CAR COUNTRY
A N E N V I R O N M E N TA TA L H I S T O R Y . .
Foreword by
W E Y E R H A E U S E R E N V I R O N M E N TA TA L B O O K S
William Cronon, Editor E ditor
Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books explore human relationships with natural environments in all their variety and complexity. They seek to cast new light on the ways that natural systems aect human communities, the ways that people aect the environments of which they are a part, and the ways that dierent cultural conceptions of nature profoundly shape our sense of the world around us. A complete list of the books in the series appears at the end of this book.
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Seattle and London
CAR COUNTRY
A N E N V I R O N M E N TA TA L H I S T O R Y Foreword by William Cronon
Car Country: An Environmental History is published with the assistance assi stance of a grant from the Weyerhaeuser Weyerhaeuser Environmental En vironmental Books B ooks Endowment, established by the Weyerhaeuser Company Foundation, members of the Weyerhaeuser family, and Janet and Jack Creighton.
© 2012 201 2 by the University of Washington Washington Press Printed and bound in the t he United States of America Design by Thomas Eykemans Composed in Sorts Mill Goudy by Barry Schwartz Display type set in Intro by Svetoslav Simov First paperback edition edition 2014 201 4 18 17 16 15 14
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-- Wells, Christopher W. Car country : an environmental history / Christopher W. W. Wells.
p. cm. — (Weyerhaeuser environmental books) Includes bibliographical references and index. 978-0-295-99429-1 (paperback : alk. paper) 1. Automobiles—Environmental Automobiles—Environmental aspects —United States—History. States—H istory. 2. Automobiles—Social aspects—United aspects— United States—History. 3. Transportation, Automotive—United States—Hi story story.. 4. Urban transportation—United transport ation—United States—History. 5. City planning pla nning—United —United States S tates—His —History. tory. 6. Land use—United use —United States—History. . Title. 5 623 . .45 45 20 12
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The paper used in this publication is acid-free acid-free and meets the minimum min imum requirements requiremen ts of American National Standard for Information Information Sciences— Permanen Perm anence ce of Pap Paper er for for Printed Printed Libra Library ry Materials, Materials, 3 9. 48 –1 98 4.
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For Marianne
CONTENTS
Foreword by William Cron Foreword Cronon on ix Acknowledgments xv : A Car of One One’’s Own xix PART I
Before the Aut Automobile, omobile, 1880 –1905
3
Roads and Reformers 5 PART II
Dawn of the Motor Age, 1895 1895–1919 –1919 35 Automotive Pioneers Building for Trac
Photo Gallery One PART III
37 65
105
Creating Car Country, 1919– 1919–1941 1941 Motor Motor-Age -Age Geog Geography raphy 125 Fueling the Boom
173
6 The Paths Out of Town Photo Gallery Two PART IV
201
228
New Patterns, New Standards, New Landsca Landscapes, pes, 1940–196 1940–1960 0 251 Suburban Nation 253
: Rea Reachin chingg fo forr the Car Ke Keys ys 289 Notes 297 Selected Bibliography 379 Index 413
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FOREWORD
Far More More Than Just a Machine Machin e
If I were to ask my students who invented the automobile, I suspect their most likely response would be Henry Ford. That answer would be wrong, but wrong for the right reasons. reas ons. Although there are a number of candidates for the rst creator of a road vehicle powered not by animals anima ls but by steam or electricity or petroleum, no one person can be given credit for the transportation transpor tation technology that ultimately changed the face of the planet over the course of the twentieth century. By the time Ford began adding gasoline engines to four-wheeled vehicles in the 1890s, he was one of a small legion of inventors all trying to do the same thing. He became famous in 1904 when one of his cars set a new land speed record of more than ninety miles per hour, but that is not why my students (and most of the rest of us) remember his name more than anyone else associated with the early e arly history of the automobile. It was his invention of the wildly popular Model T in 1908 that assured his place in history and in our memories. Ford’s Model T may not have been the rst automobile, but it was the rst to make a compelling case that owning and operating a car might become a normative experience for most Americans. America ns. By embracing a robustly simple design that any reasonably competent mechanic could maintain, by using standard interchangeable i nterchangeable parts, and by manufacturing the vehicles by arranging workow along an assembly line (a technique he introduced in i n 1913), 1913), Ford was able to reduce his hi s costs of production so much that he could repeatedly cut the price of these t hese “Tin Lizzies,” successfully marketing them to middle-class customers and even to his own workers. workers. When his emplo employees yees began quitting because b ecause of the grueling pace required by the assembly ass embly line, Ford doubled doubled their wages by introducing the ve-dollar workday, which had the indirect eect of making it more possible for these working-class working-class Americans Amer icans to purchase the cars they were building. Ford eschewed eschewed changes in style, famously remarking that his customers could have the car in i n any color they wanted as long as it was black, and this th is too held down costs even though it opened the door to the changing styles and brands that by IX
the 1920s would characterize one of Ford’s most successful competitors, General Motors. But that lay in the future. By the end of World War I, half the t he cars in i n the United States St ates were Model T’s. T’s. That is why my students would not be entirely wrong if they guessed that Henry Ford invented the automobile, for that error hides a deeper truth. Although we tend to think of a car as a single object—that is, after all, the way we purchase it—it actually consists of myriad dierent parts, each of which has behind it a complex history of invention, development, and use. The internal combustion engine has quite a dierent history than the petroleum distillates that power it, the generator providing the sparks to ignite that fuel, the drive shaft that conveys rotational energy to the wheels, or the rubber with which the tires on those wheels are made—and this list only scratches the surface of all the dierent pieces that must be brought together together if a car ca r is ever to make ma ke it out of the garage and onto the road. Ford’s Ford’s genius was to gure out a way to assemble these parts par ts in the cheapest possible way, way, which in turn enabled him to sell sel l more than fteen fteen million mi llion Model T’s by 1927. 