Why We Drive: The Past, Present, and Future of Automobiles in America
160
Why We Drive: The Past, Present, and Future of Automobiles in America
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781621064862 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Microcosm Publishing |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2012 |
| Series: | Bicycle Revolution Series |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 6.60(h) x 0.50(d) |
| Age Range: | 16 - 18 Years |
About the Author
Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Saint
Paul Pioneer Press, Boston’s Weekly Dig, San
Diego CityBeat, and many other magazines and newspapers. His weekly syndicated strip No
Exit ran in 24 papers simultaneously during its peak. Andy is cochair of the Saint Paul Bicycle
Coalition, trying to make Saint Paul, Minnesota more bicycle-friendly.
Read an interview with Andy on our blog!
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Many people believe that America's addiction to automobiles is a cultural problem. The thinking is, if engineers, elected officials and the public were better educated about transportation issues, they'd shift the country away from cars and towards public transit and better land use. In reality, our country's automobile addiction has more to do with politics, government agencies, and our tax structure. For nearly two decades, polls, referendums, and increased use show overwhelming public support for better transit and automobile alternatives. Yet the development of these alternatives has been slow or, in some states, non-existent. To understand why, this book first discusses the problems caused by cars. Then it examines the history and mechanics of highway politics. And finally, it suggests some ways that money can be directed away from highway building and towards non-automotive transportation.
An acronym used repeatedly throughout this book is "D.O.T." or "DOT" for short. This stands for "Department of Transportation." Almost every state has one. This is the agency that builds and maintains all your state and federal highways. If you're lucky, it also builds and maintains a few bikeways and a little public transit. In Minnesota, we have the "Minnesota Department of Transportation" or "MnDOT." Some states, like Massachusetts or Pennsylvania also have "Turnpike Authorities" in addition to DOTs. In many respects, these function much like DOTs. So, when I refer to DOTs, I'm also referring to Turnpike Authorities.
I am an advocate for car-free cities, car-free city sections and car-free living. This image represents my vision of a car-free city.
You might ask: "Why would you want to give up your car?"
Giving up your car commits you to living in an urban or dense suburban area. This is because only these areas can be regularly negotiated by bicycle, walking, or public transit. Giving up your car commits you to your neighbors and commits you to collective social relationships because you are more dependent on your immediate neighborhood for employment, goods, and services. Giving up your car also commits you to behaving in a more time and energy-efficient manner, and it commits you more deeply to public transit and the environment. By giving up your car, you become a better political advocate for transit, for cities, and for your neighborhood, since you gain a more intimate knowledge of how they function.
Allowing your beliefs to impact your lifestyle on this level is what I would call "orthodox environmentalism." It is similar to the lifestyle chosen by the Amish. They refuse to use cars or certain technologies precisely because they feel it adversely impacts their community. Once you give up your car, you'll see more clearly how cars and hyper-mobility do, in fact, destroy community.
Giving up your car has many benefits. Each year, the average American drives 13,476 miles and spends over 13 forty-hour weeks behind the wheel of a car. Studies show all this driving is partly responsible for the exploding rates of obesity. They point to suburbanites' increased need to drive. So, giving up your car keeps you in better physical shape and decreases the amount of time you spend moving between destinations.
Because Americans spend a sixth of their income to own and operate cars, not having a car saves you money — over $7,479 per year, on average, to pay for gas, oil, maintenance, insurance, depreciation, tolls, tickets and parking. As the cost of fuel rises this cost of car ownership will rise as well.
As the late Ivan Illich pointed out back in 1973:
"The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. ... The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour."
Today, we drive twice as many miles as we did in 1973, but the cost of car ownership and thus the number of hours we devote to our cars has also doubled. For all our money, time, and effort, we're still moving slower than a bicycle.
Like the science fiction movie The Matrix, giving up your car unplugs you from the Matrix of American car culture. From birth, you are unconsciously lured into the car and lured into seeing the world from the viewpoint of a car windshield.
Fortunately for me, my father liked bicycles and trains.
Cars are viewed as status symbols. If you have one (especially an expensive one), you are viewed as "Successful." If you don't have a car, you are considered "Unsuccessful."
Cars are romanticized on television, in films and in popular music. There are thousands of songs, TV shows, and movies about driving, racing, road trips, and car chases. Just because something is romanticized, however, doesn't mean it's good for you. Alcohol, guns, drugs, and cigarettes are also romanticized in popular culture. But, like cars, they are bad for your health or even deadly.
