Friday, June 27, 2014

Why We Drive: The Past, Present, and Future of Automobiles in America

Why We Drive: The Past, Present, and Future of Automobiles in America

by Andy Singer

Why do we drive? At face value the answer seems obvious. America's reliance on the automobile is a logical, inevitable result of our historic quest for personal mobility that provides us speed and convenience at the lowest cost.
Or is it?
Andy Singer is a cartoonist and self-described advocate for car-free cities and car-free living.
He has an ax to grind, and his latest book does so as an entertaining, informed, compelling read. Singer shows how our development into a sprawling, automobile-centric society was not inevitable. Instead it resulted from a combination of technological, political, even criminal developments that were hardly preordained.
Better yet the same developments are correctable, once we gain the collective will to act.
Singer's book presents itself as a scripted slide show full of archival photographs and his distinctive cartoons, each paired with with a concise narration. He provides ample footnotes for those readers wishing to delve further.
I like the way that Singer organizes Why We Drive in three parts. First he explains why we should not and cannot continue to rely so heavily on the automobile for our personal transportation needs.
The book then turns to describing how roads and highways came to shape the development of the United States during the latter half of the twentieth century. Based on this foundational understanding Singer then suggests a rich set of tactics for advocates hungry for change.
As for our cherished automobile Singer itemizes the ways that urban freeways have proven to be toxic to cities. While many before Singer have chronicled how the construction of urban freeways tore apart otherwise vibrant and healthy (and often populated by people of color) neighborhoods, Singer re-frames the automobiles' place in urban environments as a waste of space.
40-60 percent of the average American city has been paved, for use by the automobile in the form of roads and parking lots. Singer explains that when commercial and residential real estate are demolished to make way for the automobile, the city loses badly-needed property tax revenue, and this lost revenue represents a hidden subsidy to motorists, especially those nonresidents who commute to the city and otherwise pay no taxes in return for the city services they use.
To those espousing the principles of a free market this is called a "free rider" problem..
Singer provides a lesson on the political science of government transportation agencies and how the development of these powerful agencies in the early twentieth century opened a new era of "big government" politics, beginning with Robert Moses' Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority in New York. Singer also provides an interesting aside on how taxpayer-funded roads and highways once was the cause for many Democratic politicians but over time has become more of a Republican priority.
Gracing this book's cover is a photograph of two men mugging for the camera while one hands the other a check over a handshake...while a streetcar burns behind them. This is the sordid story of National City Lines, a conspiracy by some of America's biggest and most well-respected corporations to jumpstart the sales of automobiles and buses in our cities by removing their biggest competitor: the urban street car lines. Through fraud, conspiracy and embezzlement they bought and dismantled over 100 rail transit systems in 45 U.S. cities. While they were ultimately convicted in court, they got away with it with nothing more than slaps on the wrist.
Singer gets it right by including a fact often lost in the retelling of this story. However vulnerable the privately-owned and operated street car lines were at the time, they were made vulnerable as they struggled to compete with the roads and highways being paid for by the taxpayers. This is a case where state and local governments unfairly helped to pick the winners. While today we often bemoan the problems endemic with our publicly-run transit systems, it's instructive to know that part of what ails them is rooted in the way that governments entered the road-building business.
To contemplate the tremendous economic damage this caused, one only has to tally the costs of all the "light rail" construction projects currently underway in many U.S. cities. Late last year I was observing up close the excavation work for the new Atlanta Streetcar. Workers had unearthed rails from Atlanta's first streetcar system, buried under the pavement since the 1950's.
Ironic?
Singer takes a poignant dig at a concept widely-embraced by proponents of "green technologies": alternatively-fueled vehicles and hybrids. He states: "Those advocating for vehicles using hydrogen, ethanol, electricity and other forms of non-petroleum fuels often overlook the fact that 25-40% of all the pollution and greenhouse gas that a car will emit during its lifetime do not come from its tailpipe. Instead, they come from its manufacture and disposal."
Ouch.

I also might add that all of the Priuses, Leafs, Insights, Teslas, Volts and sundry methane/ethanol burners do nothing to relieve us of traffic congestion and its attendant problems. They say that you cannot make yourself green merely by buying the right stuff, and the same applies to those seeking their green cred based on what they drive.
So much for the trashing of automobile culture and conventional wisdom for our solutions. The last part of Singer's book contains answers, some that work on the grassroots level and some that work on a systemic level. We can show people how, by offering choices for quality transportation, everyone benefits. We can demonstrate how public subsidies work both for and against the kinds of transportation choices we want. And we have a lot we can do to correct the flaws inherent to rules which govern land use and how our taxes are spent.
Singer includes a useful directory of campaigning organizations.
This book's message is clear and hopeful. Just because we of this current generation arrived where we are on four wheels does not mean we have to go out that way. Why We Drive is a fresh addition to the pantheon of great books about transportation and society such as Asphalt Nation and the Geography of Nowhere.