1927. But the car itself is hardly the end of the story. If most of us take utterly for for granted the t he complex inner mechanisms beneath the hoods of our automobiles, automobiles, the same is no less true of complex features of the highways and street systems on which we operate these vehicles and the landscapes through t hrough which we we drive. Although a passing familia fam iliarrity with the history his tory of transportation tra nsportation technologies quickly leads one to conclude conclude that the twentieth century was the age of the automobile just as the nineteenth century centur y had been the age of the railroad, rai lroad, most of us rarely stop to think about what that actually means. In truth, the rise in the United States of a culture in which mass ownership of automobiles became typical constituted one of the most sweeping cultural cultur al and a nd environmental environmental revolutions revolutions in human history. h istory. What Ford and his fellow automobile manufacturers helped invent—with help from countless others—was essentially a technological ecosystem, an intricate set of interconnected inventions, institutions, and behaviors that by mid-century more or less dened the American way of life. This is the great insight that organizes Christopher W. Wells’s superb new book, Car Country: An Environmental History . Wells X
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seeks in this lively, playful, and wonderfully accessible account to introduce readers to the transformations t ransformations wrought upon the national landscape of the United States St ates to make it t for Americans and a nd their cars. He tells us the stories not just of Ford and his Model T, but of highway engineers, street designers, real estate developers, policy makers, and all the other people and professions who created the automobile autom obile infrastructures infrast ructures that became second nature to Americans during the twentieth century. Almost nothing about Car Country escapes Wells’s eye: the gravel and asphalt with which highways are paved, the layout layout of streets designed for dierent speeds of travel past and through neighborhoods, the road signs and other navigational devices that enable strangers to make their way through communities they have never visited before, the retail institutions that were able to attract ever larger numbers of customers from ever greater distances—and, distances —and, of course, the concomitant challenge of of guring out where all those customers could possibly park all a ll those cars. car s. Witness Witness the emergence of this automobile-dependent landscape in the pages of this book, and you will never again see the world around you in quite the same way. You can read this book purely for the pleasure of discovering the stories behind endless features of your own life and world that are probably so familiar that you barely even notice them. I know of no other book that explores in a single volume so many dierent aspects of our automobile-dependent culture: the design of cars, the paving of streets, the engineering of highways, the rening of gasoline, the taxing of fuel sales at the pump, the laying out of subdivisions, the marketing of real estate, the zoning of cities, the building of parking lots, the lobbying of legislatures, and so on and on and on. If any of these sound dry or technical, never fear: Chris Wells is an engaging storyteller, and the only thing dry about this book is his sardonic wit. Amid his many explanations of how and why why Car Country works the way it does—and he is a master explainer—is a constant peppering of anecdotes and observations that make ma ke the book a delight to read. But Wells also has a much larger purpose in mind. He opens the book by reecting on his h is own youthful enthusiasm for the rst vehicle he ever owned, a 1975 5 long-bed Toyota pickup truck that symbolized freedom and adulthood and that made his teenage comings and FOREWORD
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goings far easier than would otherwise have been the case. Then he went o to a small liberal arts college without a car and found to his surprise that he rarely missed it—except when he returned home to Atlanta and found himself in need of a vehicle to do almost anything. During extended travels in Europe, he again found himself missing his car almost not at all—until he came home to Atlanta and again felt his mobility and lifestyle severely cramped, because neither his bicyclee nor the available mass bicycl ma ss transit tr ansit options were sucient to get him safely to where he needed to go. “With such poor options for getting around,” he remembers, “I felt incapacitated without a car.” Then he wentt o to graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin, where the wen t he univeruniversity and its student neighborhoods are compactly laid out on an isthmus between two lakes, and suddenly the car again became b ecame as much an inconvenience as a benet. From this small autobiographical sketch, Wells draws a large and important conclusion. Once one recognizes that the automobile is not just a machine but a single element in a vast technical ecosystem in which every part is connected to every other and all human behaviors and institutions are shaped by its presence or absence, one is forced to recognize that any changes in this car-dependent landscape are almost inevitably trickier and more complicated than they rst appear. It’s not just that Americans love their automobiles; it’s that the landscape landsc ape we have created for them makes no other options available to us. We have no choice but to love them. John Muir once famously said of the natural natu ral world that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we nd it hitched to everything else in the universe.” The same is equally true of the human world, for reasons that have as much to do with history and culture as they do with nature. It has taken more than a century to create the complex interconnec tions that have made Car Country second nature to us. The scale of our resulting dependence on the automobile is so vast—ranging fractally from the largest public works project in history (the interstate highway system) all the way to what we do when we feel the impulse to drink a well-made cup of coee—that unwinding these dependencies is hard even to imagine. And yet we may have no choice in the matter, since some of the elements on which the system depends—cheap liquid fuel most of all—may prove less sustainable XII
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in the twenty-rst twenty-rst century than t han they appeared to be in the twen t wentieth. tieth. Sustainable or not, the challenge of imagining our transportation future will require a better understanding of our transportation past than most of us now possess. To grasp the complexities and fascinations and paradoxes of Car Country, I know of no better guide than this engaging book.