To see what cars have done to our landscape and look for alternatives, it is instructive to look at pre-automotive cities or pre-automotive city sections. These older pre-car or car-free areas are often popular places to live. The Cathedral Hill or Merriam Park neighborhoods of St. Paul, Minnesota, where I live, are good examples of this. These buildings and much of the neighborhood were built in the late 1800s and early 1900s along an electric streetcar line. By 1900, most U.S. cities had networks of street railways and cities were planned around them. Buildings were designed to be taller and closer together so that everyone in the neighborhood would be within easy walking distance of the streetcar line.
Pre-automotive or car-free areas are huge tourist attractions. As my friend Ken Avidor says, even when they don't live in them, Americans love to visit places that are walkable or have great public transit. This includes places like Disney World (and other amusement parks), Venice, The Casbah, The old sections of Brussels or London, the French Quarter of New Orleans, or this spot — the North end of Boston.
Built in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, Boston's North End features narrow streets, beautiful churches, courtyards, pocket gardens, and old graveyards ...
... complete with restaurants, banks, stores, and a host of services. This is where Paul Revere's house and the Freedom Trail are located. It has a few cars but no space for parking, and the streets are narrow enough that any motor vehicle traffic is reduced to a crawl.
Tourists also love to see the pre-automotive, pedestrian sections of downtown Boston and the "Boston Commons." There is actually a car-free strip, 2 blocks wide and 4 blocks long, right in the heart of downtown Boston that is enormously popular and vibrant. It's called "Downtown Crossing." It's located on Washington Street between Temple and Bromfield and includes portions of both Winter and Summer Streets. Only vehicles with commercial plates are permitted in this area (for loading and unloading) and only between 6pm and 11am.
People also love the 1920s streetcar neighborhoods to the west of downtown Boston. These feature pre-automotive three and four-story walkup apartments along transit corridors, with lower density housing on the side streets. In the early days, transit, by its very nature, created dense housing, because people had to live within walking distance of the transit line. The general pattern would be a transit line on a larger street that was zoned for denser commercial or mixed use buildings, then 6-10 blocks of slightly lower density, residential housing, followed by another transit line.
You can see this transit-oriented style of housing and city planning in many of the neighborhoods of Minneapolis and St. Paul. They contain two to three story walkup apartments and old homes with big front porches. Before cars, you came and went from your house via the front door. Thus the porch was your interface with your neighbors.
The automotive suburban tract homes did away with porches. You enter these houses directly from the garage and have limited interaction with people around you. Because of the space required by cars, suburban homes take up more land and are inherently spread further apart. Thus, unlike transit, cars tend to promote low density, sprawling development and reduced human interaction.
This postcard of New York City says it all. This is the same spot in 1922 and 1996. Space formerly devoted to human beings is now devoted to cars. Park avenue used to be a long, linear park until it was gradually destroyed to make way for more automobiles.
Even in 1922, the advent of steel, electric water pumps, and electric elevators gave birth to skyscrapers and buildings that were out of scale with human beings. This made them potentially inefficient. As Ivan Illich argued that the optimal speed for human relations is the speed of a bicycle, I would argue that the optimal building size is closely-packed two to four story walkups. This is because they provide an efficient level of walkable density and yet they can be built, maintained, and lived in without the need for external energy. Skyscrapers and almost any building above six stories is dependent on electric power to function. In contrast, a two to four story walkup can remain habitable even in blackouts.
Besides their impact on architecture and urban design, cars have other downsides. One huge downside is their wasteful use of fuel. One out of every seven barrels of oil pulled out of the ground around the world is now burned up on American highways. Our need for oil is probably a major reason that the Bush administration chose to invade Iraq. Even when not at war, the U.S. spends billions of dollars maintaining a carrier battle group in the Persian Gulf to ensure that oil supply lines stay open. We've done this as far back as the early 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war.
Another downside of cars is air pollution. In addition to the soot that comes out of their tail pipes, cars produce "tire dust." This is a mixture of petroleum-based rubber and particles that tires and brake discs shed as they wear down. Tire dust can contain asbestos and heavy metals. If you live next to a highway or major boulevard, tire dust and soot are what blackens parked cars, windowsills, and porches. You breathe them, and new research shows that children who grow up near heavily used roads can have permanently reduced lung capacity, putting them at risk for asthma, illness, and premature death as adults.
In most urban areas, motor vehicles are also overwhelmingly responsible for smog and bad air quality.
In addition to air pollution, cars pollute our water via oil runnoff from streets and highways, leaking gas station tanks and tanker spills. Most importantly, vehicle carbon dioxide emissions are one of the biggest contributors to climate change and global warming.
