CA R COUNTRY

AN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORYForeword by william crononchristopher w. wells

WEYERHAEUSER ENVIRONMENTAL BOOKS

William Cronon, Editor

Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books explore human relationships with natural environments in all their variety and complexity. They seek to cast new light on the ways that natural systems affect human communities, the ways that people affect the environments of which they are a part, and the ways that different cultural conceptions of nature profoundly shape our sense of the world around us. A complete list of the books in the series appears at the end of this book.

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University of Washington PressSeattle and London

ChristoPher W. Wells

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CAR COUNTRY

AN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORYForeword by William Cronon

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Car Country: An Environmental History is published with the assistance of a grant from the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Endowment, established by the Weyerhaeuser Company Foundation, members of the Weyerhaeuser family, and Janet and Jack Creighton.

© 2012 by the University of Washington PressPrinted and bound in the United States of AmericaDesign by Thomas EykemansComposed in Sorts Mill Goudy by Barry SchwartzDisplay type set in Intro by Svetoslav SimovFirst paperback edition 201418 17 16 15 14  5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

University of Washington Presswww.washington.edu/uwpress

library of Congress Cataloging-in-PUbliCation DataWells, Christopher W.Car country : an environmental history / Christopher W. Wells. p. cm. — (Weyerhaeuser environmental books)Includes bibliographical references and index.isbn 978-0-295-99429-1 (paperback : alk. paper) 1. Automobiles—Environmental aspects—United States—History. 2. Automobiles—Social aspects—United States—History. 3. Transportation, Automotive—United States—History. 4. Urban transportation—United States—History. 5. City planning—United States—History. 6. Land use—United States—History. i. Title. he5623.W45 2012   388.3’420973—dc23   2012026654

The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi Z39.48 –1984.∞

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For Marianne

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CONTENTS

Foreword by William Cronon ixAcknowledgments xv

PrologUe: A Car of One’s Own xix

PART I Before the Automobile, 1880–1905 3

1 Roads and Reformers 5

PART II Dawn of the Motor Age, 1895–1919 35

2 Automotive Pioneers 37

3 Building for Traffic 65

Photo Gallery One 105

PART III Creating Car Country, 1919–1941 123

4 Motor-Age Geography 125

5 Fueling the Boom 173

6 The Paths Out of Town 201

Photo Gallery Two 228

PART IV New Patterns, New Standards, New Landscapes, 1940–1960 251

7 Suburban Nation 253

ePilogUe: Reaching for the Car Keys 289

Notes 297Selected Bibliography 379Index 413

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FOREWORDFar More Than Just a MachineWilliam Cronon

If I were to ask my students who invented the automobile, I suspect their most likely response would be Henry Ford. That answer would be wrong, but wrong for the right reasons. Although there are a num-ber of candidates for the first creator of a road vehicle powered not by animals but by steam or electricity or petroleum, no one person can be given credit for the transportation technology that ultimately changed the face of the planet over the course of the twentieth century. By the time Ford began adding gasoline engines to four-wheeled vehicles in the 1890s, he was one of a small legion of inventors all trying to do the same thing. He became famous in 1904 when one of his cars set a new land speed record of more than ninety miles per hour, but that is not why my students (and most of the rest of us) remember his name more than anyone else associated with the early history of the automobile. It was his invention of the wildly popular Model T in 1908 that assured his place in history and in our memories.

Ford’s Model T may not have been the first automobile, but it was the first to make a compelling case that owning and operating a car might become a normative experience for most Americans. By embrac-ing a robustly simple design that any reasonably competent mechanic could maintain, by using standard interchangeable parts, and by man-ufacturing the vehicles by arranging workflow along an assembly line (a technique he introduced in 1913), Ford was able to reduce his costs of production so much that he could repeatedly cut the price of these “Tin Lizzies,” successfully marketing them to middle-class customers and even to his own workers. When his employees began quitting because of the grueling pace required by the assembly line, Ford doubled their wages by introducing the five-dollar workday, which had the indirect effect of making it more possible for these working-class Americans to purchase the cars they were building. Ford eschewed changes in style, famously remarking that his customers could have the car in any color they wanted as long as it was black, and this too held down costs even though it opened the door to the changing styles and brands that by

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the 1920s would characterize one of Ford’s most successful competi-tors, General Motors. But that lay in the future. By the end of World War I, half the cars in the United States were Model T’s.

That is why my students would not be entirely wrong if they guessed that Henry Ford invented the automobile, for that error hides a deeper truth. Although we tend to think of a car as a single object—that is, after all, the way we purchase it—it actually consists of myriad different parts, each of which has behind it a complex his-tory of invention, development, and use. The internal combustion engine has quite a different history than the petroleum distillates that power it, the generator providing the sparks to ignite that fuel, the drive shaft that conveys rotational energy to the wheels, or the rubber with which the tires on those wheels are made—and this list only scratches the surface of all the different pieces that must be brought together if a car is ever to make it out of the garage and onto the road. Ford’s genius was to figure out a way to assemble these parts in the cheapest possible way, which in turn enabled him to sell more than fifteen million Model T’s by 1927.

But the car itself is hardly the end of the story. If most of us take utterly for granted the complex inner mechanisms beneath the hoods of our automobiles, the same is no less true of complex features of the highways and street systems on which we operate these vehicles and the landscapes through which we drive. Although a passing familiar-ity with the history of transportation technologies quickly leads one to conclude that the twentieth century was the age of the automobile just as the nineteenth century had been the age of the railroad, most of us rarely stop to think about what that actually means. In truth, the rise in the United States of a culture in which mass ownership of automobiles became typical constituted one of the most sweep-ing cultural and environmental revolutions in human history. What Ford and his fellow automobile manufacturers helped invent—with help from countless others—was essentially a technological ecosys-tem, an intricate set of interconnected inventions, institutions, and behaviors that by mid-century more or less defined the American way of life.

