of society and widespread alienation, Americans seem unable to let go of the idea that living in the modern world means driving in it, even if it makes them unhappy.
By framing our energy problems strictly as a question of finding a substitute fuel for our cars, whether hydrogen or ethanol or recycled french-fry oil, Americans are betraying a depressing lack of imagination. France and Germany—with their more walkable towns and cities and their excellent trains and public transportation systems—today each use about half the oil we do on a per-capita basis, with little difference in standard of living. Are we so sure that the sprawling, car-dependent suburban lifestyle we have created is so valuable that it must be clung to at any cost?
In 1939, General Motors’ “Futurama” exhibit at the World’s Fair in New York presciently predicted the suburban world of 1960—a world crisscrossed by superhighways, in which most people lived in far-flung homes and commuted to the skyscrapers of central cities. By the time the World’s Fair returned to New York in 1964, GM’s new Futurama was making far more outlandish predictions of undersea cities, moon colonies and automatic road-building machines; somewhere between the 1930s and the 1960s, predictions of the future had shifted from achievable visions to wild fantasy. Today, though, even the fantasy of a different way to live seems to be gone.
I recently took my 3-year old son (a true car enthusiast) to see an auto show at the New York Hall of Science, a children’s museum which was built on the site of those old World’s Fairs. Unlike some anti-car advocates, I found myself not immune to the charm of the automobiles there. Dozens of classic cars from the 40s to the 70s were lined up in the parking lot—Mustangs, Stingrays, Dodge Chargers, Classic Cameros, a beautiful MG Roadster—and I couldn’t help being moved by the romance of those old vehicles, some still in the possession of their original owners, lovingly preserved, each one charged with history.
But when a minivan almost backed over us on the way out, I was reminded that there will always be an antagonism between cars and pedestrians, and that to serve one is to necessarily slight the other; and in America, the car almost always wins. Or as Mumford wrote in that same 1958 essay, “the current American way of life is founded not just on motor transportation but on the religion of the motorcar, and the sacrifices that people are prepared to make for this religion stand outside the realm of rational criticism.”
For half a century, the religion of the motorcar embodied both the romance and the ugliness of American life; at once emblematic of its mystique and its banality. Maybe in the past one could argue that there was something so essentially liberating about the car that any accommodation of city planning had to be made for it. But today, the stakes are much higher. Global warming is not a problem we can afford to be wrong about; and if those who argue that world oil production may soon peak and decline are correct, the age of the automobile could be coming to an end much faster than we think, whether we like it or not.
Unfortunately, as long as we continue to believe that driving everywhere is the only way to live in the modern world—that spreading ever further into the countryside and spending ever more time in our cars is normal, however much we may dislike it, that public transit is unaffordable and unpleasant, that walkable towns are unrecoverable relics of a bygone era—we will never find a good way out of our increasingly untenable way of life.
Recent Comments