FOREWORD
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When I rst began to work on what ultimately became this book, now nearly a dozen years ago, I had little inkling in kling of just how much much its completion would rely on the stunning generosity, support, insight, and assistance of others. I can never hope to repay the debts that I have accrued, but I am more than happy to name names. I owe particular thank thankss to my mentors at the University of WisconWisconsin–Madison, Bill Cronon and the late Paul Boyer, whose extraordinarily nari ly high standards for scholarship, teaching, advising, and engaging engaging with a scholarly community were exceeded only by the understated grace and modesty with which they both modeled those standards. I am more grateful than I can say for their advice, rigor, generosity, and friendship. James Baughman, Rudy Koshar, Eric Schatzberg, and Stanley Schultz also lent their critical eyes and ears to my research in its early phase, improving it in ways large and small. Chuck Cohen, Linda Gordon, Bill Reese, Anne Firor Scott, and a nd Joel Wolfe Wolfe had nothing directly to do with this project, but all are ne scholars and teachers who went out of their way to help me learn what it means to be a historian. At the University University of Washington Washington Press, acquiring acquir ing editor Marianne Maria nne Keddington-Lang provided constant advice, encouragement, and support through the long process of transforming my research into a book. Together with Bill Cronon, she has helped make the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series s eries at the University of Washington Press into a real rea l community of authors, not just a list of books. Were Were I to have tried to dream drea m up a better editor e ditor,, I would have have fallen well short of the mark that Marianne establishes. I am indebted as well to Julie Van Pelt, who read the nal manuscript with an incredible combination of precision and artistic sensibility. Many others have read drafts, oered advice, and helped me with the process of transforming crude ideas into a more polished form. Peter Norton and one anonymous reviewer read the entire manuscript with critical eyes, oering suggestions and insights that measurably XV
improved the nal product. Ellen Arnold and Tom Robertson read and critiqued most of the manuscript, much of it in prose so raw that none but true friends would willingly subject themselves to the task. Greg Bond, David Hertzberg, Hiroshi Hi roshi Kitamura, and Michael Rawson all read and commented on the lion’s lion’s share of my dissertation, disser tation, and Je Allred, Allre d, Thomas Andrews, Will Barnett, Bar nett, Katie Benton Benton-Cohen, -Cohen, Tracey Tracey Deutsch, Jim Feldman, Je Filipiak, and Alexander Shashko also als o read, commented on, and improved various portions of the book. Thanks as well to J. Brooks Flippen, Mathieu Flonneau, Libbie Freed, Jordan Kleiman, Timothy Lecain, Tom McCarthy, Clay McShane, Martin Melosi, Federico Paolini, Pamela Pennock, Paul Sutter, and Thomas Zeller, and the audiences of panels at various var ious conferences conferences where I presented pieces of the research in this book. Thanks for their help and insights to Brian Black, Ed Linenthal, Karen Merrill, Merr ill, Ty Ty Priest, and the anonymous readers at the Journal of American History; Pamela Laird, John Staudenmaier, Staudenmaier, and the anon anonymous ymous readers at Technology and Culture; and Claire Strom at Agricultural History. And nally, a heartfelt thanks to the students in several iterations of the research seminar that I have taught on the subject of this book at Macalester College, Davidson College, and Northland College. In addition to giving me a platform to think thin k out loud loud about its subjects and issues, these t hese students contributed their own perceptive ideas and provided a critical audience, helping me weed out some of my less useful approaches to the material. Before I could write a word, I beneted from the labors of what feels like a countless number of librarians, reference specialists, and archivists, who helped helped me navigate n avigate collections collections and a nd track down elusive elusive materials while oering the sort of moral support that keeps isolated researchers going eve even n when they encounter an inevitable rough patch. At The Henry Ford, where I spent four months in the archives, thanks to Judith Endelman, Mark Greene, Cathy Latendresse, Andy Schornick, and Linda Skolarus. I also owe a substantial debt to the sta of the Library of Congress, who lled my steady stream of book orders and shared their magnicent reading room, which served as my daily oce for six months. Jerey Stine and Roger White at the Smithsonian showed me their collections, answered my questions, and helped make my time in Washington a pleasant experience. I would also XVI
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like to express gratitude to the many librarians and archivists at the National Archives II, the Bentley Historical Library, Libra ry, the Detroit Public Library, the State Historical Society S ociety of Wisconsin, and the Minnesota Historical Society. The interlibrary loan stas at both the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Macalester College secured a multitude of sources ranging from the important import ant to the obscure, without which I simply could not have have written wr itten this book. Last but not least, Terr Terrii Fishel and her sta provided a sabbatical oce in the Macalester College library, oering a quiet place to work as well as help and collegiality whenever when ever I descended from the garret. gar ret. A remarkable range of people contributed contri buted to my research along the way. Maggie Hughes helped me get organized as I pivoted from working on research to working on a book, and Ben Poupard conrmed a hunch by tracking down important evidence in the Ford archives. Trent Boggess, Lendol Calder, Bob Casey, and David Louter generously shared their knowledge knowledge and materials at key points in the t he process. Aaron Isaacs shared his vast expertise about railroads and streetcars at a crucial point and provided the commuter rail timetables for St. Paul Park that became the basis for one of the maps in this book. I owe an eternal debt to Ross Donihue, Sarah Horowitz, and Birgit Muehlenhaus, who applied their GIS savvy to help me transform a motley mix of timetable information, railroad and streetcar maps, road construction maps, oil pipeline maps, and my own nascent ideas into elegant cartographic renderings. Even more people provided intangible support along the way as friends, colleagues, students, and intellectual sparring mates. Special thanks to Shelby Balik, Karen Benjamin, Jonathan Berkey, Ann MacLaughlin Berres, Dawn Biehler, Louisa Bradtmiller, Scott Breuninger, Thea Browder, Ernie Capello, Chris Capozzola, Adrienne Christiansen, the late Judy Cochran, Hal Cohen, Alison Craig, Vivien Dietz, Jerald Dosch, Ann Esson, Ted and Abby Frantz, Tony Gaughan, Aram Goudsouzian, John Gripentrog, Suzanne Savanick Hansen, Paul Hass, Sandy Heitzkey, Dave Holmes, Jack Holzheuter, Dan Hornbach, Lynn Hudson, Mary and Toni Karlsson, Tina Kruse, David Levinson, Jane Mangan, Christie Manning, Mann ing, Sarah Marcus, Tom Tom McGrath, Sally McMillen, Ray Mohl, Alicia Muñoz, Lara Nielsen, Nancy O’Brien Wagner, Wagner, Roopali Phadke, Bill Bil l Philpott, Philpott , Peter Rachle, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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Andy Rieser, Mark Rose, Honor Sachs, Jim Schlender, Zach Schrag, Matt Semano, David Sheer, Tony Shugaar, Deb Smith, Kendra Smith-Howard, Chris Taylor, Trish Tilburg, Dan Trudeau, George Vrtis rtis,, and Kristen Walton. Generous nancial support also helped bring this book to fruition. At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, various grants and travel fellowships fello wships helped launch the early stages of research. A Henry Henr y Austin Clark Fellowship from The Henry Ford made possible my extended time in Dearborn. D earborn. Several S everal awards from the Mellon-funded Mellon-funded Three Rivers Center at Macalester helped extend my sabbatical, buying muchneeded time to dedicate myself to full-time writing. I am particularly grateful for the investments that Macalester College makes in its junior faculty. Without its generous junior sabbatical and family leave policies, completing this book would have been a very dierent—and much more more dicult—process. dicult—proces s. Last, but certainly not least, I owe a tremendous personal debt to the members of my family. Their love, support, and unstinting belief in the path I have chosen mean more to me than I can put into words. My wife, Marianne Milligan, has talked through every idea and read every word in this book—and then some. Only she knows just how much it has taken to write this book, particularly after Jack, Annie, and Meg joined our family fami ly.. I dedicate ded icate this book b ook to her.
