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NOWHERE_TRIP

                                           October 30, 2001

The Car, as I'm getting          EDGE_CITY
increasingly interested in
arguing, is perhaps another
name for Government, in the           ("Government" *sometimes*
disguise of the Market.               means "The People", though.)

"The Geography of Nowhere"
(1993) by James Howard Kunstler             NOWHERE_MAN
has some good stuff about cars
as a public policy, rather than
a result of the free market:


   "A civilization completely dependent on
   cars, as ours is now, was not
   inevitable.  The automobile and the
   electric streetcar were invented and
   made commercially viable at roughly
   the same time: the period from 1890
   to 1915.  However, the automobile, a
   private mode of transport, was
   heavily subsidized with tax dollars
   early on, while the nation's
   streetcar system, a public mode of
   transport, had to operate as private
   companies, received no public funds,
   and were saddled with onerous
   regulations that made their survival
   economically implausible."
                      p 86


   "The costs to the public mounted early.
   A commission under President Hoover
   concluded that the automobile was the
   "most potent influence on the rise of
   local taxes between 1913 and 1930.  The
   price of building new roads and repaving
   the old cobbled city streets was
   staggering.  Chicago spent $340 million
   on street-widening alone between 1910
   and 1940.  The new low-density auto
   suburbs required expensive sewer and
   water lines to be laid _before_ the new
   homes were sold -- meaning that the
   carless urban working class had to pay
   for the new infrastructure that the
   car-owning middle class would enjoy."

                      p 90


   "The federal government got into the
   act of subsidizing auto use in 1916
   with the $75 million Federal Road Act
   to improve post roads and to encourage
   the states to organize their own
   highway departments by giving them
   money.  A second Federal Road Act in
   1921 sought to improve 200,000 miles
   of state highways with the idea of
   linking them up to form a national
   network.   ...   In 1925, the
   national system of numbered routes
   was adopted, and for the first time
   highway spending topped $1 billion
   for a single year.  Kenneth Jackson
   makes the shrewd observation that
   'although the motorcar was the
   quintessentially private
   instrument, its owners had to
   operate it over public spaces.' ... "

                     p 90


            References:

            Kenneth T. Jackson - _Crabgrass
            Frontier:  The Suburbanization
            of the United States_, New
            York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

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