The Case Against the Auto

Tom Wetzel

Note: The following article originally appeared in ideas & action #14, 1990. This was the second article in a series. Copyright Tom Wetzel.

The issue of transportation cannot be separated from how communities are organized. The way in which worksites and residences are laid out on the earth’s surface presupposes a means of getting around. The effect of transportation on community organization is easy to see if you look at the communities that have seen the greatest amount of growth in recent decades – such as Santa Clara Valley or the Southern California coastal plain – and then compare them with older cities, such as New York City or San Francisco, which were built up before the era of the automobile.

Employers need to be accessible to their workforces, and major retail centers need to be accessible to their customers. The older cities concentrated more living and working space into a smaller area because the real estate developers in the earlier decades of this century were restricted by the forms of transportation that were readily available to the bulk of the populace of that era: walking, streetcars, “el” or commuter trains, bicycles.

Workers had to either live within walking distance of the factory or have access to it on a rail transit line. Transit services of that era were rather limited as they were financed by private funds, often by real estate speculators.

The huge freeway and road construction programs of the 1950s and 1960s, however, greatly changed the nature of urban development. Freed from the need for public transit, the land area occupied by urban uses began to expand much more rapidly than population growth. This happened because the postwar highway construction boom suddenly made huge areas of agricultural and undeveloped lands much more accessible.

Land prices are a function of the “value-added” (i.e. increased market value) from human production that takes place there. When the freeways made agricultural areas more accessible, this enhanced the marketability of houses and commercial buildings erected there. This causes land values to skyrocket since the construction of buildings, and the production activities relocated to these new settlements, have a higher “value-added” than farm produce.

Commercial and residential developments tended to leapfrog out into the countryside, following the newly built superhighways, as real estate speculators grabbed at cheap land prices beyond the fringes of existing development.

If a person lives in an older, more concentrated city, life without the car may be a bit more feasible. Greater density of residences and worksites cansupportamore developedtransit system. More places you want to get to may be within walking distance. Even in this case, however, the jobs may have shifted to the fringes of the metropolitan area. Increasing numbers of people find themselves facing a “reverse commute” from city to suburbs.

Market is the Problem, Not the Solution

Prior to World War II, highway-oriented planners had developed schemes for a highway system that would be grade-separated designed for high speed – the highway equivalent of rail rapid transit. Except for

Related Topics: Automobiles –