This is the great insight that organizes Christopher W. Wells’s superb new book, Car Country: An Environmental History. Wells

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seeks in this lively, playful, and wonderfully accessible account to introduce readers to the transformations wrought upon the national landscape of the United States to make it fit for Americans and their cars. He tells us the stories not just of Ford and his Model T, but of highway engineers, street designers, real estate developers, policy-makers, and all the other people and professions who created the automobile infrastructures that became second nature to Americans during the twentieth century. Almost nothing about Car Country escapes Wells’s eye: the gravel and asphalt with which highways are paved, the layout of streets designed for different speeds of travel past and through neighborhoods, the road signs and other navigational devices that enable strangers to make their way through communi-ties they have never visited before, the retail institutions that were able to attract ever larger numbers of customers from ever greater distances—and, of course, the concomitant challenge of figuring out where all those customers could possibly park all those cars. Witness the emergence of this automobile-dependent landscape in the pages of this book, and you will never again see the world around you in quite the same way.

You can read this book purely for the pleasure of discovering the stories behind endless features of your own life and world that are probably so familiar that you barely even notice them. I know of no other book that explores in a single volume so many different aspects of our automobile-dependent culture: the design of cars, the paving of streets, the engineering of highways, the refining of gasoline, the taxing of fuel sales at the pump, the laying out of subdivisions, the marketing of real estate, the zoning of cities, the building of parking lots, the lobbying of legislatures, and so on and on and on. If any of these sound dry or technical, never fear: Chris Wells is an engaging storyteller, and the only thing dry about this book is his sardonic wit. Amid his many explanations of how and why Car Country works the way it does—and he is a master explainer—is a constant peppering of anecdotes and observations that make the book a delight to read.

But Wells also has a much larger purpose in mind. He opens the book by reflecting on his own youthful enthusiasm for the first vehicle he ever owned, a 1975 sr5 long-bed Toyota pickup truck that symbol-ized freedom and adulthood and that made his teenage comings and

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goings far easier than would otherwise have been the case. Then he went off to a small liberal arts college without a car and found to his surprise that he rarely missed it—except when he returned home to Atlanta and found himself in need of a vehicle to do almost anything. During extended travels in Europe, he again found himself missing his car almost not at all—until he came home to Atlanta and again felt his mobility and lifestyle severely cramped, because neither his bicycle nor the available mass transit options were sufficient to get him safely to where he needed to go. “With such poor options for getting around,” he remembers, “I felt incapacitated without a car.” Then he went off to graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin, where the univer-sity and its student neighborhoods are compactly laid out on an isth-mus between two lakes, and suddenly the car again became as much an inconvenience as a benefit.

From this small autobiographical sketch, Wells draws a large and important conclusion. Once one recognizes that the automobile is not just a machine but a single element in a vast technical ecosys-tem in which every part is connected to every other and all human behaviors and institutions are shaped by its presence or absence, one is forced to recognize that any changes in this car-dependent land-scape are almost inevitably trickier and more complicated than they first appear. It’s not just that Americans love their automobiles; it’s that the landscape we have created for them makes no other options available to us. We have no choice but to love them. John Muir once famously said of the natural world that “when we try to pick out any-thing by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” The same is equally true of the human world, for reasons that have as much to do with history and culture as they do with nature. It has taken more than a century to create the complex interconnec-tions that have made Car Country second nature to us. The scale of our resulting dependence on the automobile is so vast—ranging fractally from the largest public works project in history (the inter-state highway system) all the way to what we do when we feel the impulse to drink a well-made cup of coffee—that unwinding these dependencies is hard even to imagine. And yet we may have no choice in the matter, since some of the elements on which the system depends—cheap liquid fuel most of all—may prove less sustainable

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in the twenty-first century than they appeared to be in the twentieth. Sustainable or not, the challenge of imagining our transportation future will require a better understanding of our transportation past than most of us now possess. To grasp the complexities and fascina-tions and paradoxes of Car Country, I know of no better guide than this engaging book.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When I first began to work on what ultimately became this book, now nearly a dozen years ago, I had little inkling of just how much its com-pletion would rely on the stunning generosity, support, insight, and assistance of others. I can never hope to repay the debts that I have accrued, but I am more than happy to name names.

I owe particular thanks to my mentors at the University of Wiscon-sin–Madison, Bill Cronon and the late Paul Boyer, whose extraordi-narily high standards for scholarship, teaching, advising, and engaging with a scholarly community were exceeded only by the understated grace and modesty with which they both modeled those standards. I am more grateful than I can say for their advice, rigor, generosity, and friendship. James Baughman, Rudy Koshar, Eric Schatzberg, and Stanley Schultz also lent their critical eyes and ears to my research in its early phase, improving it in ways large and small. Chuck Cohen, Linda Gordon, Bill Reese, Anne Firor Scott, and Joel Wolfe had noth-ing directly to do with this project, but all are fine scholars and teach-ers who went out of their way to help me learn what it means to be a historian.

