Dead End: America on Wheels
ERWIN, ROBERT
Dead End: America on Wheels ROBERT ERWIN There is a standard comic scene in which the zany tries to cope with a menacing heavy. When the bruiser says, "I'll knock you flatter than a tortilla,"...
...Every such campaign should include an effort to draw in greedy, ambitious, ruthless allies, and give them an incentive to bury Detroit...
...The possibilities are endless...
...Houses are likely to fetch a premium in any district that lowers its rating on the smog index several points below the figure for the surrounding region...
...A call to the personnel office tells you the only way to reach Mr...
...Yet the ineffective tactic, juggling fares, continues to be the popular one...
...Over short distances, walking and bicycling are a whole order of magnitude higher in efficiency than cars in transporting people...
...Conversely, are the sites organized by this society fit for human use, since they appear to be designed for visitation rather than occupancy...
...According to John Jerome, the author of The Death of the Automobile, "One car driving from Santa Monica to Pasadena burns up more oxygen than the total population of Los Angeles breathes in the same forty-five minute period that the motor trip takes...
...For example, simple engineering change, such as a ceiling of 100 horsepower on engines, could reduce gasoline consumption in the United States by a third...
...The automobile increases both the need for transportation and the social cost of transportation...
...Under the pressure of shortages and slumps, inefficiency can go down...
...No reduction occurred...
...Johnson is through the plant security office...
...Close reading revealed that on a typical weekend they drive 120 miles to and from their favorite hiking trails...
...Users require extravagance for purposes of selfindulgence, egotism, and status competition...
...By itself, however, the level of inefficiency does not reveal the intrinsic squandering powers of the automobile...
...Take the energy crisis...
...The handling of information about the automobile provides some of the comedy...
...A few months ago Metro, with headquarters located in an area with more cars per square foot during business hours than any other downtown in America, decided to subsidize parking for 125 staff members...
...How do I get groceries for tonight's supper...
...Meanwhile the hardship imposed on the secretary, the waiter, the mailman, the librarian, and the bank teller who must reach the same work space is supposed to be the stimulus for some vague alternative transportation...
...only the response is silly...
...Because automobile use per person rises with the movement outward, however, and because smog increases by 3 per cent for every 1 per cent increase in gasoline consumption, suburbs also spread pollution rather than disperse it...
...Dead End: America on Wheels ROBERT ERWIN There is a standard comic scene in which the zany tries to cope with a menacing heavy...
...A Harvard economist makes a case for creating an improved transit system in nearly every U.S...
...To facilitate traffic, on the other hand,' spoils a district for human habitation...
...If it becomes impossible to hide the true costs of the automobile, then managers, upper professionals, and the well-to-do in general are prepared to " s h a r e " with the public the burden of increased taxes, tolls, parking fees, and fuel prices...
...For this reason, during Connecticut's crackdown on reckless driving a few years ago—probably the strictest and most prolonged in American history—the number of crashes in the state went up 8 per cent...
...About the same time, an American newspaper ran a feature story on a middleaged suburban couple who hike a lot and who were therefore presented as models of how to adjust to the curtailment of gasoline sales...
...It is culturally permissible to transmit criticism of the auto, but not permissible to receive it...
...Disposable vehicles would probably catch on as readily as disposable tissues...
...Therefore, inspired noncomprehension is the rule...
...Iron would be gone in fifty years...
...Car sales rose too...
...All through the history of the automobile, solutions that don't work have been favored and repeated...
...Studies of pulse rate and blood pressure—for some freeway drivers higher than for astronauts at blastoff— point to the auto as a factor behind strokes and heart attacks...
...According to economist E. J. Mishan, "Even if reserves turn out to be four times as large as currently estimated, we could keep going only for another fourteen years...
...American drivers collectively log more than a trillion miles a year in their cars and trucks, and individually average nearly a month and a half of eight-hour days per year behind the wheel...
...The point is that the automobile tends toward whatever level of inefficiency is necessary to exhaust whatever resources are available...
