Asphalt Nation

I finally got around to reading parts of Jane Holtz Kay’s Asphalt Nation, which came out in 1998 and seems as relevant as ever.

Kay says the problem is beyond gridlock; it’s “lifelock” — reliance on the automobile for everything.

She explains that commuting is not the big bad menace I had thought it was. No, the menace is far more insidious and intertwined… the menace is errands.

Nearly 80% of car trips Amerincans make are errands! Milk. Toothpaste. Little league. The doctor. The gym (talk about silly). The theater. A restaurant. As Kay writes, “the ministuff of life clogs the nation’s roads.” (And yet, what reasons — i.e excuses/justifications — do we come up with for buying big cars? We say it’s so we can take big, long-distance vacations.) When the book was written a decade ago, american households averaged 6 round trips per day.

Kay writes about kids losing their independence and freedom as a result of being transported everywhere they go, with no capacity to get anywhere on their own. She blames the automobile-way-of-life for removing neighborly interaction and eye-to-eye contact from kids’ lives, and for turning the elderly into “prisoners with no one to talk to and nowhere to go.” She calls it a social tragedy, and she’s right.

“Autonomy demands mobility and mobility demands a car,” she writes. Yet “we seem to forget that the “freedom” is reduced by the servitude of a car-bound society that denies movement any other way.”

If there’s any good news, it’s that these are lifestyle choices… and as we know, there is another way…