At the University of Washington Press, acquiring editor Marianne Keddington-Lang provided constant advice, encouragement, and support through the long process of transforming my research into a book. Together with Bill Cronon, she has helped make the Weyer-haeuser Environmental Books series at the University of Washington Press into a real community of authors, not just a list of books. Were I to have tried to dream up a better editor, I would have fallen well short of the mark that Marianne establishes. I am indebted as well to Julie Van Pelt, who read the final manuscript with an incredible combina-tion of precision and artistic sensibility.

Many others have read drafts, offered advice, and helped me with the process of transforming crude ideas into a more polished form. Peter Norton and one anonymous reviewer read the entire manuscript with critical eyes, offering suggestions and insights that measurably

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improved the final product. Ellen Arnold and Tom Robertson read and critiqued most of the manuscript, much of it in prose so raw that none but true friends would willingly subject themselves to the task. Greg Bond, David Hertzberg, Hiroshi Kitamura, and Michael Rawson all read and commented on the lion’s share of my dissertation, and Jeff Allred, Thomas Andrews, Will Barnett, Katie Benton-Cohen, Tracey Deutsch, Jim Feldman, Jeff Filipiak, and Alexander Shashko also read, commented on, and improved various portions of the book. Thanks as well to J. Brooks Flippen, Mathieu Flonneau, Libbie Freed, Jordan Kleiman, Timothy Lecain, Tom McCarthy, Clay McShane, Martin Melosi, Federico Paolini, Pamela Pennock, Paul Sutter, and Thomas Zeller, and the audiences of panels at various conferences where I pre-sented pieces of the research in this book. Thanks for their help and insights to Brian Black, Ed Linenthal, Karen Merrill, Ty Priest, and the anonymous readers at the Journal of American History; Pamela Laird, John Staudenmaier, and the anonymous readers at Technology and Cul-ture; and Claire Strom at Agricultural History. And finally, a heartfelt thanks to the students in several iterations of the research seminar that I have taught on the subject of this book at Macalester College, Davidson College, and Northland College. In addition to giving me a platform to think out loud about its subjects and issues, these students contributed their own perceptive ideas and provided a critical audi-ence, helping me weed out some of my less useful approaches to the material.

Before I could write a word, I benefited from the labors of what feels like a countless number of librarians, reference specialists, and archivists, who helped me navigate collections and track down elusive materials while offering the sort of moral support that keeps isolated researchers going even when they encounter an inevitable rough patch. At The Henry Ford, where I spent four months in the archives, thanks to Judith Endelman, Mark Greene, Cathy Latendresse, Andy Schor-nick, and Linda Skolarus. I also owe a substantial debt to the staff of the Library of Congress, who filled my steady stream of book orders and shared their magnificent reading room, which served as my daily office for six months. Jeffrey Stine and Roger White at the Smithson-ian showed me their collections, answered my questions, and helped make my time in Washington a pleasant experience. I would also

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like to express gratitude to the many librarians and archivists at the National Archives II, the Bentley Historical Library, the Detroit Public Library, the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and the Minnesota Historical Society. The interlibrary loan staffs at both the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Macalester College secured a multitude of sources ranging from the important to the obscure, without which I simply could not have written this book. Last but not least, Terri Fishel and her staff provided a sabbatical office in the Macalester College library, offering a quiet place to work as well as help and collegiality whenever I descended from the garret.

A remarkable range of people contributed to my research along the way. Maggie Hughes helped me get organized as I pivoted from work-ing on research to working on a book, and Ben Poupard confirmed a hunch by tracking down important evidence in the Ford archives. Trent Boggess, Lendol Calder, Bob Casey, and David Louter gener-ously shared their knowledge and materials at key points in the process. Aaron Isaacs shared his vast expertise about railroads and streetcars at a crucial point and provided the commuter rail timetables for St. Paul Park that became the basis for one of the maps in this book. I owe an eternal debt to Ross Donihue, Sarah Horowitz, and Birgit Muehlen-haus, who applied their GIS savvy to help me transform a motley mix of timetable information, railroad and streetcar maps, road construc-tion maps, oil pipeline maps, and my own nascent ideas into elegant cartographic renderings.

Even more people provided intangible support along the way as friends, colleagues, students, and intellectual sparring mates. Spe-cial thanks to Shelby Balik, Karen Benjamin, Jonathan Berkey, Ann MacLaughlin Berres, Dawn Biehler, Louisa Bradtmiller, Scott Breuninger, Thea Browder, Ernie Capello, Chris Capozzola, Adri-enne Christiansen, the late Judy Cochran, Hal Cohen, Alison Craig, Vivien Dietz, Jerald Dosch, Ann Esson, Ted and Abby Frantz, Tony Gaughan, Aram Goudsouzian, John Gripentrog, Suzanne Savanick Hansen, Paul Hass, Sandy Heitzkey, Dave Holmes, Jack Holzheuter, Dan Hornbach, Lynn Hudson, Mary and Toni Karlsson, Tina Kruse, David Levinson, Jane Mangan, Christie Manning, Sarah Marcus, Tom McGrath, Sally McMillen, Ray Mohl, Alicia Muñoz, Lara Nielsen, Nancy O’Brien Wagner, Roopali Phadke, Bill Philpott, Peter Rachleff,

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Andy Rieser, Mark Rose, Honor Sachs, Jim Schlender, Zach Schrag, Matt Semanoff, David Sheffler, Tony Shugaar, Deb Smith, Kendra Smith-Howard, Chris Taylor, Trish Tilburg, Dan Trudeau, George Vrtis, and Kristen Walton.

