by Daniel Lazare
Reviewed by Cheryl Hammond
Henry Ford stated, “The modern city is the most unlovely and artificial sight this planet affords. The ultimate solution is to abandon it. We shall solve the city problem by leaving the city.” With Henry Ford’s help, modern America has, indeed, abandoned the city.
Daniel Lazare has written a very readable book which explores the devastating effects of the automobile on cities and has comprehensively answered the question posed in the book subtitle. He also explores in depth the hostility of reformers and progressives to cities and how these reformers encouraged government policies to move people away from city cores. He explains the social and economic consequences of America’s move to the suburbs.
At the beginning of the 20th century, efficient organization of industry was inconceivable without concentration of activity in cities. Urban demographer, Adna Weber predicted cities would continue to grow and any other alternative was “too remote to be predicted”. How limited are our powers to see into the future!
Henry Ford, an ordinary mechanic with no formal training, not only built an industrial empire, but created a transformation of our social, economic, and physical landscape.
The automobile easily shoved other modes of transport off the road. It gave ordinary individuals tremendous motive power, but created immense costs. Soon streets had to be widened and sidewalks narrowed to make room for more cars. Trolley riders suffered the congestion due to automobiles just as much as those in the cars. Already in 1907 traffic fatalities reached more than 700 annually in New York City alone. Three-fourths of the fatalities were children who still thought it was safe to play in the streets.
As early as 1913, travel writers were noting the traffic paralysis in city after city. The wonderful efficiency of the cities began to decline. For example, bridges accommodated fewer and fewer persons per day as automobile usage increased. Cars took up ten to twenty times the space per passenger as a trolley.
Automobiles are a poor fit for cities. As Americans have switched to car transport, they have moved out of the cites and moved to locations which better fit the automobile.
A century ago, no urban planner spent a moment thinking about how to draw people into the city. The city was overflowing with jobs and people. In fact, social workers and reformers wrote of the benefits of decentralizing the population away from the cities, drawing inspiration from Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian ideal. Jefferson’s influence was so strong then and today that we can overlook that the early founders of this country had other ideals besides Jefferson’s. For example, the New England Puritans required colonists to settle in compact communities surrounding a church.
Today, our government-built highway systems continue to support automobile dependence and create more areas where no other means of transport is practical. Lazare does not have many good solutions, but his well researched study will help us find the answers.
America’s Undeclared War, Daniel Lazare, published by Harcourt, copyright 2001.
E-mail Cheryl Hammond at info@todaydata.com.