I think this is just another example of why Buddhism is absolutely correct about the idea of "interdependent co-arising".
Basically, it's a teaching that says all things evolve in constant interaction and dependence with each other. There is almost never a simple causal arrow from one thing to another, but rather trends and processes.
So it's not about how the freeway invented the car or vice versa. It's about how, _in_America_, the car interacted with structural racism and the postwar housing crunch and a half-dozen other factors, and as the freeway grew out of that, it in turn reinforced and shaped how cars were made, as well as the ongoing racial development of housing patterns and all of those other half-dozen factors.
This is talked about a lot in THE POWER BROKER too. The initial audience for cars were upper-class people who had a primitive local road network ready to go for them (for the use of non-auto carts, bicycles and what not). Planners and electeds fretted at the traffic jams on the weekends - even with the small ownership numbers of cars - and engineered parkways and expressways to alleviate jams and provide better utility for autos. In turn, this enabled car producers to sell to a broader geographical/socioeconomic audience with the promise of convenience and, instead of unlocking the jams, the new road capacity induced demand (in an effect that is now well-known) and the jams got worse. In fact, every new expressway/expansion and highway bridge conversion in New York resulted in all the roads across the city getting more congested. That effect has been measured everywhere.
I’m not sure urbanists would like this argument but, perhaps it’s possible that the auto isn’t an inherent efficiency loser in these built environments, but rather there was something corrupt or selfish pulling planners in the wrong direction & there is a coincidental uniformity in how all the expressways and urban ring/spoke roads were built incorrectly. And now highway removals and street closures/plaza conversions are backtracking to a more sustainable and efficient design where critical trips succeed and the induced demand part (upper-class people looking for perfect parking on either end + an unencumbered 80mph trip in the middle) is going away in favor of high-capacity transit.
Interesting. I think lots of urbanists would agree with that - most of us aren't against highways/expressways, just the ones running through cities. I guess a lot of people feel there's almost no place for cars within cities, but that isn't realistic at this point. Not even in Europe.
You’re certainly correct that a subset of urbanists are radicalized and unwilling to compromise, as well as being emotionally touchy. More broadly, few are willing to hear excuses for why we can “fix cars in cities” rather than roll back what clearly cannot work spatially.
Either way, the proof of your statement that urbanists would agree that fixing/tweaking is progress - they’re usually happy with street conversions that retain 100% access coverage with time, speed or size restrictions. They’re happy with busways that have sensible carveouts. They’re happy with congestion pricing. They’re happy with plazas where a regular driver can’t cut-across but a greenmarket truck can park for the day to set up a stand. Absolutists who think the farmers should take LIRR are overrepresented in the discourse 🙃
The car was better as a rich man's (person's) toy. One of the big problems with cars is their spatial requirements. There are few rich people, so if only the wealthiest owned cars, there would not be many cars. Early motoring was a rich person's game. As a result, the same kind of people who had access to cars were the people who a generation earlier had access to a horse and carriage. So horses and carriages never consumed cities, even if the totality of horse-powered conveyances did.
While Rolls, Benz, and Daimler continued to make touring cars, the runabout was an American invention. The Curved-Dash Olds was the first, but Ford was more successful in developing the runabout, which was an everyman's model for a car.
Cars for the masses required roads with expanded capacity. But another thing we need to remember, is that few streets were paved at the advent of the automobile and even those pavements did not facilitate high speeds. When there was the first US national inventory of paved roads, gravel counted as a pavement, and gravel accounted for a large percentage of the small percentage of paved mileage. Smooth surfaces and wider roads made scaling up possible.
This is a review that characterizes Barrett's study of Chicago better than I can. This book is a great piece of the puzzle of how we achieved our transpo system.
Interesting. Yeah, I remember seeing a video once about the movement for paved roads. A lot of it was from farmers who wanted to get to market/town/etc. with motorized vehicles. That book sounds interesting.
The first mover of Good Roads was Albert Pope, the bicycle manufacturer. The Good Roads Movement started with an improbable alliance between the cycling industry, cycling enthusiasts, and farmers:
Pope thought that he could sell more bicycles if there were more paved streets and roads, whether for urban cycling or for touring. So he funded an advocacy group headed by the New York lawyer, Hugh Potter, who devised the Good Roads Movement. This is how the farmers got the idea:
Environmental historian Christopher Wells wrote this great article about how rural Americans perceived roads and their conditions, and the challenges to changing their attitudes about them.