Generous financial support also helped bring this book to fruition. At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, various grants and travel fellowships helped launch the early stages of research. A Henry Austin Clark Fellowship from The Henry Ford made possible my extended time in Dearborn. Several awards from the Mellon-funded Three Riv-ers Center at Macalester helped extend my sabbatical, buying much-needed time to dedicate myself to full-time writing. I am particularly grateful for the investments that Macalester College makes in its junior faculty. Without its generous junior sabbatical and family leave policies, completing this book would have been a very different—and much more difficult—process.

Last, but certainly not least, I owe a tremendous personal debt to the members of my family. Their love, support, and unstinting belief in the path I have chosen mean more to me than I can put into words. My wife, Marianne Milligan, has talked through every idea and read every word in this book—and then some. Only she knows just how much it has taken to write this book, particularly after Jack, Annie, and Meg joined our family. I dedicate this book to her.

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PROLOGUEA Car of One’s Own

A good transportation system minimizes unnecessary transportation.—Lewis Mumford (1958)1

Like many of my friends, I was ecstatic when the long vigil leading up to my sixteenth birthday ended, and I finally—finally!—got my driv-er’s license. Driving opened a new world of freedom and mobility, par-ticularly after my father bought a new car and gave me his old one: a yellow 1977 Toyota long-bed pickup truck. Despite its flashy white rac-ing stripe, my new truck was in sad shape. Parts of the bed were rust-ing through, torn bits of foam protruded from gaping holes in its vinyl seats, and the passenger-side door, which was crumpled from a previ-ous accident, could only be opened by observing a careful sequence of steps that flummoxed all but a select group of initiates. I was utterly blind to its problems: the truck was a piece of junk, but it was my piece of junk.

My truck made everything about high-school life easier. Now that I was finally free of the complicated process of arranging rides home after my various practices and after-school activities, it also became infinitely easier to get to friends’ houses, to soccer games and debate tournaments, and to movies and parties. Best of all, the costs of my newfound mobility were negligible: I had only to make an occasional emergency run to the grocery store for my mother, to give my younger sister a ride when she needed one, and to use my own money to keep the truck’s tank full.2 My previously well-used bicycle went into stor-age, and for the rest of high school came out only for recreational rides with friends.

When I left home for college in the mountains of western Mas-sachusetts, first-year students were barred from owning vehicles—a policy designed to prevent the town’s picturesque streets from becom-ing a parking lot. Full of regret, I left my truck behind. I still vividly remember the phone call, several months later, when I asked about my truck and got silence in return. After some prodding, my parents

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explained that it had been totaled—the victim of a fallen tree during a storm. The insurance company proclaimed it a worthless hunk of metal, but I knew better: its loss meant forfeiting the easy mobility that I had enjoyed through my last years of high school. I spent my remain-ing college breaks in Atlanta hitching rides with friends or negotiating the use of one of my parents’ cars.

Somewhat to my surprise, though, I seldom missed my truck at col-lege. The campus itself was less than one square mile in extent and contained everything a student could need: dormitories, dining halls, classrooms, athletic fields, museums, a variety of shops and restaurants on main street, and a profusion of public gathering spaces that hosted a diverse mix of activities, including lectures, musical and theatrical performances, and whatever else two thousand college students liv-ing in an isolated town could dream up. When I moved off campus as a senior, two of my housemates had cars—although most of the time they sat parked outside the house, unused, until one of us needed to run to the nearest grocery store in the next town over.

After graduation, I took a job teaching high-school history in

1977 Toyota sr5 long-bed pickup truck (with racing stripe). Ben Piff, courtesy of oldparkedcars.com

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Switzerland, and like many Americans living in Europe I marveled at how easy it was to get around by foot, bus, and train. Even without a car, it was easy (and affordable, even on my small salary) to spend my free weekends traveling. By contrast, on the occasions when I had to drive a school van, driving seemed downright cumbersome. Narrow streets, low speed limits, what struck me as outrageously high gasoline prices, and exceedingly scarce parking—not to mention the boisterous teenagers I was carting around—undercut much of driving’s appeal. Rather than embodying freedom and mobility, driving in Switzerland seemed more like an expensive, inconvenient, and at times even har-rowing chore.

Yet almost immediately upon returning to Atlanta for the summer, the familiar yearning for a car of my own came flooding back. Even something as simple as meeting friends during their lunch breaks pre-sented significant obstacles. Infrequent, inconveniently located bus service in my neighborhood made buses unappealing, and the near-est stop on the city’s pleasant, rail-based rapid-transit system (whose tracks did not run anywhere I wanted to go) was nearly three miles away from my parents’ house. Cycling, the preferred transportation of my youth, was fine in my neighborhood but felt dangerous beyond it, where a crush of traffic had enveloped the city in the 1980s.3 With such poor options for getting around, I felt incapacitated without a car.

Interestingly, my intense desire for a car quickly dissipated after I moved to Madison—the capital of Wisconsin and a bustling univer-sity town—to attend graduate school. Madison’s main commercial street downtown, State Street, which connects the university campus on one end with the state capitol on the other, is lined with enough bookstores, coffee shops, restaurants, bars, and small specialty shops to keep the university’s forty-thousand-plus students happy. I rented an apartment within a short walk of my classes and the library, drop-ping my vague plan to buy a car upon learning that off-street park-ing would add 50 percent to my monthly rent. I worried about getting groceries until discovering a store—half a mile away—that offered free delivery. With most of what I needed located within a reasonable walk, I never really missed having a car.