...In the guise of fighting air pollution and noise as well as "saving gasoline," one could advocate reviving streetcars...
...Now a $500 price increase even with production allegedly increased by 43 per cent and the work force reduced by 25 per cent in the Corvette division alone...
...People are willing to risk their livelihood and their health on the automobile and tie their vanity and their fantasies to it...
...virtuous examples are set...
...The inefficiency is incredible...
...The late Paul Goodman made the point that it would be much cheaper to bring materials to a workers' neighborhood once a month than to transport scattered workers to and from a plant every day...
...Nevertheless, the United States still leads the rest...
...indeed, that is one of their main functions...
...About one American in every six depends on the auto for income...
...To counter the itch of the well-off to base their convenience on somebody else's hardship, charges for the use of an automobile—so long as the auto remains the common form of transportation—ought to be levied according to income, that is, the individual's take from the common economy...
...The dangers are serious...
...An increase in the number of registered vehicles and an increase in the average frequency of use easily offsets safety measures...
...Thank God they won't have to ride the bus...
...To get two or three minutes more walking time at traffic signals in the city might pay off tenfold in obstruction...
...But neither are criticism and ridicule sufficient to break up ingrained patterns of behavior...
...Almost none of this space is available for anything except passage and storage of cars, although a large part of it is nearly empty when it is not overloaded...
...If oil consumption continues on this upward curve, the world's total known and estimated supply will be exhausted in twenty to thirty years...
...The makers, installers, and merchandisers of electronic equipment, to name further prospects, stand to benefit from more accessibility for less locomotion...
...In the long run no society can afford the drain on time and resources simply for going back and forth...
...But, even though monkeyshines are bound to go on at all our destinations, must the transportation system itself be built for Abbott and Costello...
...When a contract is let to design or to test a steam-powered vehicle, say, or a moving sidewalk, or dial-a-bus, the parties should be held jointly responsible for gauging what jobs are likely to be lost and gained...
...Richard Nixon, that peerless leader, met the gasoline shortage by allotting more than three times more money to highway construction than to mass transit in the budget he proposed for fiscal year 1975...
...When something unpleasant or unsettling appears to lie ahead, the rich and the powerful are inclined to push ordinary people out in front, like hijackers shielding themselves behind hostages...
...As Europe's oil supply began to plunge in the fall of 1973 because of the Arab embargo, an Italian official solemnly proposed a speed limit of 75 miles per hour...
...But if science found cheap new fuels and materials, auto inefficiency could go up...
...Highway destruction would need to be called something like the American Land Expansion Program in public and explained in private as a windfall for contractors, bureaucrats, and union business agents—all those specifications and inspections, all that paving to be torn up, all the space to replant...
...The oil, steel, cement, lead, glass, and rubber industries would shrink drastically without the automobile...
...What's Good for GM One way you can learn something, if you happen to suspect there's an econpmic ripoff going on in the land, is to talk to some workers at the Corvette division of General Motors...
...The depletion of resources through such nonsense is all too credible...
...But instead of reducing production, these workers, who know how to count people and make cars at the same time, said output during the "energy crisis" went up, first to eight and then to ten cars per hour going through the line the rest of the year—with 25 per cent fewer men...
...Otherwise a decongestion effect is predictable: if the streets clear a bit, everyone will think of driving again unless other pressures are increased...
...More than 100 possible transit systems have been conceived in recent years (with names such as airmobile, monocab, synchroveyor, tubeway...
...The remaining trips, 7 per cent, are divided among all other forms of transportation...
...Most enemies of the motor vehicle ignore an elementary principle of persuasion: for credibility, grant some good to what you oppose...
...No wonder these workers suspect that something fishy is going on...
...The good old cry of "keep taxes down" should be applied to road surfacing materials and maintenance schedules...
...At present, this takes the form of a level of inefficiency that could soon use up all the oil and iron in the world...