There was also a lot of resentment toward the railroads, which exerted enormous influence in local and national politics, arguably more than Big Tech does today. Railroads were basically the only reasonable way to move people or goods in a reasonable amount of time, but their collusion on rates angered a lot of people, especially farmers. I think the Good Roads movement got a boost by offering an alternative to railroads to transport people and goods over distance.
I do not think it is a new argument. Kathleen Tobin wrote in 2002 that American suburbanization was a civil defence program. it was a National Industrial Dispersion Policy, designed to decentralize industry and commerce. Shawn Lawrence Otto wrote in 2012: ""These accommodations for defense brought about an immense change in the fabric of America, altering everything from transportation to land development to race relations to modern energy use and the extraordinary public sums that are spent on building and maintaining roads— creating challenges and burdens that are with us today, all because of science and the bomb." I wrote about it in 2019: https://www.treehugger.com/why-sprawl-was-caused-nuclear-arms-race-and-why-matters-more-ever-today-4854403
I've seen that article before (I've also seen people say there's no evidence the idea of dispersal had anything to do per se with those policies - I'm not sure.) What was new to me was in particular the idea that the existence of highways actually changed the way cars were engineered. I'm not sure it's true, but I've never heard that before.
The biggest question I have is this: when did the process described in the following quote take place?
"Absent the imposition of car culture by the federal and local governments and by the local real estate industry...there would be no point for heavy engine blocks with six cylinders, and the overall weight of the vehicle could be reduced accordingly."
Carson doesn't cite any dates in his argument, but as a car guy I feel obliged to point out that the Chevy inline-6 engine was introduced for 1929 and the Ford flathead V-8 engine for 1932. That's awfully early to be caused by an "imposed" car culture, no?
This reminded me of that scene in Fahrenheit 451 about the kids in their fast cars being dangerous to Montag the pedestrian - what prompted Bradbury to include that scene and detail? It may have been more timely than a simple "kids being risky" kind of bit. I believe Montag and Mildred both go on trips in the car that are simply about going fast, too.
Canada is a pretty good counterfactual here. The freeways mostly go around the cities rather than right through them (and the urban freeways that do existing are spurs rather than the main routes), gas 25% more expensive, and the sprawl feels at least a little bit more contained than the US. Despite that, everything is still pretty car-centric.
(I guess the cynical version of this is "Canada was forced to accept big cars by virtue of its economy being intertwined with the US", but I still think this argument misses the mark by a few decades considering that the most popular car when the Interstate Highway Act was signed was the Bel Air.)
I think that a city's relationship with the car depends completely on when it became a large metropolitan area. The cities that developed before 1940 had to have well developed public transportation systems, because circulation could not possibly depend on cars. Here are the 10 largest metro areas in the US as of 1940.
1. **New York, NY** - 7,454,995
2. **Chicago, IL** - 3,396,808
3. **Philadelphia, PA** - 1,931,334
4. **Detroit, MI** - 1,623,452
5. **Los Angeles, CA** - 1,504,277
6. **Cleveland, OH** - 878,336
7. **Baltimore, MD** - 859,100
8. **St. Louis, MO** - 816,048
9. **Boston, MA** - 770,816
10. **Pittsburgh, PA** - 671,659
By personal experience, I can attest that NYC, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston still make robust use of rail transportation.
In contrast, cities that are new on the metropolitan list in 1970 had their growth spurt after the car became the dominant form of transportation. If they ever installed subways, they did it quite late.
6. **Houston, TX** - 1,232,802
7. **Dallas-Fort Worth, TX** - 1,232,802
8. **Washington, DC** - 1,197,000
I have extensive personal experience with Washington DC, where I lived much of the time between 1950 and 1994. I remember Washington DC vividly before there were interstate highways. I remember my mother driving downtown and looking frantically for a parking spot in the late 1950s. I also rode the bus downtown for Saturday enrichment classes and the trip took a whole hour each way. Not exactly an attractive way to travel. My mother also took us for the last ride on the trolley tracks that were torn up from Pennsylvania Avenue around 1959.
Finally, I saw the first faint hint of I-295, about a mile and a half from our house. One day, I saw surveyor stakes in the woods. Then the woods were cut down, and the surveyor stakes evolved into an Interstate Highway. Certainly, 1970s were 99% about cars.
I think any discussion about freeways can't be done without speaking on the racial history of traffic patterns. The history of redlining and which neighborhoods were torn down for the interstate system could be why european cities look different than american ones
I have often thought that the answer to cars is not electric cars but the elimination of freeways and stroads. Replacing each with light or high-speed rail as required.
As the incentive to step into your car for errands and commutes would plummet, the demand for local development of services would skyrocket.