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PROLOGUE
A Car of One’s Own
A good transportation system minimizes unnecessary transportat ion. —Lewis Mumford (1958)
Like many of my friends, I was ecstatic when the long vigil leading up to my sixteenth birthday ended, and I nally—nally!—got my driver’ss license. Driving opened a new world of freedom and mobility, parer’ particularly after my father bought a new car and gave me his old one: a yellow 1977 Toyota long-bed pickup truck. Despite its ashy white racing stripe, my new truck was in sad shape. Parts of the bed were rusting through, torn bits of foam protruded protr uded from gaping holes in its vinyl seats, and the passenger-side door, which was crumpled from a previous accident, could only be opened by observing a careful sequence of steps that ummoxed all but a select group of initiates. I was utterly blind to its problems: the truck tr uck was a piece of junk, but it was my piece of junk. My truck made everything about high-school life easier. Now that I was nally free of the complicated process of arranging rides home after my various practices and after-school activities, it also became innitely easier to get to friends’ houses, to soccer games and debate tournaments, and to movies and parties. Best of all, the costs of my newfound mobility were negligible: I had only to make an occasional emergency run to the grocery store for my mother, to give my younger sister a ride when she needed one, and to use my own money to keep the truck’s tank full. My previously well-used bicycle went into storage, and for the rest of high school came out only for for recreational rides r ides with friends. When I left home for college in the mountains of western Massachusetts, rst-year students were barred from owning vehicles—a policy designed to prevent the town’ town’s picturesque streets s treets from becoming a parking lot. Full of regret, I left my truck behind. I still vividly remember the phone call, several months later, when I asked about my truck and got silence in return. After some prodding, my parents XIX
1977 Toyota 5 long-bed pickup truck (with racing stripe). Ben Pi, courtesy of oldparkedcars.com
explained that it had been totaled—the victim of a fallen tree during a storm. The insurance company proclaimed it a worthless hunk of metal, but I knew better: its loss meant forfeiting forfeiting the easy mobility mobil ity that I had enjoyed enjoyed through my last years of high school. I spent my remaining college breaks in Atlanta hitching rides with friends fr iends or negotiating negotiating the use of one of my parents’ cars. Somewhat to my my surprise, surpr ise, though, I seldom missed misse d my truck at college. The campus itself was less than one square mile in extent and contained everything a student could need: dormitories, dining halls, classrooms, athletic elds, museums, a variety of shops and restaurants on main street, and a profusion of public gathering spaces that hosted a diverse mix of activities, including lectures, musical and theatrical performances, and whatever else two thousand college students living in an isolated town could dream up. When I moved o campus as a senior, two of my housemates had cars—although most of the time they sat parked outside the house, unused, until one of us needed to run to the nearest grocery store in the next town over. over. After graduation, I took a job teaching high-school history in XX
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Switzerland, and like many Americans living in Europe I marveled at how easy it was to get around by foot, bus, and train. Even without a car, it was easy (and aordable, even on my small salary) to spend my free weekends traveling. By contrast, on the occasions when I had to drive a school van, driving seemed downright cumbersome. Narrow streets, low speed limits, lim its, what struck me as a s outrageously outrageously high gasoline prices, and exceedingly scarce parking—not to mention the boisterous teenagers I was carting around—undercut much of driving’s appeal. Rather than embodying freedom and mobility, driving in Switzerland seemed more like an expensive, inconvenient, and at times even har rowing chore. Yet almost immediately i mmediately upon returning returni ng to Atlanta for the summer, the familiar yearning for a car of my own came ooding back. Even something as simple as meeting friends during their lunch breaks presented signicant obstacles. Infrequent, inconveniently located bus service in my neighborhood made buses unappealing, and the nearest stop on the city’s pleasant, rail-based rapid-transit system (whose tracks did not run anywhere I wanted to go) was nearly three miles away from my parents’ house. Cycling, the preferred transportation of my youth, was ne in my neighborhood but felt dangerous beyond it, where a crush of trac had enveloped the city in the 1980s. With such poor options for getting getti ng around, I felt incapacitated without a car. Interestingly, my intense desire for a car quickly dissipated after I moved to Madison—the capital of Wisconsin and a bustling university town—to attend graduate school. Madison’s main commercial street downtown, State Street, which connects the university un iversity campus on one end with the state capitol on the other, is lined with enough bookstores, coee shops, restaurants, bars, and small specialty shops to keep the university’s forty-thousand-plus students happy. I rented an apartment within a short walk of my classes and the library, dropping my vague plan to buy a car upon learning that o-street parking would add 50 percent to my monthly rent. I worried about getting groceries until discovering a store—half a mile away—that oered free delivery. With With most of what I needed located within with in a reasonable rea sonable walk, I never really missed having a car. By this point my interest in the diering transportation systems of Europe and the United States had captured my academic interest as PROLOGUE
