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Two days after May Day, 1991, I began this odyssey into the auto age. Getting around on four wheels wasn't what it used to be, and, in the aftermath of what some were calling "the first petroleum war" in the Persian Gulf, Congress was debating whether to continue to make the world safe for its major oil consumer, the automobile, or adopt a new highway bill. With two-thirds of the nation driving through congested carburbs, the system of moving Americans was clearly askew. Would the federal government continue its perennial task of covering the nation with asphalt or legislate a fresh approach? Would Washington continue to advance the policies that produced dependence on the motor vehicle and assaulted the landscape and cityscape, the environment and quality of life or tame the car?
And so, in order to gauge the Late Auto Age, I decided to graph its extremes. On one side stood the advocates of "de-vehicularization" as the anti-auto activists had begun to call their goal; and, on the other, the movers for more roads, more cars, more auto-dependency. To see them, I would brave the separate worlds of footpower and horsepower: the road worriers vs. the road warriors.
A happy coincidence of events helped me to define the polarities of what I would call Asphalt Nation. In sequence that early May, the opposing forces were holding conferences, only days and miles apart. On May 3 and 4, the advocates for an auto-free America were meeting in Greenwich Village; on May 5 and 6, their adversaries, the automobile-oriented transportation professionals, were assembling in Secaucus, New Jersey. In their own words, on their own turf, both sides would diagram the extremes of our motoring nation as it entered a new century.
The meetings couldn't have been staged in more appropriate locales. The carbusters were gathering for the two days of their Auto-Free Cities assembly at Manhattan's New York University near Washington Square. A walk or train ride away from the most thoroughly-railed, densely-settled, pedestrian neighborhood in the United States, they were launching their joint crusade to curb the car. With equal symbolism, the car couturiers--the engineers and bureaucrats mostly dedicated to molding the infrastructure of the motor vehicle--would gather a day later in the wasteland of Secaucus, New Jersey, the sprawling, inaccessible landscape bred by the car culture.
Mere seasons after the nation's battle for the Middle East oil wells had ended ("oil for the headlights of America," one commentator noted); mere months before the highway legislation hit Congress, the pedestrian-firsters and the highway-firsters would offer contrasting viewpoints. I would see the black and white of life on wheels: how the two ends of the spectrum would solve the congestion and chaos of motorized America. On the one hand, grassroots activists and advocates would argue how the car was the villain of the environmental age, the heavy in an era of anomie and isolation. On the other, the hardhat traffic bureaucrats, ready to pave their grandmothers to get home for Thanksgiving Dinner, would argue for more asphalt.
My first stop, then, was with the anti-auto evangelists. In the academic environs of New York University's auditorium, they gathered for the First International Conference for Auto-Free Cities. The 400 or so speakers and listeners were summoned by Transportation Alternatives, a feisty group best known in the limited history of the anti-auto movement for their civil disobedience stopping traffic on the Queensboro Bridge in protest of its closing to bicyclers and walkers. "The QB6," (the Queensboro Six) Newsday had labeled the protestors. They succeeded. The bridge remained open for bicyclers or walkers.
Bearing the label "humanpower advocates," brandishing "Touch the Earth: Walk" buttons, and carrying bumper stickers for every environmental cause under the ozone, the conference-goers were a legion. Passionate walkers, hardy bikers, urban and environmental vigilantes disembarked from the dingy subway stops nearby. Others walked or parked their bikes outside the conference headquarters at l00 Washington Square East. How many had come without "benefit of car," a moderator asked. Three hundred hands shot up.
So it went throughout the day in the corridors and classrooms where the costumes of "radicalism" underscored the politics of the "radicalism" of scrapping the car…..
"Cars are filthy abominations," said Toronto bike activist Anne Hansen.
Applause.
"Monstrous. Dangerous. Obtrusive," she went on. More applause.
"Abusive." Applause. Applause.
"Did I come to the right conference?" she asked with a laugh.
You bet she did.
Two days later, imbued with their fervor and loaded with their pamphlets on every environmental cause on the planet, I headed to the conference of their presumed adversaries.