By this point my interest in the differing transportation systems of Europe and the United States had captured my academic interest as

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well—but popular works on the subject seemed to raise more questions than they answered. The most prevalent explanation for the remark-able success of the automobile in the United States—the ubiquitous “love-affair” thesis—suggests that Americans fell in love with automo-biles and, once enamored, did whatever was necessary to accommodate them. “It is, at base, quite simple,” one popular history of automobiles declares: “Americans have a fervent, intense, enduring love affair with their cars.”4 Most of those who adhere to this explanation see automo-biles as basically good—as a technology that is ultimately liberating, enabling, empowering, and democratic, all qualities that accord well with American values. To be sure, proponents of the love-affair thesis concede that the country’s dependence on automobiles has its nega-tive side, including environmental damage, steep infrastructure costs, the frustrations of jammed traffic, and dependence on foreign oil, but these problems are simply the unfortunate trade-offs that Americans must make to ensure universal access to an otherwise useful and bene-ficial technology. Deep down, advocates of the love-affair thesis argue, Americans love their cars, whatever their flaws, and this more than anything else explains the country’s relationship with automobiles.5

A second popular explanation—call it the “conspiracy” thesis—attributes the privileged position of automobiles in American life to powerful interests foisting automobiles on an unwary public. A cabal of automakers and various affiliated conspirators used underhanded means to deprive the country of effective public transportation, according to this argument, and powerful road builders have used their clout to secure public financing for huge construction projects at the expense of other social needs. Proponents of the conspiracy thesis sometimes grudgingly concede that cars have certain positive qualities, but on balance they see the country’s car culture as a nega-tive, damaging force. Given free choice and a level playing field, they argue, Americans would certainly choose a less automobile-dependent lifestyle.6

Neither of these explanations for the dominance of cars in the United States squares particularly well with my own experience, in which my desire (and need) for a car has varied dramatically from place to place. In Atlanta, I nearly always felt confined and helpless without a car because what I wanted to do was spread out over a large area,

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making driving the only practical way to get around. Both in Switzer-land and in two very different college towns, however, not having a car proved at worst a minor inconvenience. Because most of what I needed in a normal day was located in easy walking or bicycling distance from where I lived, having a car was more a convenience than a necessity. To put it another way, the physical arrangement of the built environ-ment, in which housing, retail, and businesses intermingled in rela-tively close quarters—a condition that planners refer to as “mixed-use landscapes”—meant that my opportunities per square mile in all three places were much higher than in Atlanta. Significantly, the prevail-ing patterns of land use limited my options for conducting my every-day affairs as much or more than the quality of public transportation, which varied from excellent in Switzerland to nonexistent in western Massachusetts. How I felt about cars had little bearing on whether or not I needed one.7 I did not want a car so much as I wanted to be able to do things quickly and easily: get groceries, get to work, see my friends.8 In Atlanta I needed a car; in the other places I have lived since I left home for college, having a car did not factor as much into the equation.

As I thought through these relationships, it became increas-ingly clear that most public discourse about the role of automobiles in American life erects a false boundary between how Americans feel about transportation technologies and why Americans drive so much more than people elsewhere in the world. In endlessly debating the merits of particular technologies—Priuses versus SUVs, buses ver-sus light rail—we lose sight of the social and environmental context in which those technologies operate. This oversight has implications both for how we live our lives and for the environmental effects of the technologies we use. The language of the love affair, and the often moralistic approach of critics who condemn the automobile, privileges a tight focus on the relative vices and virtues of individual behaviors and technologies at the expense of coming to grips with either the genuine advantages and freedoms that cars create or the social and environmental costs of the nearly universal automobile use that car-dependent landscapes foster.9

Focusing on feelings about transportation technologies rather than the conditions in which they operate can have nefarious conse-quences, as the case of Atlanta’s transit system illustrates. The system’s

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trains function well as machines: when installed, they were quiet, smooth, comfortable, clean, and fast and could efficiently move large numbers of people over long distances. Judged on these merits alone, they should have been a resounding success, but in the real world their success has been mixed, at best. How can we explain this? Among the residents of Atlanta I have talked to, the most popular explanation directly mirrors the logic of the love-affair thesis: “I guess people here just don’t like to ride trains.” Pressed to elaborate, people tout the rela-tive virtues of cars (deemed convenient, flexible, inexpensive, and fast) and the relative vices of the trains (deemed awkward, rigid, expensive, and slow).

Yet focusing on people’s predilections (“people here just don’t like to ride trains”) suggests that their attitudes are somehow timeless and innate rather than informed reactions to a changing world. In the case of Atlanta’s rail-based transit, for example, nearly all of its stations until recently have connected the city’s airport with four main things: giant parking lots for commuters, office space, convention-oriented facilities, and sports venues. The opportunities per square mile sur-rounding each rail stop, in other words, cater almost entirely to out-of-town visitors, office workers, mall-goers, and sports fans. Why should anyone else ever ride the trains? The land uses within easy walking distance of each station send strong signals about who is supposed to use the trains—large parking lots scream “I am for drivers,” just as rail stops surrounded by office buildings and hotels declare “I am for office workers and conventioneers.” As a result, the rail-based transit system is awkward, rigid, expensive, and slow for most Atlantans, although this is not because the trains are technologically deficient: it is because most of the city’s residents are neither conventioneers nor employees of a company located near a rail stop. From its inception, the system’s engineers did not design it to help most city residents do the things they need and want to do as part of their everyday lives.10

To understand how powerful the relationship between success-ful mass transit systems and land-use decisions is, compare Atlanta’s system to one of any number of successful European systems. Why would the latter enjoy much heavier ridership than Atlanta’s, even in cases when they employ older, slower, less comfortable technology? Following the love-affair thesis, we might conclude that Europeans