Sometimes you have to provide a top down environment so that people can get to work creating bottom up communities.
I think that the idea of a automotive manufacturing being hundred of local industries is cute, but ignores the effects of scaling. Henry Ford's Model T was first created in 1908, and was popular because of its quality, reliability, and relative easy to maintain and repair. But the 1908 Model T's, while mass produced, were still made by hand and took 12 hours to make. By 1914, the time to create them was 93 minutes.
All of this is happening well before freeways.
I'm sympathetic to the urbanist arguments - but sometimes, large factories are better because of economies of scale reducing prices, and an agglomeration of expertise producing higher quality. So I think that part of the dream is pretty far off.
I think we have to be a little careful about revisionist history here. Once we recovered from the disruption of WWII and got back to every day life, there was a general sense of intense optimism around technology, the automobile, the space race etc, and while there were pockets of people warning about the effects of mass motoring - and the industry pushing it of course - the vast majority of people just thought this was the new way that was magical. It's easy for us today to see what the negative consequences of that are, but at the time they didn't see it that way. Since much of the US was not hundreds of years old like in other parts of the world, we were OK with tearing down stuff to redo it for this technology. While some of that happened in Europe, no one was going to tear down a 500 year old cathedral for a wider road. In a way, we are going down the same road (pardon the pun) with autonomous vehicles. This is something Peter Norton talks about in his book Autonorama. But to your point about whether it was the car or the speed of the mode, I think it was very much about the car in and of itself because it allows the user to decide where it goes and when. It was a natural thing that as cars became more technologically sophisticated they would be faster and would require a right of way that could accommodate that. That's pretty much how the engineering profession works, we always try and design infrastructure with margins of safety so it's only logical that highways would evolve as cars did.
Noah set out to drive across the country on the remnants of the Lincoln Highway, and while doing so spend a lot of time working through the evolution of car infrastructure and culture.
I think this is just another example of why Buddhism is absolutely correct about the idea of "interdependent co-arising".
Basically, it's a teaching that says all things evolve in constant interaction and dependence with each other. There is almost never a simple causal arrow from one thing to another, but rather trends and processes.
So it's not about how the freeway invented the car or vice versa. It's about how, _in_America_, the car interacted with structural racism and the postwar housing crunch and a half-dozen other factors, and as the freeway grew out of that, it in turn reinforced and shaped how cars were made, as well as the ongoing racial development of housing patterns and all of those other half-dozen factors.
This is talked about a lot in THE POWER BROKER too. The initial audience for cars were upper-class people who had a primitive local road network ready to go for them (for the use of non-auto carts, bicycles and what not). Planners and electeds fretted at the traffic jams on the weekends - even with the small ownership numbers of cars - and engineered parkways and expressways to alleviate jams and provide better utility for autos. In turn, this enabled car producers to sell to a broader geographical/socioeconomic audience with the promise of convenience and, instead of unlocking the jams, the new road capacity induced demand (in an effect that is now well-known) and the jams got worse. In fact, every new expressway/expansion and highway bridge conversion in New York resulted in all the roads across the city getting more congested. That effect has been measured everywhere.
I’m not sure urbanists would like this argument but, perhaps it’s possible that the auto isn’t an inherent efficiency loser in these built environments, but rather there was something corrupt or selfish pulling planners in the wrong direction & there is a coincidental uniformity in how all the expressways and urban ring/spoke roads were built incorrectly. And now highway removals and street closures/plaza conversions are backtracking to a more sustainable and efficient design where critical trips succeed and the induced demand part (upper-class people looking for perfect parking on either end + an unencumbered 80mph trip in the middle) is going away in favor of high-capacity transit.
Hmmm.
Interesting. I think lots of urbanists would agree with that - most of us aren't against highways/expressways, just the ones running through cities. I guess a lot of people feel there's almost no place for cars within cities, but that isn't realistic at this point. Not even in Europe.
You’re certainly correct that a subset of urbanists are radicalized and unwilling to compromise, as well as being emotionally touchy. More broadly, few are willing to hear excuses for why we can “fix cars in cities” rather than roll back what clearly cannot work spatially.