...The most insidious danger created by the automobile is dependence—similar to the dependence created by one-crop farming and company towns...
...As pointed out many times before, the automobile runs down cities and towns...
...Producers, suppliers, and service enterprises make money off extravagance...
...One individual in the Department of the Interior reportedly outlined 250 promising energy-conservation modifications...
...Yet most people believe, at the bottom of their hearts, that cars are wonderful...
...Fresh talent is constantly developing in the art of not coming to grips with the automobile...
...Most information about cars reveals their destructiveness...
...Being one who suspects so, I did so...
...One obvious place to look for allies is the chemical industry...
...That reduced the work force to 375 from 500 on the two shifts in the division, a reduction that meant workers with up to five years' seniority were tossed into the ranks of the unemployed...
...Half a century ago Lewis Mumford pointed out why the car would spoil the city...
...Nor would it hurt to admit that there is something appealing—expendable but appealing— about a shiny vehicle with power at your command...
...Much in favor of a livable community and a rational transport system, he nevertheless makes allowances that other critics of the auto should not be afraid to make...
...Not quite all the blame should be put on the auto culture, however...
...it furnishes privacy and guarantees a seat...
...Laughing at the scene on Three Stooges Parkway is all right to keep up the morale of opponents of the automobile and to remind us that humorless lectures in economics and engineering are not sufficient to move people or embarrass vested interests...
...It is no surprise that even a majority of poverty-level Americans have a car or part use of one...
...Planned obsolescence, the concealed cost of additional trips, and a hundred other pressures and inducements will continue to operate...
...Today's standard American car gets fewer miles to the gallon than did its predecessor fifty years ago...
...After a time, out of habit and vanity, many forty-five-year-olds would never apply for a license...
...The automobile is dangerous, all right...
...The odds are that these substances contribute to the incidence of lung cancer, emphysema, and respiratory disease and thus hasten 100,000 deaths per year...
...Why not...
...Dependence on toothless government agencies is still another example...
...For example, despite a potential 100 million new customers, the patronage of public transit in 1970 was less than half what it was in 1925...
...Again, the truth is different...
...About 80 per cent of all U.S...
...Chevrolet, to cite a classic case, designed a promising pollution-control valve in 1924, then dropped it...
...Besides running cities and towns down physically, the automobile is a major source of corruption...
...Yet, the average car in the United States is parked more than twenty hours a day...
...The facts are that improved service (shorter waits, speed, comfort) stimulates use of public transit far more than fare reductions and that the subsidy implicit in curbside parking in most American cities is worth three times the fares collected on public transit...
...Virtually every car offered for sale is capable of exceeding the speed limit, and the courts in the more populous states are so tolerant of traffic crimes that the prosecuting authority on the average spends $5 more getting a conviction than is recovered in fines...
...In stretching functional distance and hence making transportation more important, the automobile kills off other ways of going anywhere...
...Extravagance too is a curse of the automobile (and the truck...
...At the end of August 1973, Washington, D.C., was so besmogged that a number of workers were sent home with shortness of breath, headaches, and so on...
...The beauty of reviving streetcars would be to make the streets impassable for all autos, including those of chauffeur-driven corporation and government executives...
...Louis plant is the only place Corvettes are made), somebody in charge could make a killing if he went straight to the bank every day...
...Even the drunk can complain that in large parts of the country it is almost imperative to drink, and to drive in order to drink...
...A final principle to bear in mind: Every proposal to develop new transportation technology ought to include an estimate of the effect on employment if the technology works...
...Comical though the handling of information about the automobile may be, it is only a sideshow compared with the ludicrous handling of the automobile as a problem...
...Over greater distances, where a lane of highway carries 3,600 people per hour by car, 42,000 could go by train or 60,000 by bus...
...The majority may still bring on mass asphyxiation...
...Roy C. Johnson is foreman of the Corvette assembly division...
...trips are made by car...
...It is easy to cite disquisitions on passenger miles and torque, but hard to find in the literature one answer to the obvious questions: "How do I go to work this morning...