In addressing climate change and air pollution, the environmental movement tends to focus on increasing fuel efficiency standards and reducing vehicle emissions. Periodically, they are able to raise the "Corporate Average Fuel Economy" (CAFE) standards for new cars and trucks.
To raise fuel economy and lower emissions, environmentalists and auto makers tend to advocate for hybrid and alternative fuel vehicles. While hybrids are a necessary and available improvement, alternative fuels like hydrogen fuel cells are a long way off and have a host of problems.
Hydrogen is not an energy source in itself. It merely functions as a battery and offers a way of holding electric current that is less toxic than conventional batteries, which can contain acid, lead, and other rare or toxic materials. The problem is that hydrogen is currently much less efficient than conventional batteries, meaning that significantly more energy must be put into creating the hydrogen than can be obtained from it in electric current. Also, most hydrogen is currently created using nuclear power or fossil fuels like coal, making it even less environmentally friendly.
Hydrogen fuel cells would need to be a lot more efficient and the hydrogen would have to be created from wind or solar power to have any positive impact. Such advances in hydrogen fuel cell technology are a long way off.
Powering cars with biofuels like ethanol has also been a focus of industry and, initially, many environmentalists. Unfortunately, studies show that ethanol can produce as much or more greenhouse gas and pollution than burning conventional fossil fuels. This is because energy, fertilizers and other inputs are required to grow and process the corn, sugar cane, or other agricultural products, and because forest land is often cleared for growing it, particularly in Latin America. Ethanol ends up being more of a subsidy to big agribusiness corporations like Archer Daniels Midland, than a viable alternative fuel. It also has the unintended effect of driving up food prices by taking land away from food production.
More importantly, hydrogen, ethanol, electricity, and other alternative fuels often ignore the fact that 25-40% of the pollution and greenhouse gas a car will emit during its lifetime doesn't come out of its tailpipe. Instead, it comes from the car's manufacture and disposal. The iron, nickle, aluminum, and other metals in a car's frame and engine require huge amounts of energy to mine and forge. The plastics in its body, interior, and tires all use petroleum. While newer electric and hybrid vehicles might have lower tailpipe emissions, their batteries and components are made from more energy intensive materials. This increases their CO2 and pollution emissions during manufacturing, recycling, and disposal.
The cement and asphalt in highways also need huge amounts of energy and fossil fuels to grind, heat, transport, and spread. Cement production alone is responsible for 5% of the world's CO2 emissions. It's the same thing with the steel in bridges, overpasses, and other highway components. If you include the energy and CO2 emissions from road building and maintenance, more than half of motor vehicle pollution and greenhouse gas is an inherent part of building, maintaining, and disposing of vehicles and roads. Alternative fuels won't change that, even if they manage to reduce or eliminate tail pipe emissions.
More than emissions and fuel use, however, the biggest problem posed by cars is that they waste so much physical space. The average car uses 90 square feet of space in one's home, 90 square feet of space at various destinations, 180 square feet of road surface at each location for maneuvering and 60 square feet of space to be sold, repaired, and maintained. Thus, 30 to 50% of urban American land is paved over to accommodate cars. In Los Angeles, 60% of the city is paved. In Houston Texas, the amount of asphalt is 30 car spaces per resident. The automobile's need for space literally destroys urban areas!
This 2004 photograph of downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota illustrates this. The need for car parking and driving has virtually eliminated the downtown itself and it has helped create "Urban Dead Zones," where no one lives. They only house office space, sports facilities, and acres upon acres of parking. This is typical of most American downtowns.
This is a photograph I took of downtown St. Paul, Minnesota on a Sunday afternoon. Not a soul is using this vast space — not even many cars.
You can't see this from the photo, but to either side of me are surface parking lots. So, surrounding a downtown urban intersection, you have three surface and one elevated parking lot. If this space was instead used for housing, then people wouldn't have to commute to downtown. They could live right in it!
This is another photograph of downtown Saint Paul taken on the same Sunday afternoon. Few businesses are open and almost no cultural activities are taking place.
Once again notice the surface and multi-story parking lots on land that could be used for housing, office space, or retail stores.
Highways, streets, and parking lots destroy a city's property tax base by eliminating taxable property — property that pays for schools, public safety, libraries, and health services. Whenever I look at a highway or parking lot, I consider what formerly existed on the land it now occupies and what could exist.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Why We Drive"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Andrew B. Singer.
Excerpted by permission of Microcosm Publishing.
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