Developers have always needed to work in concert with state and local administrators to make such projects work: they could hardly build a new suburban township in the wilderness and then just wait until the water, roads, and sewage came along to tie them into the infrastructure grid. In the beginning rural counties were desperate to stop the depopulation of their land, and they hoped that rising property and income taxes would eventually repay them for the cost of their new infrastructure. But they frequently misunderstood the cost of schooling, which eventually drove many rural counties into bankruptcy. The counties then began to solicit commercial and industrial development, to expand their tax bases without adding children. But to the degree that they succeeded in thus becoming cities on their own, they also appropriated not only the economies but also the very functions of their core cities.
The coup de grace came from the Interstate Highway System. The federal government had never taken much interest in the nation’s transportation before its arrival, and given his prescient warnings against the Military-Industrial complex, one might have thought President Eisenhower would be the last to challenge that tradition. A Republican populist, Eisenhower understood the freedom and autonomy that cars could offer individuals--he admired the German Autobahn that he literally rode to victory in the war--and like most mid-westerners, he had no sympathy for railroads. He pushed the National Defense Highway System through Congress with the disingenuous argument that a national network of high-speed highways was needed for urban evacuation routes in case of nuclear war. The resulting 45,000 miles of interstate highways remains the largest single engineering feat of any civilization in history. But attempts to celebrate its 50th anniversary this past year were about as joyful as a bureaucratic picnic.
To complement the highway system, the government subsidized the construction of some 2000 new civilian airports as well, with a similar rationale of national defense: the potential need for the military to commandeer airfields in time of war. The new systems complimented each other: airplanes took the distance travel while cars and trucks took the hauling and the local fare. Airplanes had a huge edge on ships for speed, while cars--almost equal to trains in speed--had a great advantage in convenience.
Although planes travel port-to-port like boats and trains, their terminals can’t be placed downtown for obvious reasons. If they had been integrated with the rail system and thus connected to the city centers, as was universally the case in Europe, they would have increased the financial strength of the cities instead of draining it away. But in America they were linked to the roads instead. Together, air and highways made up a new, parallel system of transportation, in which the cities increasingly became obstacles to traffic flow. Their massive public subsidies gave them a decisive edge over the privately-owned rails, whose pleas for commensurate support hardly swayed a single Congressman. The fix was in.
Although every conceivable attempt was made to pull the cities into the grid--interstate overpasses, underpasses, beltways, even cloverleafs in city centers--communities like Hartford, Atlanta, Kansas City and Detroit were only further ruined by the efforts. Nothing can change the fact that highways and cities don’t mix. Freeways take up too much room; they destroy the very environments they were built to vivify. Cars and pedestrians don’t mix well, either, because parking takes too much urban space for pedestrians to comfortably navigate. The solution in most suburban cities, oddly enough, is to do away with walking altogether.
With airlines linked to the grid instead of the ports, the cities--along with the trains and ships that built them--fell outside the new trade routes where all the new wealth was being made, and in the sixties, at the height of the American century, they all--cities, rails, and shipping--went bankrupt together. The disaster was blamed on urban poverty at the time, but poverty was a symptom, not a cause: the jobs had all gone out to the highway grid.
Although the recent re-gentrification of the cities is certainly a positive development, it should hardly be mistaken for a re-establishment of their traditional role: manufacturing and business continue to abandon them for better trade locations on the interstates, even if they’re still attractive for their beauty, nostalgia, and culture. Manhattan in particular has become the Venice of the 21st Century: a marvel of a past age, a mecca for romantics, but increasingly irrelevant to the civilization it once commanded. How long can we expect the culture of the old society to thrive, after it loses its last remaining strands of economic power? The example of Venice is not encouraging.
On the other hand, it must be said that millions of people have benefited from this transformation to a new suburban civilization, raised out of urban and rural poverty into a free, autonomous dignity in which a house, a job and a car are now possible for just about everyone. This is an enormous national achievement, and notably egalitarian: everyone, rich or poor, drives on the same roads, and everyone’s cars and houses are similar at some level because they’re all comparatively cheap. It’s what a lot of people mean by the words ‘American Dream,’ and a lot of the business of the country is devoted to providing it.
To what degree the dream is a delusion is the question no one wants to ask, given that it’s all based on cars. To begin with, cars are deadly. Forty thousand people die in their cars every year, at a rate of a hundred and ten per day. Three million more are wounded, more than eight thousand per day, and twenty per cent of the casualties are children, for whom car wrecks are the leading cause of death. We’ve lost more Americans on the highways than in all of our wars combined--some two million dead, one hundred and fifty million wounded--literally hundreds of millions of families either injured or destroyed. No previous civilization, no matter how barbaric, has allowed such affliction of its citizens. Even though the carnage has come to seem routine, the arbitrary mutilation and death of so many people is an obvious affront to the moral legitimacy of our nation.
The system takes an infamous toll on the living as well, as congestion can cost an average commuter a hundred hours--two and a half weeks--of wasted time each year. It should be obvious by now that congestion is as inevitable a product of an auto-grid system as urban density is of a port system, for the simple reason that everyone wants to build next to the freeway. The resulting gridlock pushes many to the limits of their adaptive capacity: every urban highway has a contingent of enraged drivers who court their own death, oblivious to the loss of their humanity. In a typical incident in Virginia not long ago, a mob of outraged commuters demanded that gravely injured people, thrown from their cars in a crash, be pulled off the road to let the traffic through.
The fuel that powers the cars is lethal too, in the quantities that we use it. With five per cent of the world’s population, we consume forty per cent of its gasoline, mostly in our cars, much of it blown uselessly into the atmosphere in traffic jams. In many places the air isn’t fit to breathe: each year some seventy thousand people die from pollution-aggravated respiratory disease, in places where football games have been canceled because the fields can’t be seen from the stands; where the air is so acid that it eats the faces off of marble statuary. Acid rain falls through whiskey-brown polluted skies, runs off roads and parking lots and into everyone’s water supplies, and kills whole populations of aquatic life. Plant and animal species face wholesale extinction from the massive appropriation of their habitats. And now the ultimate climatic disaster, global warming, appears to be upon us.
Even the president--a Texas oil man--speaks of our national addiction to oil, which is seen as gluttony by the rest of the world, and brings us censure in its wake. We’ve been mild and patient with countries in want of liberty like North Korea and Tibet, but oil countries like Iraq require immediate freedom, delivered with bombs and tanks. It may be true that things have always worked this way, but in the past when we abandoned all pretense of moral authority for some strategic gain, we didn’t have to do the job on world-wide television. As every former Soviet knows, the knowledge thus gained by the people is convertible to the kind of power that can topple empires.
In dealing with these myriad symptoms, we have to focus on their cause, which is the imposition of a highway grid on top of a port-based civilization. Because it happened, it seems inevitable, but that doesn’t mean that it remains inevitable. Nor is it necessarily irreversible. As with many things in history, the solution may be lying around in plain sight, undiscovered because of its very familiarity. After all, for most of humanity’s span on earth, oil itself was thought to be a noxious bane of otherwise fertile land. For all we know there may already be a transportation system that doesn’t kill its passengers, doesn’t pollute, doesn’t make us subservient to a commodity that we don’t own and can’t control; a system that would reinforce the fiscal gravity and density of our cities, and work to reverse the urbanization of our agrarian land.
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