Automobile Dependence and the Limits of the Electric Car

Sometimes an argument is taut enough to (momentarily) suffocate any counters. A defense of gay marriage recently accomplished this feat. Below please find its transportation-savvy counterpart.

[He] may well be right that electric cars are the future of the automobile, the ultimate problem isn’t cars themselves—it’s the consequences of a car-centric culture.

Those consequences include, but aren’t limited to: Sprawling development patterns (which are massively energy-inefficient, destroy farmland and rural lifestyles, contribute to the concentration of the food system, and require massive amounts of infrastructure—electrical, sewer, and roadway—to exist), impervious surfaces that increase roadway runoff into streams and soil, car crashes (which kill 40,000 people a year and create a huge cost to public health institutions) the consequences of sedentary, car-based lifestyles (obesity, shorter life spans), and the weakening of ties to friends, family, and community, to name a few.

Publicola author Erica Burnett is responding to the argument that bike and pedestrian street improvements are wasteful and unnecessary because in the future, the climate problem will be solved by electric cars. The electric car meme is tempting, but it only scratches the surface of the lifestyle enabled by the automobile. And while e. cars are certainly a net improvement, climate-wise and oil-dependency-wise, reducing automobile dependence is just as important as reducing fossil fuel dependence.

the car is a kind of shield that deflects empathy

So reads a line in the NYTimes write up of photographer Lee Friedlander's exhibit at the Whitney Museum, and accompanying coffee table book. I've wanted to write about this for a while, but since it's less directly an urban planning topic, and more broadly car-cultural, I hemmed and hawed. No more.

Friedlander's work draws upon photographs taken during roadtrips across the continental US in the past 15 years. Unlike most roadtrippers, he took all of his pictures from inside his car.

This innovation puts Mr. Friedlander in the company of all those who turn the landscape of our automotive consumer culture into art--the article links to Ed Ruscha, but anyone who ever dug Warhol's Campbell Soup cans probably gets Friedlander. They find their are by inverting and questioning the connotations we typically associate with familiar iconography. (This is fine art! This too!)

Friedlander's particular inversion questions the iconography of an American Landscape associated with scenic scenery, majestic vistas, and even the banalities/nostalgia of highway signage and roadside commerce, because these familiar portraits tell narratives that selectively omit the auto. Each image is a story, and the story told when a traveler steps out of a parked car to capture the Grand Canyon is a different story than taking the same picture inside the car. (Exhibit A.)

As the article notes:

[Friedlander] knows that cars are essentially illusion factories — to wit: “Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.”

Illusion factories--I think this gets to the heart of how Friedlander wants to portray the automobile: as a machine that enables much portraiture of things that are America, but simultaneously engineers its own absence from the story the picture tells. The picture, then, is an illusion, fictive, and in Friedlander's vision, courtesy of the automobile. So he unwinds the narrative, exposes the machinery, and leaves the car in the picture.

And this is why Friedlander belongs on a blog about urban planning: because cars create illusions beyond the photographs that chronicle our identities and our tourism. Relying exclusively on cars for our transportation grid creates unrealities where far things are closer (SF --> LA in 6 hours!), and close things are farther (corner store Supermarket behind a quarter mile of parking). Car accidents killed 37,000 people in 2008, yet <<insert demonized phenomena here>>. Cars seal us off from passed-through environments, and detach us from other drivers who become less demonstrably human, and more demonstrably an inconvenience preventing me from going as fast as I'd like to go. Crash weighed in on the phenomena, and I would argue car-centric environments help explain the decline in civic participation noted by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone. Back in August, I posted my own reflections about how the car warps expectations.

But it took until reading the Friedlander article to read the line that bundled and explained these frustrations in one swoop: "the car is a kind of shield that deflects empathy." It's an illusion factory.

95 Theses

What a difference a coast can make. I'm back in the east bay, in Danville to be precise. Danville, the town that either elicits perfunctory silence when I state it as my origin/current home, or exclamations of "my uncle/cousin/ex-boyfriend's stepdad lives there!" It's a spot that my dad said he used to drive past on Boy Scout outings and make fun of. Dan-ville--who'd ever want to live there, he'd ask. Milli Vanilli-land.

For the next year, I'll be getting into Danville and the 680 corridor along which it lies. I'll be discussing the (sub)urban planning choices fails that conspire to make Danville a land of Milli Vanilli. I'll be discussing the ways in which it is emblematic of 20th century, housing-market-fueled development patterns. And I'll be eagerly documenting the ways it might benefit from some complete-streeting, someplanning innovations, and some efforts to turn the no-place parts of it into proper, desirable places. Lots of this will occur by proxy, as I highlight best practices gleaned from other places, documented first on other sites.

I'll also be biking. And riding transit. A lot. As part of my effort to chronicle the ways in which towns and cities like Danville are flawed, or at least frustratingly designed for automobile use, I'm not using a car. There are, believe it or not, thousands of east bay residents who are without car by necessity rather than choice. While there are strong privileges that allow me to be merely a tourist in their world, able to resort to one of my family's two automobiles if my will should falter, I think the experiment will make the 20th century's major urban design flaw abundantly and experientially clear: our streets, our neighborhoods, our transportation networks, our homes, our entire built environments, and even our assumptions all revolve around the automobile. I dislike this, think that a whole host of problems arise from it, and want to change it ...

sign me,

the suburban avenger