MODERN TIMES
Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 9 May 2009
America's car
culture
America
certainly has its share of cultural hang-ups. Between the gun lobby, anti-abortionists, religious
fundamentalists, anti-scientists, anti-immigrant xenophobes, open-borders
extremists, anti-government radicals, football fanatics, anti-intellectuals,
money worshipers, and other true believers, we're tied up in cultural knots
most of the time.
You
can draw up your own list, which will doubtless be different from mine. The distinguishing feature of these
cultural fetishes is the fervor with which they are held, and believers'
disregard for their consequences.
For example, it's one thing to work toward reduced abortions but quite
another to be so rigid about it as to wind up increasing abortions and disease,
as extreme anti-abortionists do when they oppose condoms and sex
education. Jared Diamond's book Collapse catalogues the fate of tribes and nations as they
grappled with such obsessions. The
emerging lesson is that nations that cannot control their irrational cultural
habits will be consumed by them.
Consider
the automobile. America's
obsession with cars is obvious in our expressways that fill the land and
disfigure the cities, in our oil consumption, in our non-existent and broken
sidewalks, in our bloated road budgets, in our meager alternative
transportation budgets, in our massive car subsidies, in our cathedral-like
malls and decaying downtowns, in our cheesy highway eateries, in our muscle
cars, in our feeling that mass transit is for losers, and in our chauffeured
children.
While
listening to a National Public Radio news segment about Detroit, it struck me
that Motown is the car culture's ultimate victim. It's a devastated city, nearly bereft of mass transit, with
no downtown worthy of the name.
Grass grows in nameless empty fields where once stood busy factories and
the apartments and homes of their workers. One fears to walk the streets. Ironically, a century ago the city was a center of the rail
industry, and Detroit was bending metal for trains instead of cars. But by the 1930s General Motors was
destroying the nation's streetcars by buying them up to make way for cars.
Americans
continue searching for their dream out in some soul-less suburb with easy
access to the bypass that leads to the mall that has destroyed the center of
the town they call home. We buy
our attire in the clothing chains and eat in the restaurant chains along our
highways, and we drive to Disneyland to admire a picturesque replica of a
typical American downtown circa 1900.
What charms us about these old-fashioned streets? It's the absence of cars! Yet, back home, we do not notice what
we have done to our real downtowns.
It's
getting harder to live in central Fayetteville. Two restaurants that used to be a short walk from my house
have vanished, along with much else on North College Avenue. My eye doctor, dentist, and physician
have moved out to the suburbs. The
Fayetteville Square once boasted a movie theater, a second theater a block
away, a drugstore, Penney's, Woolworth's, Lewis Brothers' hardware, a
department store, and more. I
talked with Penney's manager after I'd heard they were moving to the new
Northwest Arkansas Mall. He told
me he'd love to stay on the square, but his boss in Dallas ordered the move to
the mall because that's where the money was. Thank goodness for the IGA grocery
store that remains near the center of town.
Ah
yes, the money. Why was the money
at the mall instead of downtown?
The answer has everything to do with our subsidization of cars. The average driver does not even pay
for most road expenses, much less for policing, the health effects of car
pollution, highway injuries and deaths, property loss in crashes, free parking,
congestion costs, building damage from pollution and vibrations, and car
disposal, not to mention the cost of oil wars. Many studies have shown that car subsidies come to between
$600 to $1800 billion annually, or $2000 to $6000 per year for every
American. If added to the cost of
gasoline, as it should be, this would come to an extra $4 to $12 per
gallon. This is why, in Europe
where people aren't so car-crazed, gasoline runs $10 per gallon. This, in turn, is one reason parts of
Europe are considerably more civilized than America.
It's
the mark of a true fetish that we still chase our highway dreams even after all
it has cost us in lives and money, and even after putting up with decades of
poor transportation. Like true
addicts, we're hooked. Just one more
beltway, just a few more lanes on our so-called bypass, just one more city
street widening, and our problems will be solved. God forbid that we should park our car and get on mass
transit, or that we should consider living in our cities rather than strung out
in half-acre lots near an expressway on-ramp.
President Obama has breathed some welcome fresh air into this car-mania with his $13 billion proposal for a fast train network. It's barely a start, but perhaps the start of something big: transportation that promotes communities instead of tearing them down, transportation that will save injuries, lives, pollution, resources, and congestion, while getting there faster and more humanely. There are lots of good people in Fayetteville paying attention to these developments and looking for openings for alternative transportation. I'm hopeful that our state and regional officials are also following this trend and putting their car-culture habits on the wagon. With strong Fayetteville leadership, we can perhaps swing Northwest Arkansas, and the state, onto a better track.