Either way, the proof of your statement that urbanists would agree that fixing/tweaking is progress - they’re usually happy with street conversions that retain 100% access coverage with time, speed or size restrictions. They’re happy with busways that have sensible carveouts. They’re happy with congestion pricing. They’re happy with plazas where a regular driver can’t cut-across but a greenmarket truck can park for the day to set up a stand. Absolutists who think the farmers should take LIRR are overrepresented in the discourse 🙃
The car was better as a rich man's (person's) toy. One of the big problems with cars is their spatial requirements. There are few rich people, so if only the wealthiest owned cars, there would not be many cars. Early motoring was a rich person's game. As a result, the same kind of people who had access to cars were the people who a generation earlier had access to a horse and carriage. So horses and carriages never consumed cities, even if the totality of horse-powered conveyances did.
While Rolls, Benz, and Daimler continued to make touring cars, the runabout was an American invention. The Curved-Dash Olds was the first, but Ford was more successful in developing the runabout, which was an everyman's model for a car.
Cars for the masses required roads with expanded capacity. But another thing we need to remember, is that few streets were paved at the advent of the automobile and even those pavements did not facilitate high speeds. When there was the first US national inventory of paved roads, gravel counted as a pavement, and gravel accounted for a large percentage of the small percentage of paved mileage. Smooth surfaces and wider roads made scaling up possible.
This is a review that characterizes Barrett's study of Chicago better than I can. This book is a great piece of the puzzle of how we achieved our transpo system.
https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/uhr/1984-v13-n2-uhr0791/1018130ar.pdf
Interesting. Yeah, I remember seeing a video once about the movement for paved roads. A lot of it was from farmers who wanted to get to market/town/etc. with motorized vehicles. That book sounds interesting.
The first mover of Good Roads was Albert Pope, the bicycle manufacturer. The Good Roads Movement started with an improbable alliance between the cycling industry, cycling enthusiasts, and farmers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Augustus_Pope#promotion_of_bicycles_and_cycling
Pope thought that he could sell more bicycles if there were more paved streets and roads, whether for urban cycling or for touring. So he funded an advocacy group headed by the New York lawyer, Hugh Potter, who devised the Good Roads Movement. This is how the farmers got the idea:
https://archive.org/details/gospelgoodroads00highgoog/page/n4/mode/2up
Environmental historian Christopher Wells wrote this great article about how rural Americans perceived roads and their conditions, and the challenges to changing their attitudes about them.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3744804
There was also a lot of resentment toward the railroads, which exerted enormous influence in local and national politics, arguably more than Big Tech does today. Railroads were basically the only reasonable way to move people or goods in a reasonable amount of time, but their collusion on rates angered a lot of people, especially farmers. I think the Good Roads movement got a boost by offering an alternative to railroads to transport people and goods over distance.
Great point!
I do not think it is a new argument. Kathleen Tobin wrote in 2002 that American suburbanization was a civil defence program. it was a National Industrial Dispersion Policy, designed to decentralize industry and commerce. Shawn Lawrence Otto wrote in 2012: ""These accommodations for defense brought about an immense change in the fabric of America, altering everything from transportation to land development to race relations to modern energy use and the extraordinary public sums that are spent on building and maintaining roads— creating challenges and burdens that are with us today, all because of science and the bomb." I wrote about it in 2019: https://www.treehugger.com/why-sprawl-was-caused-nuclear-arms-race-and-why-matters-more-ever-today-4854403
I've seen that article before (I've also seen people say there's no evidence the idea of dispersal had anything to do per se with those policies - I'm not sure.) What was new to me was in particular the idea that the existence of highways actually changed the way cars were engineered. I'm not sure it's true, but I've never heard that before.
Total agreement. Since when has the government been successful at telling us where to live?
The government has successfully influenced where the defense and associated industries were located. This had some influence on where people lived.
Yes, the siting of military bases and defense industries has had an influence, but I think that's less than 10% of the US economy for sure.
The biggest question I have is this: when did the process described in the following quote take place?
"Absent the imposition of car culture by the federal and local governments and by the local real estate industry...there would be no point for heavy engine blocks with six cylinders, and the overall weight of the vehicle could be reduced accordingly."
Carson doesn't cite any dates in his argument, but as a car guy I feel obliged to point out that the Chevy inline-6 engine was introduced for 1929 and the Ford flathead V-8 engine for 1932. That's awfully early to be caused by an "imposed" car culture, no?
Great comment
This reminded me of that scene in Fahrenheit 451 about the kids in their fast cars being dangerous to Montag the pedestrian - what prompted Bradbury to include that scene and detail? It may have been more timely than a simple "kids being risky" kind of bit. I believe Montag and Mildred both go on trips in the car that are simply about going fast, too.
Canada is a pretty good counterfactual here. The freeways mostly go around the cities rather than right through them (and the urban freeways that do existing are spurs rather than the main routes), gas 25% more expensive, and the sprawl feels at least a little bit more contained than the US. Despite that, everything is still pretty car-centric.