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have a stronger affinity for trains or, alternatively, that Europeans just do not love cars as much as Americans. Paying attention to land-use patterns, however, suggests that transit prospers in places where stops grant access to many opportunities per square mile and are within easy walking distance of housing. The relationship is not hard to grasp: if just about anyone can leave home and take a short walk to a transit stop, and if nearly every stop along the line offers a diverse mix of incentives to exit and spend time and money in nearby businesses, then people are likely to use the system heavily—even if they own cars. When transit conveniently connects housing to the innumerable opportunities of dense, mixed-use landscapes, transit seems to thrive. This appears to be particularly true when the opportunities near rail stops are not limited to major attractions like ball fields and muse-ums but also feature businesses that cater to more mundane everyday needs, like drug stores, hardware stores, and supermarkets.11

Anecdotal evidence suggests that rail systems traversing land-scapes that are rich in opportunities per square mile seem to appeal as much to substantial numbers of Americans as to Europeans. For example, consider American cities like New York, Boston, and Chi-cago, where subway and elevated train systems still attract heavy rid-ership. The transit stops in these places are frequently within walking distance of residential areas and offer numerous attractive opportuni-ties within a short walk. Consider also the attitudes of even resolutely car-loving Americans who encounter robust rail-based transit systems when traveling abroad. Many are pleasantly surprised to be able to get around without a rental car and describe their experiences by saying things like, “Streetcar systems would never work in the United States because Americans don’t like public transportation, but the street-cars in Europe are very pleasant and convenient.” In truth, streetcar systems would stand little chance of succeeding in the United States without radically different land-use patterns—but the point is that land-use patterns, not attitudes toward rail, are the best determinant of likely success or failure.

What is true of light rail is also true of cars: when we design land-scapes that are easily navigated only by personal vehicles, people tend to drive everywhere they need to go. In this book, I try to move past the language of the love affair to focus on the built landscape. I do so

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in part because the love-affair framework so poorly explains my own changing relationships with cars and in part because thinking in terms of love and hate is conceptually limiting. However one feels about cars—whether you love them, hate them, or are filled with ambiva-lence—you will not find much about those emotions in the pages that follow. Instead, this book will ask you to think about landscapes: the everyday world around us, from the mundane to the magisterial, and especially the various principles that guide its physical organization. Sometimes I employ the language of ecology to describe its organiza-tion, particularly in order to explore the environmental implications of near-universal automobile use in the United States. Yet I will also have occasion to describe changes in very different terms: more often than not, the people who rearranged the American landscape in the ways I describe did not think much about the effects of their actions on “nature” or “the environment” as part of their decision-making processes, even though the environmental consequences of their deci-sions have been profound.

Understanding the landscape’s physical arrangement is crucial to understanding why Americans drive so much. In addition to shaping the fortunes of transportation systems like light rail, land-use patterns also govern how far car-dependent Americans must drive to conduct their everyday affairs. The easiest way to illustrate this point is to exam-ine how the physical layouts of two very different residential areas in the St. Paul metropolitan region—one urban, the other suburban—affect the transportation needs of their residents. The first of these two residential areas is a collection of subdivisions located off an interstate exit ramp roughly fourteen miles south of downtown St. Paul in Eagan, Minnesota, a suburban community of more than sixty thousand people spread out over 34.5 square miles. Its land-use patterns were established primarily in the 1970s and 1980s in direct relationship to the newly constructed interstate.12 The layout of one of Eagan’s neighborhoods, grouped around an interstate exit ramp (fig. 1), reflects the approach that suburban developers have honed to a science in the interstate era. Eagan’s general land-use practices differ little from those of innumer-able suburban communities around the country.

In order to understand the organization of this exit-ramp neighbor-hood, which covers roughly 5.5 square miles, one must first appreciate

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how city planners in the last four decades or so have understood differ-ent kinds of roads, which they have sorted into clear hierarchical cat-egories based on intended use. Planners divide roads into two broad categories—high-speed highways and lower-speed roads—and then make further distinctions within each category. In the lower-speed road category, for example, planners distinguish between arterial roads, collector roads, and residential streets and rely on each to serve a different transportation purpose. Arterial roads are the most heavily traveled of the three and typically connect important central locations with one another and with the interstate. They tend to be zoned for large developments like shopping centers, strip malls, office parks, and townhouses rather than for single-family housing. In Eagan, as in most interstate-oriented suburbs, the highway’s entrance and exit ramps are located on a major arterial road. By comparison, suburban collector roads have a lower capacity than arterials, and as their name implies they are designed to “collect” traffic from adjacent subdivisions and funnel it to arterials. The zoning regulations along collectors tend to permit only a few small commercial and community-oriented devel-opments; they are usually easy to identify by the many subdivision entrances along their length. Residential streets, the final road type, are contained entirely within individual subdivisions—thus discourag-ing through traffic—and the land adjacent to them tends to be zoned exclusively for residential land uses.

I.1 Exit-ramp neighborhood, Eagan, Minnesota. Cartography by Birgit Mühlenhaus, 2011.

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By manipulating the arrangement of these different road types, planners and developers create a rational transportation system that is easy to navigate (by those with cars), ensures the relatively efficient distribution of utilities like sewers and water mains through low-den-sity areas, keeps heavy traffic concentrated on major routes (and out of neighborhoods), and locates most everyday essentials within a short drive of residential areas. Because zoning bars commercial activities from residential areas, shopping trips typically begin at home, move through curving residential streets to a collector, follow the collector to the arterial, and take the arterial toward the businesses clustered around the interstate ramp. In well-developed suburbs like Eagan, exit-ramp commercial clusters typically boast a variety of establishments, including restaurants, grocery stores, barber shops and hair salons, real estate agencies, financial services companies, various professional offices, and perhaps even a movie theater or hardware store—enough to satisfy a typical family’s everyday needs. Whenever something is not available locally, the interstate provides a direct link to the larger resources of the metropolitan region.