...The truth is that the principal choice is whether or not to be a normal member of society...
...The electric equipment and electric power industries are logical places to look, too, even though the oil companies have a hold there through ownership of much of the coal and gas that fuels the plants...
...Another example is the perennial scheme of luring people onto mass transit by holding fares down or even lowering them...
...Another 13 per cent are made by air...
...Remedies are talked up...
...After the smog thinned out with a change of weather, the man in charge of COG pollution headquarters dismissed the flirtation with mass suicide that he had just failed to control...
...We are a zany species, cousins to the chimps, and dazzled by our own commotion...
...We are rich in ideas and designs—and not one person in 10,000 hears about them, much less has a chance to try them...
...Measured by energy expended for weight carried per distance traveled, pipelines, waterways, and railroads are upwards of 75 per cent more efficient than current motor vehicles for hauling freight...
...Streets and parking areas lock up 35 to 50 per cent of the land in a motorized city...
...Also in folklore, people collectively can lower the risk if they wish, by demanding safer cars, cleaner engines, driver education, improved highway design, strict law enforcement, and so forth...
...If these sound like strange goings on at General Motors, equally strange is trying to reach company spokesmen for their comments on them...
...The level moves with circumstances...
...The crucial thing is to put further disincentives to work when any aspect of motoring improves temporarily...
...Only the response to the automobile is silly...
...Woody Allen, cornered en route to the library, warns a bloodthirsty mugger to back off: "Listen, fella, this book is way overdue...
...Gough Street in San Francisco, for example, which carried 2,000 cars per day in 1957, was altered to carry 7,500 per day by 1967, and during that period the average length of residence dropped to half that of less-traveled nearby streets...
...corporations get the majority of their revenue from motor vehicles and highways...
...Once the automobile clearly dominates, it wastes further space by speeding up commercial and residential decay...
...Wait, though," one of the men said...
...The Clean Air Act of 1970 and its amendments, though not likely to be enforced now that it might cost votes, would have increased manufacturing and operating costs, lowered performance, raised fuel consumption, and yet left the automobile as the main form of transportation...
...The periodic worry over long waits and finding interim transportation might hasten the end of the automobile...
...Social equity and the need to get rid of the auto require that the $25,000 a year person and the $6,000 a year person both experience a crushing expense...
...They've now also raised the price of cars by an average of $500 each...
...Business Week estimates that about half of all U.S...
...Double tracks down the clogged streets of most cities would make driving unbearable...
...Under cover of "saving gasoline* ' one could lobby for mandatory engine tune-ups twice a year with a system of licensing" official mechanics to make them artificially scarce like doctors and plumbers...
...The so-called oil shortage, for example, though perhaps brought on prematurely by the oil companies, was due sooner or later anyway— the result of severing consumption capacity from the earth's resource base...
...This agency is the capital's best hope for unclogging the streets, lowering pollution, shifting to energyefficient transportation, and in all such matters it is a shining example to the nation...
...Thirty years later "plann e r s " disillusioned with urban renewal "discovered" the same thing...
...Its performance is in large part socially rather than technically determined, and extravagance is its social function...
...In many places a person without a car is cut off from the most ordinary activities * such as seeing relatives or hunting for a job...
...First a flukey "energy crisis...
...If " n e w " forms of transportation must be developed, the well-to-do give top priority to a radial high-speed transit system out to the far suburbs, with stops a mile and a half apart...
...Work part of every week at home...
...In folklore, the individual sets his own level of risk by choosing when, where, and how carefully he will drive...
...These allies should equal in guile the land speculators who, after bribes are deducted, typically make a 2,000 per cent profit when a new highway comes through...
...benefit of merchants, shoppers, schoolchildren, buyers of front footage, and others...
...Ride a bicycle...
...Owen might have added that, like central heating and electric power, a car can be used with almost no knowledge of where it comes from or how it works...
...In 1973, at the plant in north St...
