The Fascism of the Automobile
Wednesday, October 13th 2004 · Rant · Musings
I've long thought the automobile a terrible mode of transportation. Dangerous, expensive, and antisocial. We're so used to car travel that we seldom stop to think about the three or four lanes of densely-packed vehicles moving at sixty or eighty miles per hour, each one independently controlled by an easily distractable and ultimately fallible human being. The only guides are colored stripes painted onto the asphalt which are often faded by time and the passage of tires, or concealed by snowfall or by the glare from headlights which is only worsened by rain-slicked windshields or the dark of night.
No, I don't have a solution. Many blame sprawl. But how realistic is it to rebuild and restructure cities? Others would speak in behalf of public transportation. Certainly, subways and trains do work in many major cities, and busses are a viable option in many other places. But the automobile is so American - it allows us personal freedom to go where we want when we want, and in our own space - in a vehicle that is in fact a personal possession. It's become a part of our culture, and as such is not easily banished. I certainly wouldn't want to do without my own car, even though I spend far more time in it than I'd like. There's a certain snobbiness within most of us that disdains exclusive usage of a bus to get around. With today's technology we no longer have to wait until 8 o'clock to watch a movie - we have on-demand programming and DVDs. We no longer need to wait while dinner cooks - we have microwaves. We can have groceries delivered, shop and pay bills online, and telecommute to work. With all these conveniences and time-savers, how can we dain to run our lives by a bus schedule?
I'm not advocating anti-car groups and organizations, I'm just making an observation about a problem to which I see no easy or immediate solution - just thinking out loud. Cars are here to stay. But some part of me can't help but wish that a safer and less expensive alternative had evolved in the automobile's stead.
I believe the roots of our national love affair, or even obsession, with automobiles can be found in the years immediately following the end of WW II. The post-war decade, 1945 to 1955, saw a mass exodus of families to the newly-created and heavily marketed “suburbs.”
By the time I was born, in 1948, the rush was well under way, and my own father bought his own piece of the American Dream in 1952. In order for workers to get to jobs in the cities where they no longer wished to live, they needed transportation. For many, it was bus or train, but a lot of people needed some way to get to the station. Back when wives stayed home to raise kids and keep house, hardly anyone I knew had two cars. Consequently, the wife would give hubby a lift to the station each morning and be there to pick him up in the evening. This was the decade that saw the neologisms “car pool,” “car hop” and “drive-in (movie, bank, liquor store, etc.)” added to the lexicon. One thing was clear - if you wanted to live in the ‘burbs, you had to have a car. That’s all there was to it. I never owned a (legal, road-worthy) car before 1969 so, needless to say, I grew up in a world of bicycles, hitch-hiking, shank’s mare and public transportation.
In the US, cheap gasoline, endless marketing hype and Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System sounded the death knell of public transportation as we knew it in the 1950s. I can clearly recall being able to catch a bus less than a quarter of a mile from my father’s house and ride into the nearest city, where I could get a train or bus that would take me just about anywhere in the country.
From central Connecticut, I visited the 1964 New York World’s Fair (http://naid.sppsr.ucla.edu/ny64fair/index.html) for a round-trip transportation cost of somewhere around $10.00. I specifically remember the round trip fare on the New Haven Railroad, between Meriden Connecticut and the Pennsylvania Station in New York City, was $5.25 ($5.00 one way, add a quarter for the round trip – passenger traffic was already falling off by the 1960s, and the railroad was trying to get riders back with promotions). The rest of the travel budget went to bus fare to and from Meriden and train fare to and from Flushing.
In the US, gasoline was cheaper than just about anywhere else, right up through 1973. In Europe after the War, gasoline was heavily taxed to rebuild roads and infrastructure destroyed by the bombs of both sides. Here, twenty-five cent a gallon gasoline and good roads resulted in more and more automobiles on the roads while our rail system fell apart and the Japanese kicked Detroit’s butt with cars that got more than 8 miles per gallon. What goes around comes around, and it’s our turn to pay for the ride.
There’s an entertaining, if somewhat superficial, treatment of the subject of Americans and their cars at http://www.msnbc.com/modules/summer_driving/decades/.
and flying cars!