The second sample residential area, whose physical organization differs markedly from Eagan, is Macalester-Groveland, an urban neighborhood in St. Paul with twenty thousand residents spread over roughly 2.25 square miles, located roughly 4 miles west of downtown. As with Eagan, the key to understanding the neighborhood’s spatial organization is to understand how its developers designed it in rela-tionship to the dominant transportation system of the time. The streetcars around which the neighborhood was developed from 1910 through the 1920s have been defunct for five decades, but the land-use patterns established during the streetcar era still have a profound and continuing impact on the everyday transportation demands of the neighborhood’s residents today.

A map showing the relationship between the neighborhood’s com-mercial infrastructure and its old streetcar lines demonstrates why this is true (fig. 2). Unlike Eagan, whose developers sorted various highways and roads into an elaborate, multilevel hierarchy, Macalester-Grove-land’s developers distinguished only two road types: residential streets and streetcar streets. Three east–west streetcar lines, spaced every half mile, ran through the neighborhood, putting all residents within four

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blocks of a streetcar stop. East–west and north–south streetcar lines gave residents access to the rest of the city as well as to downtown Min-neapolis, seven miles to the northwest.

Of more lasting importance than the streetcars, however, are the small commercial nodes, located every half mile—and sometimes every quarter mile—that sprang up along their routes.13 In contrast to Eagan, where the interstate ramp provides the center of gravity for nearly all nonresidential activities, all three east–west streetcar lines in Macalester-Groveland attracted businesses to the regularly spaced clusters of storefronts along their length. As a result, commercial establishments spread somewhat evenly throughout the neighbor-hood, putting nearly all residents within six blocks or less of mul-tiple shopping areas by the late 1920s. For those who required goods or services unavailable in the many nearby stores, streetcars provided a direct link to all of the small commercial sites along any particular route and, ultimately, to the resources of downtown St. Paul.

The very different land-use patterns established during the initial development of Eagan and Macalester-Groveland continue to shape the mobility options of their residents today. The developers of both neighborhoods carefully separated residential and commercial areas but balanced separation against easy access to everyday goods and services. In a key difference between the two areas, entrepreneurs

I.2 Streetcar neighborhood, Macalester-Groveland, St. Paul, Minnesota. Cartography by Birgit Mühlenhaus, 2011.

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from 1910 through the 1920s defined “easy access” in relationship to the slow speeds of pedestrians and streetcars. As a result, Macales-ter-Groveland’s commercial establishments spread thickly and fairly evenly through the neighborhood along the old streetcar routes—with the result that even today, without streetcars, large numbers of stores exist within a short distance of all neighborhood homes. Because dis-tances are short, walking and bicycling remain practical options. In Eagan, on the other hand, where planners defined “easy access” in relationship to cars, the distances between residences and commercial establishments are much longer. The distance a person can walk in five minutes is much shorter than one can drive in five minutes, and in Eagan (as in most post–World War II suburbs), short walks seldom give residents access to any shopping opportunities at all. In addition, since most commerce is concentrated on highly trafficked arterial roads, few cyclists feel safe making even reasonably short shopping trips unless a special, separate infrastructure is provided for them. The only quick, safe option is to drive.

All of this has implications, not only for how easily people can walk or bicycle in Eagan and Macalester-Groveland, but also for the distances that residents must travel to conduct their everyday affairs. Measured in time and convenience rather than distance, there is little appreciable difference between the commercial options in Eagan and Macalester-Groveland—in both places, most of what people need is a short trip away. Measured in distance rather than time, however, the dif-ferences have the potential to add up quickly (fig. 3).14 As figure 3 sug-gests, Macalester-Groveland residents typically have smaller distances to travel for these everyday needs than Eagan residents. Each neighbor-hood design, in other words, imposes very different minimum “mobil-ity requirements” on its residents—and those designed into Eagan’s landscape (as measured in mileage) are notably greater than those designed into Macalester-Groveland’s. These requirements exist inde-pendent of what type of transportation residents use—but because dis-tances tend to be shorter in Macalester-Groveland, both walking and bicycling require less effort than in Eagan and thus are more likely to be part of the mobility mix for larger numbers of residents.

Eagan represents what I call Car Country, a shorthand label for places where car dependence is woven into the basic fabric of the

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landscape.15 In the second half of the twentieth century, such places have become ubiquitous in the United States, and during that same period cars have become integral parts of the daily lives of most adult Americans. It is a mistake, I believe, to explain this state of affairs either as the simple product of an ardent love affair with automobiles or as the result of a conspiracy to foist cars on an unwary public. Instead, the nation’s dependence on cars stems from a reality at once more prosaic and more profound: Americans drive because in most places the built environment all but requires them to do so. Landscapes in the United States that are easily navigable without personal vehicles have become rare—small islands in the vast sea of Car Country.

Despite their ubiquity, today’s car-dependent landscapes are a rela-tively new historical development. As recently as the early twentieth century, the nation’s social, political, and economic institutions were oriented entirely around foot-, rail-, and water-based transportation systems. Rural roads were decrepit—the casualty of a half century’s investment in railroads at the expense of highways—and turn-of-the-century streets in big American cities were in crisis. Few resources existed to change this state of affairs. In 1900, for example, the total annual budget for the sole federal agency involved in road improvement was just $8,000, and its staff faced a strict ban on direct involvement in road construction. Most states had sizable road-building budgets, but funding sources were unreliable and almost none of the count-less local officials charged with road construction and maintenance

I.3 One-way distance, in miles, from home to nearest business.

