“You should not have to own a car to prosper in this country, no matter what kind of community you’re living in.”
– Pete Buttigieg, United States Secretary of Transportation
How sweet it is to hear what one has been saying for years articulated at the top levels of government. I’m not alone. Independently and by the millions, Americans have begun to recognize that automobile ownership need not be a necessity in their lives, and that we should stop designing communities and commercial areas as though it were.
When I started researching and writing Slower Traffic, I discovered that I was part of a quiet but significant movement that questioned the efficacy of the car culture: the toll it took on planetary resources, household finances, and human lives. Almost by default, we became advocates for sidewalks and bicycle lanes and longer bus routes and hours, and then for trains, and car-free downtowns. Now much of that will be public policy.
It’s been a long time coming. You can thrive without owning a car, even in Maine. But it takes a bit of work and planning. Incentives help. If most of the proposed infrastructure bill gets through Congress intact and onto the President’s desk, it will mark a significant U.S. commitment toward reducing fossil fuel consumption by steering people away from cars. It’s a job that, sooner or later, has to be done.
In 1997, Boston-based architecture critic Jane Holtz Kay published Asphalt Nation, a scathing report on the true cost of the car culture. In it she coined the phrase “the late Motor Age,” (which I have partially co-opted for the subhead of this blog). It’s what we’re living in now. Kay wrote: “…we must and can end a late auto age in which every transportation decision is a highway-based, driving-first decision… Human will and political action can become the engine to find ways to reduce the sway of the internal combustion machine.”
Jane Holtz Kay died in 2012, but she would have been pleased to hear the Secretary of Transportation, two dozen years down the road from Asphalt Nation, endorse her vision of a less car-congested future.
Like baseball, government is inherently conservative, slow to respond to change. But both can be forces for good when they put their weight behind ideas whose time has come. We need new bridges to take us beyond the Age of the Automobile and all it hath wrought: mega-malls, and dying downtowns, and suburban ballparks in the middle of parking lots.
The train of progress may be slow, but at least it’s moving in the right direction.
