Why We Drive: The Past, Present, and Future of Automobiles in America by Andy Singer
Places Discussed
- Many and various
Book Notes
"The automobile's need for space literally destroys urban areas! " (p. 55).
The author's main point in this short book
is simple and eloquent: we are being bullied into cars.
Andy Singer has long been known for his cartoons that
satirize automobile-centric culture.
In this book, Singer describes some of the thinking behind his cartoons:
political and economic policy has been set up so that people who
do not have a car
are punished mercilessly (often to the point
of death) and that those who have and use cars
are coddled, subsidized, and treated
with a different set of laws than the rest of us.
This is not the result of some mysterious conspiracy, but
an out-in-the open collaboration of
the oil, road-building,
automobile, real-estate, and related industries who have
steadily merged interests to make profits from car culture.
Singer's accomplishment is to vividly and clearly make the case of
the title "why we drive" using his cartoons and footnoted facts and
sources.
Singer cites many different sources to support his points including Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took over America, and How We Can Take It Back by Jane Holtz Kay (1997) which is a more in-depth analysis of this topic. Singer also brings up some very insightful points I've not found expressed in detail elsewhere:
- Singer suggests dividing cities into two sections: driving and non-driving (p. 8). Just as the ill health effects of smoking led to laws to protect non-smokers, so too might laws that combat pedestrian injuries, death, and illness due to automobiles might be passed. I think this could be accomplished at the micro-scale--that is, not whole city sections or large neighborhoods, but plazas and sections of streets which are pedestrian-only.
- Singer cites Ivan Illich's analysis in Energy and equity (1974), in which given to the number of hours spent on car maintenance and earning the money to pay for it, an American might spend 1,600 hours to go 7,500 miles -- a return of about five miles per hour! In other words, a typical driver could go the same distance easily by bike if he used all the time he or she spent supporting the car to instead riding a bike! (p. 15).
- Twenty to forty percent of a car's pollution comes from its manufacture and disposal (p. 53). So-called "green" cars simply shift when and where the pollution happens. I also observe that green cars take up the same kind of space in cities, pushing out other use and requiring subsidies for car storage (See Shoup).
- Thirty to fifty percent of American land is given over to accommodate cars through roads, access roads, parking lots, etc. (p. 55).
- There are many costs cars incur that represent lost tax revenue and increased costs for healthcare--an enormous subsidy which is often not addressed (p. 67).
- Walking or bicycling is a more efficient way to move people--more people can be moving in a given space than by cars (p. 85).
- Transportation departments at all levels of government build roads in a sort of perpetual-motion machine to capture funds and expand their own power. Because public transit is ignored, it gains no power, and is thus underfunded (pp. 101-115).
Related Links
- AndySinger.com: author Web site
- Goodreads.com page for Why We Drive
- People Places: Car-Free: links to help you have a car-free lifestyle.
Related Books
- Streetfight
- Asphalt Nation
- The Wealth of Cities
- Suburban Nation
- How Cities Work
- Global City Blues
- Get Urban!
- Cities
- Sprawl Kills
- A Whole New Mind.
- The Trap
- The Option of Urbanism
- The High Cost of Free Parking
- Cul-de-Sac Syndrome
- Waiting on a Train
- Triumph of the City
- If Cars Could Talk
- The Great Inversion
- The End of the Suburbs
- Parking Reform Made Easy
- Urban Street Design Guide
- Dead End
- Why I Walk
- Parking and the City