...Since the first recorded victim of the automobile was killed in 1899, the number of deaths has climbed toward two million...
...The automobile, he says in The Accessible City, "is always ready to go at the traveler's pleasure, can reach any destination by any route selected...
...Its use increases the average distance between functional components— dwelling and workplace, church and shop—without relieving congestion in the long run...
...Adoption of the Rankine vapor-cycle external combustion engine, for instance, would boost the sales of heat exchangers, high-temperature lubricants, and fluorocarbon fluids (and probably lower the cost of oil for petrochemicals by lowering the demand for gasoline...
...If attempts are made to prevent decay by reducing traffic in and around a district, business goes elsewhere...
...At the time, seven Corvettes per hour were going through the assembly line...
...The stupendous figure of a trillion miles a year raises fundamental questions...
...The number of passengers on the average intercity auto trip is fewer than three...
...I think we're in good s h a p e , " he told a reporter...
...but he weaves and bobs backward, so that he can reach the door and run like hell...
...It is a protection from the rain, the cold, and the heat...
...Join a car pool...
...Louis, where automobiles go through the assembly line at a slower pace because Corvettes are built on individual order, General Motors laid off 125 workers on the ground that people were not buying gasoline slurpers as readily any more...
...As long as an automobile culture can keep going at all, it will encourage more vehicles and more use of vehicles...
...How bad can inflation be...
...And so on...
...In the 1940s and 1950s any number of journalists and sociologists emphasized that Detroit sells thrills, gadgets, glitter, status, and obsolescence...
...Highway construction, for example, simply draws more cars onto the road...
...In the city, a car moving at thirty miles per hour requires as much space as sixty pedestrians...
...JAKE MCCARTHY in the St Louis Post-Dispatch...
...This was demonstrated long ago— opening-day traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike reached the level engineers had predicted for twenty years later...
...As compared with preautomobile days, the distance an average individual must travel to reach the offices, factories, stores, hospitals, open land, homes, and places of recreation expands...
...There a sergeant tells you that the only thing he can handle is emergency calls...
...But it seemed to me that if GM increased production by 43 per cent while reducing the work force by 25 per cent (the St...
...A happy notion for the period when cars and trucks are decreasing but not yet gone would be to set the minimum age for obtaining a driver's license at forty-five (except perhaps for some invalids and for a few young people with quick reflexes to handle ambulances and such...
...For what in proportion to their income is a modest rise in expenses, they can continue to drive, possibly on decongested roads...
...Today, the automakers are conspicuously not building Rankine vapor-cycle external combustion engines, which dispense with transmission, starter motor, carburetor, and engine-block cooling system and which burn inexpensive fuel such as kerosene without emitting pollutants to any great extent...
...At least twentytwo countries now have more than a million vehicles each on the road, and they all plan to have more...
...Nationally, half of all auto trips fall under three miles...
...In real life, the automobile, a menace if ever there was one, triggers equivalent scenes of zany and, for the most part, ineffectual evasion...
...Despite publicity, direct physical danger from the automobile is underestimated...
...With the sheer volume of traffic already on the verge of defeating present paving technology, only a little more deterioration would be necessary to generate countless potholes...
...Furthermore, among critics of the automobile there is a lack of concern for the immediate needs, practical and emotional, of the people who must be persuaded...
...Almost $22 billion per year goes into streets and roads in the United States...
...A call to the main office tells you that he has a restricted telephone and the only way to reach him is through the personnel office...
...In the United States alone, about two million tons of gasoline a year are lost simply through evaporation...
...metropolitan area within months at low cost by routing buses on decongested expressways...
...Even though the system will do nothing for a housewife who must get food home or a ghetto worker who needs to go crosstown, the affluent can appreciate this sort of "reasonable" experiment...
...When the bruiser says, "I'll knock you flatter than a tortilla," Jerry Lewis shadow-boxes ferociously...
...Along with running down the community, the automobile directly threatens health and safety...
