The Quest for the Holy Rail
Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back, by Jane Holtz Kay, New York: Crown, 403 pages, $27.50
The City After the Automobile, by Moshe Safdie with Wendy Kohn, New York: New
Republic/Basic Books, 187 pages, $24.00
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'sAsphalt 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 dose 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 cliché 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.
Cars, as Kay points out, make possible "the scum of sprawl." Safdie is less
lunatic in his aversion to cars than Kay; his book is not the anti-car screed
the title would suggest. An avant-garde architect (he was the principal
designer for Expo '67 in Montreal), Safdie is concerned chiefly with urban
form, and his thesis could be reduced to four words: Don't make things square.
Safdie is right that much of the monotony of urban form arises because of rigid
planning codes and, more important, lack of imagination. But both Safdie and
Kay, along with many of the "new urbanists" who share their view, display an
amazing inability to learn from the planning mistakes they rightly decry. If
planning has made a botch of things in the past, constraining imagination and
the marketplace alike, why should we embrace an even more intensive scheme of
government planning?
The answer, of course, is that reformist idealism, along with faith in the
ability of well-meaning people to "do better next time," is irrepressible.
Combining old-fashioned reformist idealism with the anti-auto animus, we will
be, to paraphrase the old millennialist slogan, "forced to be (car) free." Kay
finds light rail "exhilarating" (she clearly needs to get out more, and perhaps
write a stage play entitled A Desire Named Streetcar) and joins the
chorus singing the praises of Portland, Oregon, as the model for the nation.
This model calls for compelling much denser development, urban limit lines to
contain urban size, and intensive use of mass transit. For mass transit, Kay
rightly points out, "you need mass." Portland has established a powerful
regional government to enforce the plan and has spent billions for a lightly
used light rail system, while eschewing new road construction completely.
Evidence from Portland suggests this model is already starting to break down
(even TheWashington Post recently ran a front-page story
entitled "Cracks in Portland's Great Wall"), but the propagandists continue to
portray it as the promised land.
Kay cites Jane Jacobs, who, to be sure, dislikes cars, but who dislikes
ambitious planners even more. Both Kay's and Safdie's vague prescriptions call
to mind Jacobs's warning that "people who get marked with the planners' hex
signs are pushed about, expropriated, and uprooted much as if they were the
subjects of a conquering power." Safdie, for example, ends a confused passage
about central planning and the free market with this inscrutable imperative:"We must create new conditions in which a vision of the city is integrated with
feedback from the city's inhabitants, and in which a central authority is
vested with power to enact this vision in a manner unthreatening to individuals
or communities." Whatever that means exactly, it can't be good.
Safdie is an innovative architect, but he should stick with designing
geometrically challenged buildings. His suggestion for solving our mobility
problems is truly bizarre. He thinks we should make cars a public utility.
Inspired by the use of communal bicycles in Amsterdam, Safdie thinks we should
give up owning our own cars and instead be able to pick up and drop off small"utility cars" (or U-cars) as we need them at depots scattered throughout
cities. Think of it as Hertz and Avis in every neighborhood. Because such cars
could be stored more efficiently than in typical parking lots or private homes
(he has hand drawings of the spatial arrangements in the book), we would save
huge amounts of space in our cities. Kay, meanwhile, is not only largely
oblivious to market solutions to genuine mobility problems (such as congestion
pricing and privatization), but is positively hostile to them, especially for
transit systems. "[T]he quest for `efficiency' through privatization is a
menace," Kay writes.
Even though commonsensical Americans are not going to stand for being coerced
out of their cars any time soon, the anti-car and urban planning nostrums of
the idealists are achieving axiomatic status. People are being made to feel
just a bit guilty about driving, at least by themselves or for "unnecessary"
trips. Forget the Sunday drive. It is a crime ag
