Tag Archives: automobility

Atlas Sprawled

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Libertarians dream of a laissez-faire capitalist nation, one with minimal government regulation and lots of entrepreneurs. There are many reasons why this goal is difficult to achieve; however, one reason is inherent in capitalism itself. As soon as a business gets large enough to have some spare cash, it might use that spare cash to obtain favors from government.

Of course, I am not the first person to discover this. For example, the plot of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged focuses less on the evils of the welfare state than on the efforts of a well-connected steel company (Orren Boyle’s Associated Steel) to use government to squash competition from Rearden Steel.

Peter Norton’s book Fighting Traffic shows how automobile-oriented street rules are at least partially a result of similar special interest manipulation. In the early 1920s, auto sales suffered because of urban traffic congestion and bad public relations related to the death toll from automobiles running over pedestrians. The auto industry and related groups such as road-builders and tire companies (or as Norton calls these groups, “motordom”) responded in three ways.

First, motordom hijacked the safety issue by blaming the victim. Car companies claimed that pedestrian deaths were the result of something called “jaywalking” (i.e., pedestrians using the streets as they had always used them, rather than waiting for automobile traffic to take its turn). In addition to financing a public relations campaign against jaywalking, motordom encouraged cities to enact anti-jaywalking ordinances.

Second, motordom lobbied government to reconstruct American streets in ways that favored fast car traffic, and even created its own “experts” to lobby city officials. A Los Angeles auto club hired Miller McClintock, a Harvard graduate student, as a consultant. Before being hired by the car lobby, McClintock wrote that widening streets would merely attract more traffic. After going on the motordom payroll, McClintock endorsed wider streets and fining jaywalkers. Car companies then hired McClintock to establish a foundation that taught engineers how to design cities for cars. The motordom-subsidized engineers then went to work in cities throughout the country, creating the sort of streets that infest cities today: wide streets where traffic flows at speeds fatal to pedestrians. Continue reading →

Fraudo-Mobility

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(cross-posted from cnu.org)

One common buzzword used by defenders of the sprawl status quo is “auto-mobility”- a phrase calculated to imply that auto-dependent sprawl equals mobility.   But of course, this is not the case.  When other modes of transportation are made impossible or impractical, automobile dependence makes us all less mobile.

A related argument is that “automobility” empowers the poor (or women, or minorities) by enabling them to reach jobs and other destinations. But this is a self-fulfilling prophecy: if government policies are based on the assumption that everyone can/should/must drive, then more and more destinations will be accessible only by automobile, and thus people will need cars.  If government policies are based on the assumption that people should be free to use other options, then fewer destinations will be accessible only by car.

To give a simple example: imagine two towns: Freetown and Sprawltown.  In Sprawltown, everything is arranged for the convenience of fast-moving cars: roads are too wide to cross safely, there are few buses or trains interfering with car traffic, “jaywalking” laws ensure that pedestrians may only cross streets at dangerous intersections, and if you let your child walk to soccer practice you will be arrested for child neglect (since the police, like most right-thinking citizens, assume that a child is safe only when inside a parent’s fast-moving automobile or house).     In Sprawltown, someone without a car does lead a very difficult life, and ownership of a car is indeed liberating.

In Freetown, cars exist, but are not dominant.  Streets are narrower, transit options are many, and children are freer.  In Freetown, cars are more of a luxury and less of a necessity.  In a region comprised of many Freetowns, far fewer people will find a car to be liberating.