I wrote a series of pieces recently, starting with an essay over at Plough, and followed up by two pieces here—one basically an elaboration/reiteration of the Plough essay, and the second a little bit of a clarification.

TLDR, I was writing about the effects that the car, and particularly its widespread adoption, had on old cities. I drew on a couple of similar essays by André Gorz and Ivan Illich (respectively, a Marxist-ish philosopher and a Roman Catholic priest-philosopher). They both argued in the early 1970s that by enabling such fast mobility, the car had the effect of spreading out development and creating a built environment that demanded a car. Which meant that the mobility it unlocked was a mirage in many ways, because the scale and placement of cities came to assume that speed once the car had reached market saturation.

In the last piece, I clarified that I was talking about the car as the default mode of daily transportation, not the car in and of itself. I noted that a lot of the early New Urbanists were actually car enthusiasts: they hated how sprawl ruined the rural landscapes and country roads. I thought about how initially, it was typical for a car to be more of a rich family’s toy than a way to run errands. You’d commute on mass transit, and then take a weekend drive for fun.

Maybe we got it right with that approach. But I have always wondered why that broke down. I’d like to think, but I’m not certain, that we could have continued like that. In other words, what I’m asking is, where did what we call “car dependence” come from?

So I saw this tweet the other day, quoting self-described anarchist blogger Kevin Carson, who wrote an essay critiquing Ivan Illich. It’s a long essay, but there’s a bit in particular about car culture which makes a very interesting argument.

Carson argues that car dependence/car culture/car-oriented land use—whatever you want to call it—not only came after the car itself, but that the speed we associate with the car came afterwards as well. And therefore, that most of the effects on land use that we blame on cars, or on mass car ownership, are really the fault of something else. Take a look at his argument:

In the case of car culture, the problems of sprawl and automobile dependency did not inevitably result from the automobile itself, but from the power interests that redesigned society around it. The problem was created by subsidies to monoculture development, freeways systems imposed by eminent domain, and legal prohibitions — like zoning — against mixed-use development.

Before the rise of car culture and car-centered urban design, the norm was the compact, mixed-use city or town where residences were within foot, bicycle, bus or streetcar distance of the downtown district where people worked or shopped. Increased population was accommodated primarily by modular proliferation — e.g. the railroad suburb — rather than outward sprawl.

Absent the imposition of car culture by the federal and local governments and by the local real estate industry, the automobile would have served a useful niche function in cities laid out in the old fashion. Its primary market would have been people like farmers in the areas outside cities, where population concentrations were insufficient to be served by streetcar or rail lines. For periodic trips into town and back, perhaps in a small truck capable of conveying a load of vegetables to the farmers’ market or bringing home groceries and dry goods, a light internal combustion engine or electric motor would have been sufficient. With no need for rapid acceleration on the freeway, there would be no point for heavy engine blocks with six cylinders, and the overall weight of the vehicle could be reduced accordingly. With flat body panels capable of being produced on a cutting table, there would have been no need for Detroit’s two- or three-story stamping presses. The automobile industry would have been an affair of hundreds of local factories.

Hence it is not true that “[p]ast a certain threshold of energy consumption, the transportation industry dictates the configuration of social space.” Rather, the configuration of social space dictates the forms of transportation adopted, which dictates the level of energy consumption.

The first bit there is your typical libertarian or just plain urbanist critique against zoning and urban freeways. (Not to say it isn’t accurate.) But the rest of this is really interesting, and isn’t an argument I’ve heard before. Carson is essentially saying that the freeway invented the car, not the other way around.

This sounds possibly too perfect to be true, although I’ll note, again, that Europe is basically the supercar capital of the world, but has also retained a lot of old-fashioned cities. A lot of everyday driving cars in Europe are or were quite basic and small. (For example, the Fiat Panda.) The supercars are for showing off and largely for tracks. But there’s a smaller market in Europe for large, powerful, arguably overbuilt cars that end up just running errands all the time. So if you squint, you can see Carson describing Europe’s ultimate settlement with the car.

What do you think? This is a new argument to think about in terms of this well-worn question of whether or not there was any conceivable universe in which America kept continuity with its pre-car cities—or whether something like the American transportation and land-use landscape we have today was overdetermined all along.

Related Reading:

The Near Occasion of Speeding

The U-Turn Not Taken

An Urban People

Traffic Report

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