New york automobile insurance plan
Reason Magazine - Staff
- The Quest for the Holy Rail
Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back, by Jane Holtz Kay, New York: Crown, 403 pages, $27.50
The City After the Automobile, by Moshe Safdie with Wendy Kohn, New York: NewRepublic/Basic Books, 187 pages, $24.00
The car is rapidly becoming the ultimate Rorschach test of political and socialattitudes. Try it: Do you see the car as a means of freedom, a great democratictool offering mobility and independence to the masses, a symbol of comfort andself-expression, an instrument capable of providing pleasure and enjoyment, avenue for romance? Or do you think of the car as essentially a rollingcigarette, complete with addictive properties and second-hand emissions thatare harmful to our children? Do you think the car is a symbol of dependenceinstead of freedom? Do you speak disdainfully of Americans' "love affair withthe car" as though it were a despicable perversion, or at least some kind ofserious irrationality? Do you think American Graffiti should beclassified as a pornographic movie? Do you think cars lead to aggression andcrime (think of "road rage" and those drive-by shootings), and are responsiblefor despoiling the earth ("They paved paradise/ Put up a parking lot")?
The second set of attitudes now constitutes the politically correct view ofcars and car culture, and if the car haters have their way, it won't be longuntil the "car lobby" evokes the same odious connotation as the "tobaccolobby." If you think this is a paranoid exaggeration from a Jeep-driving lifemember of the Auto Club, just browse practically any page of Jane Holtz Kay'sAsphalt Nation, which is the most complete compendium of anti-carclaptrap ever assembled. Perhaps we should not be surprised at the result,since Kay is the architecture critic for The Nation. The book would makefor hilarious saloon reading--in fact, I thought perhaps the book could be atongue-in-cheek put-on, which is what I think Click and Clack of NPR's CarTalk had in mind when they provided a dust jacket blurb--were it not forthe fact that anti-car sentiments are becoming increasingly accepted. Not longago I watched a grown congressman on C-SPAN calling for a tax break forcommuters "who would like to do the right thing" and ride mass transitinstead of driving to work. The premise--that driving to work is immoral--wentunchallenged.
You know you're on the wrong side of the elite divide when the very firstsentence of the book begins with "It took a village"--I'm not making thisup--"to raise this book.""Our transportation is a tangle," Kay writes, "ourlives and landscape strangled by the umbilical cord of the car." Cars are badbecause they are a means of "instant gratification," which we all know is themodern American vice par excellence. "The licentious motor vehicle" allows for"unleashed consumption." The car is a "voracious icon" of "hypermobility," anagent of "spatial greed," an "accomplice" in the rise of Kentucky Fried Chickenand Taco Bell. We need to supplant the car culture, she concludes, because itwould be good for our "state of being." We even get a dose of postmodernfeminism in the mix. Independent mobility is a boon to women, you say? Not onlyis this thinking like a man, according to Kay, but "it is a false form ofconsciousness that fails to assess women's enslavement to the motor vehicle."
The only anti-auto cliché missing from this book is the old chestnutabout the alleged 1940s conspiracy by General Motors and other auto-relatedcompanies to put L.A.'s beloved Red Cars out of business (though the demise ofthe Red Cars is duly lamented). But while this standard myth is absent, Kaymakes up for it with several new whoppers of her own. Car vibration causesmuscular and skeletal damage, for example. And those big urban riots in the1960s that have baffled social scientists for so long? "Freeway construction"was "a major cause." Buybacks of old cars to reduce air pollution arebad--because people will buy new cars. Japan, she thinks, is morecompetitive than the United States because they pay "truthful" gas prices($5.00 a gallon) and ride their bikes a lot more. (Apparently Kay hasn'tchecked on the vigor of the Japanese economy lately.) Meanwhile, Kay thinks"the car culture paved the road to `Black Tuesday'" (i.e., the 1929 stockmarket crash). We even have the reductio ad Hitlerum: "Adolf Hitler's emergingautobahn had sparked America's vision for a transcontinental road." Gee, theNazis built big highways, ergo...