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had any training in engineering. Few of the car-oriented features that are integral to the modern American landscape, from limited-access motor highways to parking lots, existed yet even as ideas. Further com-plicating the picture, early motor vehicles were ostentatiously expen-sive and notoriously unreliable, making it a laughable idea that the country’s leaders would ever devote themselves to the complex and forbiddingly expensive task of remaking the nation’s transportation system around cars.

Yet, in relatively short order, this is exactly what happened. Politi-cians at every level of government funneled unprecedented sums into developing and expanding the nation’s automotive infrastructure in the first half of the twentieth century. Initially, these changes focused on accommodating the flood of automobiles pouring onto Ameri-can roads and streets, as engineers wrestled to design both cars and roads that could overcome difficult environmental conditions. Then in the interwar years, after a series of significant technological and fis-cal breakthroughs, powerful cars and expanding networks of smooth roads finally began to give motorists the ability to reliably overcome older environmental limits on private transportation. Only then did planners and engineers begin to make serious plans for completely car-centered landscapes that were designed not just to make driving easier but to unlock the full transportation potential of automobiles; only then did significant numbers of people begin to reorganize their every-day activities and landscapes around automobiles. After World War II, with the profitability, practicality, and political attractiveness of car-centered activities well established, governments at all levels supple-mented existing car-oriented transportation policies with new rules and incentives governing land-use practices that redefined “develop-ment” as “car-oriented development.” By 1956, when Congress funded construction of the interstate highway system, nearly all of the basic patterns underpinning the creation of car-centered landscapes—as well as nearly all of the most significant environmental problems related to heavy car use—were firmly in place. With these changes, the United States became Car Country.

This transformation required two equally profound changes: first, the development of a well-funded, car-oriented transportation infra-structure; and second, a complex set of regulations, incentives, and

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practices regarding land uses that helped create a new, car-dependent economic geography. As a car-friendly transportation infrastructure became a normal part of the American landscape—think stop signs and centerlines, traffic lights and limited-access highways—car use became significantly easier. In addition, as car-friendly land-use prac-tices became a normal part of the American landscape—think ample parking lots and convenient drive-through windows, vast subdivi-sions of single-family housing and regional malls rivaling the size of downtown—car use became more necessary. As the different sectors of the American economy dispersed more thinly across the landscape, even the most mundane of everyday tasks moved out of easy reach of most people traveling on foot or by public transportation. Car use became not just easy but—for most people and in most places—almost mandatory.

As car-dependent landscapes became the norm, they locked in the significant environmental consequences of nearly universal car use in a large, affluent nation. Born, as it was, from the desire to overcome environmental limits on personal mobility, Car Country profoundly altered how people interacted with nature. People developed new ways of thinking about and interacting with the environments in which they lived—and particularly with the roads and streets that ran through their communities—as federal, state, and local governments reshaped them based on the needs of wheeled traffic rather than the needs and desires of people living along them. More subtly, cars trans-formed how people understood their place in the world and their abil-ity to move around within it, redefining “local” space and prompting new ideas about how to array everyday activities and enterprises across the landscape. In addition to changing people’s interactions with the environment, building Car Country required tumultuous, large-scale transformations of the natural world. Dramatic increases in automo-bile use spurred the growth of the oil industry and its related envi-ronmental problems, for example, which became necessary and significant adjuncts to Car Country’s continuing successes. The momentous industrial effort required to put the nation on wheels had profound environmental consequences, as did the equally momentous road-construction program that provided the vast networks of streets and highways that made driving so convenient. By introducing these

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changes, Car Country put more people than ever before within an easy drive of places where they could find ample greenery, recreational opportunities, and a sense of reconnection with the natural world. In short, Car Country refashioned, on a grand scale, both the basic pat-terns of interaction between people and the environment and the fun-damental structure and composition of the nation’s ecosystems.

Almost from the beginning, these changes inspired a legion of vociferous critics.16 By the time full-blown discontent with America’s car culture and its destructive environmental effects finally percolated up into national politics in the 1960s and 1970s, however, patterns of sprawling, low-density development had already become thoroughly ingrained in the American political economy. Moreover, Car Coun-try’s critics too often focused on particular problems—factory pol-lution, tailpipe emissions, roadside eyesores, suburban “boxes made of ticky tacky,”17 the loss of public “open space” and “pristine wilder-ness”—without understanding the broader, interconnected forces at work that continued to roll out new car-dependent communities year after year. Environmentalists secured new regulations that limited some of low-density sprawl’s more damaging environmental effects, but they failed to stop sprawl itself or the engines driving its expan-sion. The overwhelming tendency among critics, with a few important exceptions, has been to focus on cars rather than roads and on the behavior of drivers rather than the powerful forces shaping American land-use patterns.18

Without effective critics—and with car-oriented facilities incorpo-rated as a basic feature of the nation’s political, social, and economic approach to both transportation and land-use practices—car-depen-dent landscapes have multiplied, older ways of moving around have steadily disappeared as practical options for most Americans, and more and more people have begun to drive longer and longer dis-tances, whether they have wanted to or not. In Car Country, driving and sprawl have become essential, interlocking components of Ameri-can lives, landscapes, and relationships with the natural world.

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