(I guess the cynical version of this is "Canada was forced to accept big cars by virtue of its economy being intertwined with the US", but I still think this argument misses the mark by a few decades considering that the most popular car when the Interstate Highway Act was signed was the Bel Air.)
I think that a city's relationship with the car depends completely on when it became a large metropolitan area. The cities that developed before 1940 had to have well developed public transportation systems, because circulation could not possibly depend on cars. Here are the 10 largest metro areas in the US as of 1940.
1. **New York, NY** - 7,454,995
2. **Chicago, IL** - 3,396,808
3. **Philadelphia, PA** - 1,931,334
4. **Detroit, MI** - 1,623,452
5. **Los Angeles, CA** - 1,504,277
6. **Cleveland, OH** - 878,336
7. **Baltimore, MD** - 859,100
8. **St. Louis, MO** - 816,048
9. **Boston, MA** - 770,816
10. **Pittsburgh, PA** - 671,659
By personal experience, I can attest that NYC, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston still make robust use of rail transportation.
In contrast, cities that are new on the metropolitan list in 1970 had their growth spurt after the car became the dominant form of transportation. If they ever installed subways, they did it quite late.
6. **Houston, TX** - 1,232,802
7. **Dallas-Fort Worth, TX** - 1,232,802
8. **Washington, DC** - 1,197,000
I have extensive personal experience with Washington DC, where I lived much of the time between 1950 and 1994. I remember Washington DC vividly before there were interstate highways. I remember my mother driving downtown and looking frantically for a parking spot in the late 1950s. I also rode the bus downtown for Saturday enrichment classes and the trip took a whole hour each way. Not exactly an attractive way to travel. My mother also took us for the last ride on the trolley tracks that were torn up from Pennsylvania Avenue around 1959.
Finally, I saw the first faint hint of I-295, about a mile and a half from our house. One day, I saw surveyor stakes in the woods. Then the woods were cut down, and the surveyor stakes evolved into an Interstate Highway. Certainly, 1970s were 99% about cars.
I think any discussion about freeways can't be done without speaking on the racial history of traffic patterns. The history of redlining and which neighborhoods were torn down for the interstate system could be why european cities look different than american ones
I have often thought that the answer to cars is not electric cars but the elimination of freeways and stroads. Replacing each with light or high-speed rail as required.
As the incentive to step into your car for errands and commutes would plummet, the demand for local development of services would skyrocket.
Sometimes you have to provide a top down environment so that people can get to work creating bottom up communities.
I think that the idea of a automotive manufacturing being hundred of local industries is cute, but ignores the effects of scaling. Henry Ford's Model T was first created in 1908, and was popular because of its quality, reliability, and relative easy to maintain and repair. But the 1908 Model T's, while mass produced, were still made by hand and took 12 hours to make. By 1914, the time to create them was 93 minutes.
All of this is happening well before freeways.
I'm sympathetic to the urbanist arguments - but sometimes, large factories are better because of economies of scale reducing prices, and an agglomeration of expertise producing higher quality. So I think that part of the dream is pretty far off.
I think we have to be a little careful about revisionist history here. Once we recovered from the disruption of WWII and got back to every day life, there was a general sense of intense optimism around technology, the automobile, the space race etc, and while there were pockets of people warning about the effects of mass motoring - and the industry pushing it of course - the vast majority of people just thought this was the new way that was magical. It's easy for us today to see what the negative consequences of that are, but at the time they didn't see it that way. Since much of the US was not hundreds of years old like in other parts of the world, we were OK with tearing down stuff to redo it for this technology. While some of that happened in Europe, no one was going to tear down a 500 year old cathedral for a wider road. In a way, we are going down the same road (pardon the pun) with autonomous vehicles. This is something Peter Norton talks about in his book Autonorama. But to your point about whether it was the car or the speed of the mode, I think it was very much about the car in and of itself because it allows the user to decide where it goes and when. It was a natural thing that as cars became more technologically sophisticated they would be faster and would require a right of way that could accommodate that. That's pretty much how the engineering profession works, we always try and design infrastructure with margins of safety so it's only logical that highways would evolve as cars did.
Can we agree that the ubiquity of cars can only exist alongside a freeway system?
I've probably shared this here before, but I *highly* recommend finding several evenings to get through this miniseries-length youtube travelogue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmFQR0IltDQ
Noah set out to drive across the country on the remnants of the Lincoln Highway, and while doing so spend a lot of time working through the evolution of car infrastructure and culture.