...It involves less walking, no waiting, and no stopping to pick up and deliver other passengers en route...
...and additional congestion in town is worth seeking...
...Some seven of ten commuters who drive ride alone...
...The employment dimension is just as much a characteristic as size and weight...
...You don't have to be an economist to wonder if what's good for General Motors might be a flat tire for the country...
...Perhaps that is asking too much...
...Wilfrid Owen is one of the few critics to give the automobile its due...
...Having created an incessant need to go places and having left no other way to get there, the automobile becomes an enormous burden...
...Next time COG will again be the antipollution spearhead...
...Or look at Metro, the agency in charge of public transit for Washington, D.C...
...The eighty-five million tons of pollutants emitted per year by motor vehicles in the United States consist mainly of nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, and carbon monoxide—substances that harm the eyes and lungs...
...If no plausible estimate can be made, then the technology in question may not be worth the risk...
...Even in elaborate disguise, of course, only a few anti-automobile measures are likely to slip through for a while...
...Thus, even the abandonment of the auto by a sizable minority would not necessarily lower the general danger...
...Besides repeating solutions that don't work, ignoring ones that might work is also a mainstay of the automobile culture...
...An estimated 50 to 75 per cent of drivers whose licenses are revoked or suspended go on driving anyway...
...Similarly, the widening of the sidewalks might be presented as the Boulevard Movement for th...
...Selective destruction of highways is desirable, for example, to make it harder to get from place to place by car or truck...
...Every campaign for sensible transportation should try to create disincentives against the use of the automobile...
...They should equal in predatory skill the door-to-door salesmen who trade on status anxiety...
...Primarily because of the automobile, use of energy in transportation in the rich countries is rising more than twice as rapidly as population...
...Mathematics makes dull reading, especially subtractions in one's uninflated check book...
...Homeowners as a class offer another possibility...
...More than 800,000 firms have no other business, and twentytwo of the fifty largest U.S...
...Suburbs provide storage space for automobiles...
...A realistic social and political dimension ought to be added to campaigns for sensible transportation...
...The location of many plants and merchandising firms would be nearly worthless without motor vehicles...
...The fact that it is less predictable and less controllable dictates prudence rather than indifference to consequences...
...political contributions, legal and illegal, come from the highway lobby...
...But by the time the burden becomes so heavy, dependence has grown monstrously...
...More is spent on cars than on clothing, and roughly 70 per cent of state capital funds are used for building and maintaining roads...
...Is a society bearable that so frequently puts its members in transit rather than somewhere they want to be...
...Disguises are plentiful...
...These are only a few examples...
...But the only discernible reaction to a series of New Jersey turnpikes had been further waves of road building...
...For thirteen days smog remained at the danger level, and during that time the Council on Government (COG) issued warnings and instructions on how to reduce traffic...
...In 1972 "research*' was conducted by resource economists to "disclose" that annual model changes cost a fortune...
...Direct obstacles, if they are egalitarian, may be preferable to money measures, even equitable money measures...
...Within an automobile culture, many locations are inaccessible, literally or socially, except by car...
...Disguises and pretexts have to be found to pursue such goals, because passionate attachment to the automobile, cultural inertia, and vested interest assure unbelievable hostility...
...On the other hand, traffic is so heavy in most metropolitan areas that a slight additional impediment may bring on a crisis from which the automobile will never recover...
...In the face of a population explosion and an insatiable demand for energy after World War II, the automobile was made less efficient...
...Under these circumstances, joining a car pool is about as significantly effective as boiling a potful of water to secure an uncontaminated public water supply...
...Pollution is getting worse in the suburbs and staying high over weekends...
...Up against a house detective who looks as though he couldn't be stopped with an elephant gun, Harpo lifts a stuffed swordfish off the wall and jabs the man in the behind...
...According to one estimate, a third of the trucks that perform local hauling in the New York metropolitan region are idle on any given weekday, and about half those on the move at a given time are empty...
Vol. 38 • December 1974 • No. 12