At times it seems as though Kay is striving to find new extremes through whichidealism can marginalize itself. Even the Progressives and FDR come in forcriticism because they liked cars and roads too much. But far from beingmarginalized, Kay's anti-car philosophy is the intellectual underpinning of thedominant currents in transportation and urban planning policy today. From theIntermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act ("Ice Tea" to the cognoscenti)to the much in vogue "new urbanism" on the local level, the moraldisapprobation of the car is the central premise of policy. For both Kay andMoshe Safdie in his The City After the Automobile, at the heart of theargument about cars is a much bigger argument about land use and urbanplanning. You know what's coming: a huge expansion of government power.
Cars, as Kay points out, make possible "the scum of sprawl." Safdie is lesslunatic in his aversion to cars than Kay; his book is not the anti-car screedthe title would suggest. An avant-garde architect (he was the principaldesigner for Expo '67 in Montreal), Safdie is concerned chiefly with urbanform, and his thesis could be reduced to four words: Don't make things square.Safdie is right that much of the monotony of urban form arises because of rigidplanning codes and, more important, lack of imagination. But both Safdie andKay, along with many of the "new urbanists" who share their view, display anamazing inability to learn from the planning mistakes they rightly decry. Ifplanning has made a botch of things in the past, constraining imagination andthe marketplace alike, why should we embrace an even more intensive scheme ofgovernment planning?
The answer, of course, is that reformist idealism, along with faith in theability of well-meaning people to "do better next time," is irrepressible.Combining old-fashioned reformist idealism with the anti-auto animus, we willbe, to paraphrase the old millennialist slogan, "forced to be (car) free." Kayfinds light rail "exhilarating" (she clearly needs to get out more, and perhapswrite a stage play entitled A Desire Named Streetcar) and joins thechorus singing the praises of Portland, Oregon, as the model for the nation.This model calls for compelling much denser development, urban limit lines tocontain urban size, and intensive use of mass transit. For mass transit, Kayrightly points out, "you need mass." Portland has established a powerfulregional government to enforce the plan and has spent billions for a lightlyused light rail system, while eschewing new road construction completely.Evidence from Portland suggests this model is already starting to break down(even TheWashington Post recently ran a front-page storyentitled "Cracks in Portland's Great Wall"), but the propagandists continue toportray it as the promised land.
Kay cites Jane Jacobs, who, to be sure, dislikes cars, but who dislikesambitious planners even more. Both Kay's and Safdie's vague prescriptions callto mind Jacobs's warning that "people who get marked with the planners' hexsigns are pushed about, expropriated, and uprooted much as if they were thesubjects of a conquering power." Safdie, for example, ends a confused passageabout central planning and the free market with this inscrutable imperative:"We must create new conditions in which a vision of the city is integrated withfeedback from the city's inhabitants, and in which a central authority isvested with power to enact this vision in a manner unthreatening to individualsor communities." Whatever that means exactly, it can't be good.
Safdie is an innovative architect, but he should stick with designinggeometrically challenged buildings. His suggestion for solving our mobilityproblems is truly bizarre. He thinks we should make cars a public utility.Inspired by the use of communal bicycles in Amsterdam, Safdie thinks we shouldgive up owning our own cars and instead be able to pick up and drop off small"utility cars" (or U-cars) as we need them at depots scattered throughoutcities. Think of it as Hertz and Avis in every neighborhood. Because such carscould be stored more efficiently than in typical parking lots or private homes(he has hand drawings of the spatial arrangements in the book), we would savehuge amounts of space in our cities. Kay, meanwhile, is not only largelyoblivious to market solutions to genuine mobility problems (such as congestionpricing and privatization), but is positively hostile to them, especially fortransit systems. "[T]he quest for `efficiency' through privatization is amenace," Kay writes.
Even though commonsensical Americans are not going to stand for being coercedout of their cars any time soon, the anti-car and urban planning nostrums ofthe idealists are achieving axiomatic status. People are being made to feeljust a bit guilty about driving, at least by themselves or for "unnecessary"trips. Forget the Sunday drive. It is a crime against nature. As James Q.Wilson recently pointed out, if the automobile were first inventedtoday, it would face i