It was, as anticipated, set in a barren auto-bred wasteland. In the isolated, highway-wrapped environs of Howard Johnson's Executive Suites Hotel in Secaucus, New Jersey, sat the bureaucrats, the traffic engineers, the highway builders --with "their hearts in asphalt," as the conference organizer for the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Institute of Transportation Engineers, Eva Lerner-Lam put it. And the environment was as bland and predictable as the gray-suited claque of administrators from the highway systems they served.
The contrast between the two conferences was marked in every aspect. The culture warriors of a visionary future had been replaced by the army of the auto age status quo. No straphangers here, it seemed. The Secaucus conferees came by internal combustion engine to discuss "Implementing Regional Mobility Solutions." They could not come directly or quickly but had to curve through the snarl of highways devoid of public transit or even a clear route by car. They passed the placeless corporate boxes along Secaucus' highway and many got lost en route. They looked out the hotel's front door on roads and parking lots as gray as the "Executive Suite's" gray garage, gray sidewalks, gray blank walls. Secaucus was the quintessence of nowhere and as far from its original landscape of the old "Meadowlands" as bulldozers could make it. The land beneath the barren tundra of buildings and lonely parking lots possessed only enough link with nature to flood the new highway on wet days and make the route to Newark Airport an obstacle course…
But stop. The contrasts somehow began to seem too sharp, too forced, too simple. For, in the opening minutes, my script shredded as the first speaker, a man with enough graphics to map a NASA lift-off, launched the proceedings before the audience of "experts." His suit was gray, his accent moderate, his manner textbook professional. But his message did not come from the other end of the spectrum of the highway age at all. It was--word for word, syllable for syllable--the message of the auto-free activists, and almost evangelical enough to suit them. Comments on "congestion," concern with the way of life, the perturbations of the late auto age marked the speeches.
Card-carrying members of the transportation bureaucracy they might be, an audience of partisans to asphalt. Yet one thing was clear from their comments: the consensus of support for the auto age was fraying. The sentiments from either end of the transportation compass were so parallel that, in the aftermath of the conference, reading my notes, the quotes were almost inseparable. "What used to be rush hour traffic has become all day," I read. "I don't think our auto-controlled society has reached the ultimate in evolution," said another sarcastic commentator. "A penny from the gas tax would get you a billion dollars a year; two would get you two," said a third in favor of mass transit. And there was "mass transit," itself. Once the "t-word," it was now an aspiration.
But who had said what? Which advocate, pro or con, had uttered this or that? I could scarcely assign authorship: some anti-auto David? some former pro-highway Goliath? "Crisis proportions...more cars than people...our roads did not come with instructions for how to work..." Such criticism was scattered throughout my notes and the attribution was sometimes uneasy, sometimes startling. "One of our states has completely disappeared," a confessed hardtopper quoted Russell Baker on the tarmacking of Florida.
If the transportation folks' hearts--and history--were in asphalt, their solutions were in biking, in car pooling, in mass transit, in walking, and especially, to my delight, in an "incomparably thrilling land use revolution" which would end sprawl in favor of walkable, transit-based planning. "Balanced transportation" was the mantra: the need to equalize the equation between the automobile and other modes of movement. Later, I would learn to question the conviction of their phrases. Notwithstanding, it was clear that the professionals were looking for …balance…."
But would they? Would--will--we?
This book addresses that question. It offers three separate but overlapping categories. Part one, "Car Glut," begins where the anti-auto advocates did, showing how deeply enmeshed we are in the coils of the car culture. Part two, "Car Tracks," the history, traces the car from Ford's mass produced Model T in l908 to today to depict how this happened. It explores how a benign technology to mobilize Americans, in the end, transformed a human-scaled landscape into the kingdom of the car. Part three, the final segment of solutions, "Car Free," takes its lessons into the future. It offers remedies, some new, some traditional to show how we can relieve this dependence and destruction and secure human …
In the annals of history, many recognize that we have moved as far as we can go on untamed wheels. A nation in gridlock from its auto-bred lifestyle, an environment choking from its auto exhausts, a landscape sacked by its highways, has distressed Americans so much that even this go-for-it nation is posting "No Growth" signs on development from shore to shore. All these deadends mark a moment for larger considerations. The future of our motorized culture is up for change. It is the hope of this book not only to explore the needs and origins of that change but, above all, to instill an enthusiasm for creating a new human and humane frontier in a new century.
But would they? Would-will-we?
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