Book Review: Asphalt Nation

First in an intermittent series.

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When I stopped owning cars, I became, almost without meaning to, an advocate for public transportation, bicycling, and pedestrian-friendly communities. Only after I began to do some research did I realize that I was part of a movement, small but growing, a pushback against the ubiquity of the car culture and the damage it has wrought. I discovered a whole body of literature on the theme of relinquishing cars and reducing the harm that they do.

One of the first books I came across was Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back, by Jane Holtz Kay, published in 1997. The author, who died in 2012, was a Boston-based architecture critic who wrote for The Nation, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Architecture, Technology Review, and other publications. The book is thoroughly researched and copiously annotated.

For all its scholarship, however, it’s a good read. It makes a compelling case against the ubiquity of the automobile in straightforward, everyday language. It’s the best book I’ve read on the subject, and its arguments resonate with clarity and urgency nearly three decades on.

Kay divides the book into three parts that can be characterized as the present, past, and future of our involvement with automobiles.

Part I is called Car Glut: A Nation in Gridlock. In six chapters, Kay lays out the litany of cumulative problems caused by an overabundance of cars. We waste weeks of our lives stuck in traffic. Car development has historically been built at the expense of lower-income people and minority neighborhoods. The “public square” disappears in favor of privately-owned shopping malls and gated communities. Non-drivers suffer from a lack of transportation options. The car is ruinous to the environment at all stages of its life, from its construction through its operating life and disposal. It causes a variety of health problems, and it kills tens of thousands of drivers, passengers, pedestrians and bicyclists each year. Finally, car ownership is expensive, on both an individual and societal level. Sadly, almost all these problems are worse today than they were in

1997.

Part II, Car Tracks: The Machine That Made the Land, asks and answers to question of how we got here. Kay traces America’s relationship (I’m not going to say “love affair,” because it’s not) with the automobile, from the rollout of the Ford Model T in 1908 to a culture 90 years later that considers the three-car household normal. She writes of the deliberate destruction of trolley systems by car companies, and government complicity in paving the way for private cars and marginalizing all other forms of transportation.

“It is time to have it otherwise,” Kay states at the end of Part I. By the end of Part II, this reader felt not only validated, but hopeful that we can learn from our historical mistakes. “Yes, I believe we can end the automobile age,” Kay writes. “We can at least reach a consciousness of how old, how very old, how very stale the single-minded automotive solution remains. We can finally realize that we have reached the end of the automotive frontier, that the solutions are there

to see.”

The San Diego Trolley Photo credit: San Diego Metropolitan Transit System www.sdmts.com

In Part III, Car Free: From Dead End to Exit, Kay lays out some of these solutions. One is zoning – designing and building communities on a human rather than an automotive scale. Another, not surprisingly, is public transportation. At the start of that chapter is a photograph of the then-new San Diego Trolley downtown station, which didn’t exist when I moved there in 1984. Today, the expanded San Diego Trolley is a well-used regional success story. A strategy Kay calls “righting the price,” would expose and correct hidden economic biases toward the car such as widespread free parking, low gas taxes, subsidies for new highway construction and other forms of car welfare. She advocates for congestion pricing, pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, traffic-calming street landscaping, and tearing up roadways that could be put to better use – strategies that cities and towns across the country are pursuing, and in the

process discovering that it makes them more pleasant places to live and work.

One can look at the sea of automobiles surrounding us and feel discouraged – or one can read Asphalt Nation and feel a sense of hope that a saner way forward is possible. Some of it is

already happening.

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Kay, Jane Holtz - Asphalt Nation: How the automobile took over America and how we can take it back; 1997 Crown Publishers, New York, New York