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well—but popular works on the subject seemed to raise rais e more questions than they answered. The most prevalent explanation for the remarkable success of the automobile in the United States—the ubiquitous “love-aair” “lov e-aair” thesis—suggests thesis— suggests that Americans America ns fell in lov lovee with automobiles and, once enamored, did whatever was necessary to accommodate them. “It is, at base, quite simple,” one one popular history of auto automobiles mobiles declares: “Americans “Americans have a fervent, intense, enduring love aair with their cars. car s.”” Most of those who adhere to this explanation see automobiles as basically good—as a technology that is ultimately liberating, enabling, empowering, and democratic, all qualities that accord well with American Amer ican values. To To be sure, proponents of the love-aair love-aair thesis concede that the country’s dependence on automobiles has its negative side, including environmental damage, steep infrastructure costs, the frustrations of jammed trac, and dependence on foreign oil, but these problems are simply the unfortunate trade-os that Americans must make to ensure universal access to an otherwise useful usef ul and benecial technology. Deep down, advocates of the love-aair thesis argue, Americans love their cars, whatever their aws, and this more than anything else explains the t he country’s relationship relationship with automobiles. automobiles. A second popular explanation—call it the “conspiracy” thesis— attributes the privileged position of automobiles in American life to powerful interests foisting automobiles on an unwary public. A cabal of automakers and various aliated conspirators used underhanded means to deprive the country of eective public transportation, according to this argument, and powerful road builders have used their clout to secure public nancing for huge construction projects at the expense of other social needs. Proponents of the conspiracy thesis sometimes grudgingly concede that cars have certain positive qualities, but on balance they see the country’s car culture as a negative, damaging force. Given free choice and a level playing eld, they argue, Americans Amer icans would certainly certa inly choose a less automobile-depen automobile-dependent dent lifestyle. Neither of these explanations for the dominance of cars in the United States squares particularly well with my own experience, in which my my desire (and need) for for a car has varied dramatically dra matically from place to place. In Atlanta, I nearly nea rly always always felt conned and helpless without a car because what I wanted to do was spread out over a large area, XXII
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making driving the only practical way to get around. Both in Switzerland and in i n two very dierent college towns, however however,, not having a car proved at worst worst a minor m inor inconvenience. inconvenience. Because most of what I needed in a normal day was located in easy walking or bicycling distance from where I lived, having a car was more a convenience than a necessity. To put it another way, the physical arrangement of the built environment, in which housing, retail, and businesses intermingled in relatively tivel y close quarters— quarter s—aa condition that planners refer to as “mixed“mixed-use use landscapes”—meant that my my opportunities per square s quare mile in all al l three places were much higher than in Atlanta. Signicantly, the prevailing patterns of land use limited my options for conducting my everyday aairs as much or more than the quality of public transportation, which varied from excellent in Switzerland to nonexistent in western Massachusetts. How I felt about cars had little bearing on whether or not I needed one. I did not want a car so much as I wanted to be able to do things quickly and easily: ea sily: get groceries, get to work, see my friends. In Atlanta I needed a car; in the other places I have lived since I left home for for college, having a car c ar did not factor as much into the equation. As I thought through these relationships, it became increasingly clear that most public discourse about the role of automobiles in American life erects a false boundary between how Americans feel about transportation technologies and why Americans drive so much more than people elsewhere in the world. In endlessly debating the merits of particular technologies—Priuses versus SUVs, buses versus light rail—we lose sight of the social and environmental context in which those technologies operate. This oversight has implications both for how we live our lives and for the environmental eects of the technologies we use. The language of the love aair, and the often moralistic approach of critics who condemn the automobile, automobile, privileges privi leges a tight focus on the relative vices and virtues of individual behaviors and technologies at the expense of coming to grips with either the genuine advantages and freedoms that cars create or the social and environmental costs of the nearly universal automobile use that cardependentt landscapes dependen la ndscapes foster foster.. Focusing on feelings about transportation technologies rather than the conditions in which they operate can have nefarious consequences, as the case of Atlanta’s Atlanta’s transit tr ansit system illustrates. i llustrates. The T he system’s system’s PROLOGUE
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trains function well as machines: when installed, they were quiet, smooth, comfortable, clean, and fast and could eciently move large numbers of people over long distances. Judged on these merits alone, they should have have been a resounding success, but in the real wor world ld their success has been mixed, at best. How can we explain this? Among the residents of Atlanta I have talked to, the most popular explanation directly mirrors the logic of the love-aair thesis: “I guess people here just don’t don’t like to ride trains.” t rains.” Pressed to elaborate, el aborate, people tout the relative virtues vir tues of cars (deemed convenient, convenient, exible, inexpensive, and fast) and the relative vices of the trains trai ns (deemed (deemed awkward, rigid, expensive, and slow). Yet focusing on people’s predilections (“people here just don’t like to ride trains”) suggests that their attitudes are somehow timeless and innate rather than informed reactions to a changing world. In the case of Atlanta’s rail-based transit, for example, nearly all of its stations until recently have connected the city’s city’s airport air port with four main things: t hings: giant parking lots for commuters, oce space, convention-oriented facilities, and sports venues. The opportunities per square mile surrounding each rail ra il stop, s top, in other words, cater almost entirely to out out-of -of-town visitors, oce workers, mall-goers, and sports spor ts fans. Why should anyone else ever ride the trains? The land uses within easy walking distance of each station send strong signals about who is supposed to use the trains—large parking lots scream “I am for drivers,” just as rail