I was asked by an editor at Plough to write about cars and urbanism through the lens of technology awhile back, I accepted, and that piece was recently published.

I observed the prompt to some extent—a few technology analogies—but I really delved into a couple of European philosophers’ writing on the automobile from the 1970s. One was a Marxist-ish political thinker and the other was a Catholic priest. (I also pressed Russell Kirk into service, the founder of American conservatism, who wrote a wonderful cranky right-wing critique of the car back in the early 1960s.)

All of these thinkers, from their various viewpoints, basically were saying the same things. Things I found relatable and kind of obviously true once I read them, but also things nobody really says anymore.

Here are a few of their quotes that I used, but there are more in the piece:

“The spread of the private car has displaced mass transportation and altered city planning and housing in such a way that it transfers to the car functions which its own spread has made necessary.”

“In the final analysis, the car wastes more time than it saves and creates more distance than it overcomes.”

“It should be irrelevant to them [a free people] by what means the exercise of personal mobility is denied, whether by imprisonment, bondage to an estate, revocation of a passport, or enclosure within an environment that encroaches on a person’s native ability to move.” [He means that mass motoring, in forcing out non-car means of transportation, has actually restricted freedom of movement fully understood.]

I find these excerpts utterly striking for their…clarity. Maybe that sounds strange to say. But they are seeing the car as a social phenomenon, how it transforms us and the environment. The point I make in the piece is that while this might sound like outdated ideology today—a little turgid, a little over-analyzing, and yeah, maybe a little commie—it’s actually quite clear-eyed and objective and observational.

In the 1970s, it was still possible to see what the car had done to cities, because anyone of some age still had a pre-revolutionary reference point. So in some sense, these philosophers were perceiving and describing something that is obscured to us, because this radical shift in how urban transportation works has become common (which is not quite to say normal).

There’s a lot more in the piece, but I have to share this lead-up to the conclusion. After this, I’m not sure I ever have to write about cars and urban renewal and the 20th century revolution in land use and transportation again. I mean, of course I will, but I’m not sure I can articulate my view of it much more precisely than this:

Like all successful revolutions, the automobile revolution obliterated the memory of what came before and established itself as a staid, respectable status quo. Some will take this to mean that it was desired – that the car and its landscape are the majority preference, and that only elitists would question it. “We like the car, leave us alone.”

We? Who voted? Who chose? Did the residents of the urban blocks leveled for commuter expressways choose it? The carless families living in the only housing they can afford, semi-stranded by a landscape that never assumed they would exist? The teenagers and elderly and temporarily and permanently disabled whose ability to move around in the world is not enhanced but circumscribed? There is no we. There are those who can afford and benefit from the car and the vast infrastructure that supports its regular use, and there is everybody on the receiving end.

There is a sort of philosophical end-user license agreement to which we assent when we climb behind the wheel. That the majority rules; that might makes right; that speed bestows respectability; that mobility is a privilege dependent on one’s income; that consumerism is a civic duty; that freedom of movement demands a sacrifice in blood.

And I guess what I would further say is, damn the people who did this our cities and our neighborhoods. Who rammed expressways through people’s homes and tore down our country’s built heritage. You can say they cared about the city in the way they knew how, in that moment in time. That an “Urban New Deal” was never on the table and that suburbia and its zero-sum competition with the city was inevitable.

But I’m not asking Robert Moses, or the people who—against Eisenhower’s own better judgment—adapted the Interstate Highway program into an urban freeway program, or the “architects” of “urban renewal,” to have had a crystal ball, to have known that 60 or 70 years later a cute brownstone was going to be a status symbol or that young American would “rediscover the city.”

They didn’t need a crystal ball. All they needed to do was look at what was in front of them, to stand before human and American history with a little bit of humility, to practice the small-c conservative virtue of giving the organic status quo the benefit of the doubt, of trying to perceive the wisdom in things done a certain way for a long time.

That was all they needed to do. At least we can.

It may amaze you after reading that, but I don’t hate cars or drivers. In fact, in a couple of weeks I’ll be elaborating on that! What I’m talking about here is the system of mass, which is almost to say forced, automobility. And further, I’m talking about that system being imposed on cities.

And I would encourage anyone skeptical of that view to think about the sheer amount of time and frustration and impatience and expense and fear and injury takes place in day-to-day errand-running and coming-and-going. And I would only encourage you to ask—to really ponder—whether all of that must be twinned with mobility and access to stuff.

Our country has spent the better part of a century throwing an unparalleled amount of public investment behind that approach. But maybe, just maybe, we deserve better.

Read the whole thing!

Related Reading:

The Menace of Cars

Drinking And Driving

Speeding and the Eucharistic Prayer

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