stops surrounded by oce buildings and hotels declare “I am a m for oce workers work ers and conventioneers. conventioneers.”” As a result, the rail-based r ail-based transit t ransit system is awkward, rigid, expensive, and slow for most Atlantans, although this is not because the trains t rains are a re technologically decient: decient: it is because most of the city’s residents are neither conventioneers nor employees of a company located near a rail stop. From its inception, the system’s engineers did not design it to help most city residents do the things they need and want to do as part par t of their everyday lives. lives. To understand how powerful the relationship between successful mass transit systems and land-use decisions is, compare Atlanta’s system to one of any number of successful European systems. Why would the latter enjoy much heavier ridership than Atlanta’s, even in cases when they employ older, slower, less comfortable technology? Following the love-aair thesis, we might conclude that Europeans XXIV
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have a stronger anity for trains tr ains or, alternativel altern atively y, that Europeans just do not love cars as much as Americans. Paying attention to land-use patterns, ho howe wever ver,, suggests that transit prospers in places where stops grant access to many opportunities per square mile and are within easy walking distance of housing. The relationship is not hard to grasp: if just about anyone can leave home and take a short walk to a transit stop, s top, and if nearly every every stop along a long the line oers a diverse mix mi x of incentives to exit and spend time and money in nearby businesses, then people are likely to use the system heavily—even if they own cars. When transit tran sit conveniently conveniently connects housing to the innumerable opportunities of dense, mixed-use landscapes, transit seems to thrive. This appears to be particularly true when the opportunities near rail stops are not limited to major attractions like ball elds and museums but also feature businesses that cater to more mundane everyday needs, like drug dr ug stores, hardware stores, stores, and supermarkets. Anecdotal evidence suggests that rail systems traversing landscapes that are rich in opportunities per square mile seem to appeal as much to substantial numbers of Americans as to Europeans. For example, consider American cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago, where subway and elevated train systems still attract heavy ridership. The transit stops in these places are frequently within walking distance of residential areas and oer numerous attractive opportunities within a short walk. Consider also the attitudes att itudes of even even resolutely resolutely car-lo car -loving ving Americans Amer icans who encounter robust railrai l-based based transit systems s ystems when traveling traveling abroad. Many are pleasantly surprised surp rised to be able to get around without a rental car and describe their experiences by saying things like, li ke, “Streetcar systems would never work work in the United States because Americans don’t like public transportation, but the streetcars in Europe are very pleasant and convenient.” In truth, streetcar systems would stand little chance of succeeding in the United States without radically dierent land-use patterns—but the point is that land-use patterns, not attitudes toward rail, are the best determinant of likely success or failure. What is true of light rail is also true of cars: when we design landscapes that are easily ea sily navigated only by personal vehicles, people tend to drive everywhere they need to go. In this book, I try to move past the language of the love aair to focus on the built landscape. I do so PROLOGUE
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in part because the love-aair framework so poorly explains my own changing relationships with cars and in part because thinking thi nking in terms ter ms of love and hate is conceptually limiting. However one feels about cars—whether you love them, hate them, or are lled with ambivalence—you lence—yo u will wil l not nd much about those emotions emotions in the pages that follow. Instead, this book will ask you to think about landscapes: the everyday world around us, from the mundane to the magisterial, and especially the various principles that guide its physical organization. Sometimes I employ the language of ecology to describe its organization, particularly in order to explore the environmental implications of near-universal automobile use in the United States. Yet I will also have occasion to describe changes in very dierent terms: more often than not, the people who rearranged the American landscape in the ways I describe did not think much about the eects of their actions on “nature” or “the environment” as part of their decision-making processes, even though though the environmental consequences of their decisions have been profound. Understanding the landscape’s physical arrangement is crucial to understanding why Americans drive so much. In addition to shaping the fortunes of transportation systems like light rail, rai l, land-use land-use patterns also govern how far car-dependent Americans must drive to conduct their everyday aairs. The easiest way to illustrate this thi s point is to examine how the physical layouts of two very dierent residential areas in the St. Paul metropolitan region—one urban, the other suburban— aect the transportation needs of their residents. The rst of these two residential areas is a collection of subdivisions located o an interstate exit ramp roughly fourteen miles mi les south of downtown St. Paul Paul in Eagan, E agan, Minnesota, Minnes ota, a suburban community of more than sixty sixt y thousand people spread out over 34.5 square miles. Its land-use patterns were established primarily in the 1970s and 1980s in direct relationship to the newly constructed interstate. The layout of one of Eagan’s neighborhoods, grouped around an interstate exit ramp (g. 1), reects the approach that suburban developers have honed to a science in the interstate era. Eagan’s general land-use practices dier little from those of innumerable suburban communities around the country. In order to understand the organization organi zation of this exit exit-ramp -ramp neighborneighborhood, which covers roughly 5.5 square miles, one must rst appreciate XXVI
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I.1
Exit-ramp Exitramp neighborhood, Eagan, Minnesota. Cartography by Birgit Mühlenhaus, 2011. 201 1.
how city city planners plan ners in the t he last four decades or so hav havee understood dier di er-ent kinds of roads, which they have sorted into clear hierarchical categories based on intended use. Planners divide roads into two broad categories—high-speed highways and lower-speed roads—and then make further distinctions within each category. In the lower-speed road category, for example, planners distinguish between arterial roads, collector roads, and residential residential streets and rely on each to serve ser ve a dierent transportation purpose. Arterial roads are the most heavily traveled of the three and typically typical ly connect important central locations with one another and with the interstate. They tend to be zoned for large developments developments like shopping centers, strip malls, ma lls, oce parks, pa rks, and townhouses rather than for single-family single-family housing. In Eagan, as a s in most interstate-oriented suburbs, the highway’s highway’s entrance and exit ramps ra mps are located on a major arterial road. By comparison, suburban collector roads have a lower capacity than arterials, and as their name implies they are designed to “collect” trac from adjacent subdivisions and funnel it to arterials. The zoning regulations along collectors tend to permit only a few small commercial and community-oriented developments; they are usually easy to identify by the many subdivision entrances along their length. Residential streets, the nal road type, are contained entirely within individual subdivisions—thus discouraging through trac—and the land adjacent to them tends to be zoned exclusivel exclusi vely y for residential land uses. us es. PROLOGUE
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By manipulating the arrangement of these dierent road types, planners and developers create a rational transportation system that is easy to navigate (by those with cars), ensures the relatively ecient distribution of utilities like sewers and water mains through low-density areas, area s, keeps heavy trac concen concentrated trated on major routes routes (and out of neighborhoods), and locates most everyday essentials within a short drive of residential areas. Because zoning bars commercial activities from residential areas, shopping trips typically begin at home, move through curving residential streets to a collector, follow the collector to the arterial, and take the arterial toward the businesses clustered around the interstate ramp. r amp. In well-developed well-developed suburbs like l ike Eagan, exit exit-ramp commercial clusters typically boast a variety of establishments, including restaurants, grocery stores, barber shops and hair salons, real estate agencies, nancial services companies, various professional oces, and perhaps even a movie theater or hardware store—enough to satisfy a typical family’s everyday needs. Whenever something is not available locally, the interstate provides a direct link to the larger resources of the metropolitan region. The second sample residential area, whose physical organization diers markedly from Eagan, is Macalester-Groveland, an urban neighborhood in St. Paul with twenty thousand residents spread over roughly 2.25 square miles, located roughly 4 miles west of downtown. As with Eagan, the key to understanding the neighborhood’s spatial organization is to understand how its developers designed it in relationship to the dominant transportation system of the time. The streetcars around which the neighborhood was developed from 1910 through the 1920s have been defunct for ve decades, but the landuse patterns established during the streetcar era still have a profound and continuing impact on the everyday transportation demands of the neighborhood’s residents today. A map showing the relationship between the neighborhood’s commercial infrastructure infras tructure and its old streetcar lines demonstrates why this is true t rue (g. 2). 2). Unlike Eagan, E agan, whose developers developers sorted sor ted various highways and roads into an elaborate, multilevel hierarchy, Macalester-Groveland’ss developers land’ developers distinguished dist inguished only two t wo road types: residential streets st reets and streetcar streets. Three Thre e east–west streetcar lines, spaced every every half mile, ran through the neighborhood, putting all residents within four XXVIII
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I .2
Streetcar neighborhood, neighborhood, Macalester-Groveland, Macalester-Groveland, St. Paul, Minnesota.
Cartography by by Birgit Mühlenhaus, 2011. 201 1.
blocks of a streetcar stop. East–west and north–south streetcar lines gavee residents access to the rest of the city as well as to downtown gav downtown Minneapolis, seven miles to the northwest. Of more lasting importance than the streetcars, however, are the small commercial nodes, located every half mile—and sometimes every quarter mile—that sprang up along their routes. In contrast to Eagan, where the interstate ramp provides the center of gravity for nearly all nonresidential activities, all three east–west streetcar lines in Macalester-Groveland attracted businesses to the regularly spaced clusters of storefronts along their length. As a result, commercial establishments spread somewhat evenly throughout the neighborhood, putting nearly all residents within six blocks or less of multiple shopping areas by the late 1920s. For those who required goods or services unavailable in the many nearby stores, streetcars provided a direct link to all of the small commercial sites along any particular route and, ultimately, to the resources of downtown St. Paul. The very dierent land-use patterns established during the initial development of Eagan and Macalester-Groveland continue to shape the mobility options of their residents today. The developers of both neighborhoods carefully separated residential and commercial areas but balanced separation against easy access to everyday goods and services. In a key dierence between the two areas, entrepreneurs PROLOGUE
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from 1910 through the 1920s dened “easy access” in relationship to the slow speeds of pedestrians and streetcars. As a result, Macalester-Groveland’s commercial establishments spread thickly and fairly evenly eve nly through the neighborhood along the old streetcar routes—with the result that even today, without streetcars, large numbers of stores exist within a short distance of all neighborhood homes. Because distances are short, walking and bicycling remain practical options. In Eagan, on the other hand, where planners dened “easy access” in relationship to cars, the distances dista nces between residences and commercial establishments are much longer. The distance a person can walk in ve minutes is much shorter shorter than t han one can drive in ve minutes, and in Eagan (as in most post–W p ost–World orld War War II I I suburbs) suburb s),, short walks wal ks seldom give g ive residents residen ts access to any a ny shopping shopping opportunities at all. a ll. In addition, since most commerce is concentrated on highly tracked arterial arter ial roads, few cyclists feel safe making even reasonably reasonably short shopping trips unless u nless a special, separate infrastructure is provided for them. The only quick, safe option is to drive. All of this has implications, not only for how easily people can walk or bicycle in Eagan and Macalester-Groveland, but also for the distances that residents must travel to conduct their everyday aairs. Measured in time and convenience rather than distance, there is little appreciable dierence between the commercial options in Eagan and Macalester-Groveland—in both places, most of what people need is a short trip tr ip away. away. Measured in distance rather than t han time, ti me, however, however, the differences have the potential to add up quickly (g. 3). As gure 3 suggests, Macalester-Groveland residents typically have smaller distances to travel for these everyday needs than Eagan residents. re sidents. Each neighborneighborhood design, in other words, imposes very dierent minimum “mobility requirements” on its residents—and those designed into Eagan’s landscape (as measured in mileage) are notably greater than those designed into Macalester-Groveland’s. These requirements exist independent of what type of transportation residents use—but because distances tend to be shorter in Macalester-Groveland, both walking and bicycling require less eort than in i n Eagan and thus are more likely to be part of the mobility mix for larger numbers of residents. Eagan represents what I call Car Country, a shorthand label for places where car dependence is woven into the basic fabric of the XXX
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I .3
One-way dist distance, ance,
in miles, from home to nearest business.
landscape. In the second half of the twentieth century, such places have become ubiquitous in the United States, and during that same period cars have become integral parts of the daily lives of most adult Americans.. It is a mistake, I believe, to explain Americans explain this state st ate of aairs either as the simple product of an ardent love aair with automobiles or as the result of a conspiracy to foist cars on an unwary unwary public. Instead, I nstead, the nation’’s dependence on cars stems from a reality nation rea lity at once more prosaic prosa ic and more profound: profound: Americans drive because in most places the built environment all but requires them to do so. Landscapes in the United States that are easily ea sily navigable without personal vehicles have have become rare—small islands in the vast sea of Car Country. Despite their ubiquity, today’s car-dependent landscapes are a relatively new historical development. As recently as the early twentieth century, the nation’s social, political, and economic institutions were oriented entirely around foot-, rail-, and water-based transportation systems. Rural roads were decrepit—the casualty of a half century’s investment inv estment in railroads r ailroads at the expense of highways—a highways—and nd turn-of tur n-of-the-thecentury streets in big American cities were in crisis. Few resources existed to change this state of aairs. In 1900, for example, the total annuall budget for the sole federal agency inv annua i nvolved olved in road improvement impr ovement was just $8,000, and its sta faced a strict ban on direct involvement in road construction. Most states had sizable road-building budgets, but funding sources were unreliable and almost none of the countless local ocials charged with road construction and maintenance PROLOGUE
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had any training in engineering. Few of the car-oriented features that are integral to the modern American landscape, from limited-access motor highways to parking lots, existed yet even as ideas. Further com plicating the picture, early motor vehicles were ostentatiously expen sive and notoriously unreliable, making it a laughable idea that the country’s leaders would ever devote themselves to the complex and forbiddingly expensive task of remaking the nation’s transportation system around cars. Yet, in relatively short order, this is exactly what happened. Politicians at every level of government government funneled unprecedented sums into developing and expanding the nation’s automotive infrastructure in the rst half of the twentieth century. Initially, these changes focused on accommodating the ood of automobiles pouring onto American roads and streets, as engineers wrestled to design both cars and roads that could overcome dicult environmental conditions. Then in the interwar years, after a series of signicant technological and scal breakthroughs, powerful cars and expanding networks of smooth roads nally began to give motorists the ability to reliably overcome older environmental limits on private transportation. Only then did planners and engineers engineer s begin to make serious se rious plans for completely completely carcentered landscapes that were designed not just to make driving easier but to unlock the full transportation potential of automobiles; only then did signicant numbers of people begin to reorganize reorgani ze their everyday activities and landscapes around a round automobiles. automobiles. After Af ter World World War War II, I I, with the protability, practicality, and political attractiveness of carcentered activities well established, governments at all levels supplemented existing car-oriented transportation policies with new rules and incentives governing land-use practices that redened “development” as “car-oriented development.” By 1956, when Congress funded construction of the interstate highway system, nearly all of the basic patterns underpinning the creation of car-centered landscapes— as well as nearly all of the most signicant environmental problems related to heavy car use—were use —were rmly in place. With these changes, the United States became Car Country Countr y. This transformation required two equally profound changes: rst, the development of a well-funded, car-oriented transportation infrastructure; and second, a complex set of regulations, incentives, and XXXII
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practices regarding land uses that helped create a new, car-dependent economic geography. As a car-friendly transportation infrastructure became a normal part of the American landscape—think stop signs and centerlines, trac lights and limited-access highways—car use became signicantly easier. In addition, as car-friendly land-use practices became a normal part of the American landscape—think ample parking lots and convenient drive-through windows, vast subdivisions of single-family housing and regional malls rivaling the size of downtown—car use became more necessary. As the dierent sectors of the American economy dispersed more thinly thi nly across the landscape, even the most mundane of everyday tasks moved out of easy reach of most people traveling on foot or by public transportation. Car use became not just easy but—for most people people and in most places—almost places—a lmost mandatory. As car-dependent landscapes became the norm, they locked in the signicant environmental consequences of nearly universal car use in a large, auent nation. Born, as it was, from the desire to overcome environmental limits on personal mobility, Car Country profoundly altered how people interacted with nature. People developed new ways of thinking about and interacting with the environments in which they lived—and lived—and particularly par ticularly with the roads and streets that ran through their communities—as federal, state, and local governments reshaped them based on the needs of wheeled trac rather than the needs and desires of people p eople living along them. More subtly, subtly, cars transt ransformed how people understood their place in the world and their ability to move around within it, redening “local” space and prompting new ideas about how to array everyday activities and enterprises across the landscape. In addition to changing people’s interactions with the environment, building Car Country required tumultuous, large-scale transformations of the natural world. Dramatic increases in automobile use spurred the growth of the oil industry and its related environmental problems, for example, which became necessary and signicant adjuncts to Car Country’s continuing successes. The momentous moment ous industrial industria l eort required to put the nation on wheels had profound profo und environmental consequences, as did the equally momentous road-construction program that provided the vast networks of streets and highways that made driving so convenient. By introducing these PROLOGUE
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changes, Car Country put more people than ever before within an easy drive dr ive of places where they could nd ample greenery, greenery, recreational opportunities, and a sense of reconnection with the natural world. In short, Car Country refashioned, on a grand scale, both the basic patterns of interaction i nteraction between people and the environment and the fundamental structure st ructure and a nd composition of the nation’ nation’s ecosystems. Almost from the beginning, these changes inspired a legion of vociferous vocif erous critics. cr itics. By the time full-blown discontent with America’s car culture and a nd its destructive environmental environmental eects nally na lly percolated up into national politics in the 1960s and 1970s, however, patterns of sprawling, low-density development had already become thoroughly ingrained in the American political economy. Moreover, Car Country’s critics too often focused on particular problems—factory pollution, tailpipe emissions, roadside eyesores, suburban “boxes made of ticky tacky,” the loss of public “open space” and “pristine wilderness”—without understanding the broader, interconnected forces at work that continued to roll out new car-dependent communities year after year. Environmentalists secured new regulations that limited some of low-density sprawl’s more damaging environmental eects, but they failed to stop sprawl itself or the engines driving its expansion. The overwhelming tendency among critics, with a few important exceptions, has been to focus on cars rather than roads and on the behavior of drivers rather than the powerful forces shaping American land-use patterns. Without Wi thout eective eective critics—and cr itics—and with car-oriented car-oriented facilities incorporated as a basic feature of the nation’s political, social, and economic approach to both transportation and land-use practices—car-dependent landscapes have multiplied, older ways of moving around have steadily disappeared as practical options for most Americans, and more and more people have begun to drive longer and longer distances, whether they have wanted to or not. In Car Country, driving and sprawl have become essential, interlocking components of American lives, landscapes, and relationships with the natural natura l world. world.
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