Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back / Edition 1

by Jane Holtz Kay

Overview

Asphalt Nation is a powerful examination of how the automobile has ravaged America's cities and landscape over the past 100 years together with a compelling strategy for reversing our automobile dependency. Jane Holtz Kay provides a history of the rapid spread of the automobile and documents the huge subsidies commanded by the highway lobby, to the detriment of once-efficient forms of mass transportation. Demonstrating that there are economic, political, architectural, and personal solutions to the problem, she shows that radical change is entirely possible. This book is essential reading for everyone interested in the history of our relationship with the car, and in the prospect of returning to a world of human mobility.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520216204
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	10/01/1998
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	440
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Jane Holtz Kay is the architecture and planning critic for The Nation and the author of Lost Boston (1980) and Preserving New England (1986).

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
The Late Motor Age: A Defining Decade 
Part I-Car Glut: A Nation in Lifelock
1 Bumper to Bumper 
2 The Geography of Inequity 
3 The Landscape of the Exit Ramp 
4 The Road to Environmental Ruin 
5 Harm to Health and Breath 
6 The Cost of the Car Culture 
Part II-Car Tracks: The Machine that Made the Land
7 Model T, Model City 
8 From Front Porch to Front Seat 
9 Driving Through the Depression 
1 0 The Asphalt Exodus 
11 Braking the Juggernaut 
12 The Three-Car Culture 
Part Ill-Car Free: From Dead End to Exit
13 None for the Road 
14 Zoning for Life 
15 Putting Transit on Track 
16 The Centering of America 
17 The De-Paving of America 
18 Righting the Price 
NOTES 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
INDEX 

Editorial Reviews

Kay, architecture critic for the Nation, argues forcefully here that the automobile holds America in economic, emotional and physical gridlock. The car-and the highways it rides on and the gasoline it burns-has debased our architecture, ruined our health, polluted our environment, undermined our public transportation systems and isolated the nation's poor and infirm. With an eye for memorable phrases and startling facts (every car on the road costs its "user and society" between $9000 and $11,000 a year), she not only defines the problem but also traces how she believes it was created, from the Model T Ford, through the suburban boom, to our current "three-car culture" in which the largest percentage of time and mileage is not devoted to commuting to work but to running errands. Kay's solutions are controversial. Stop highway construction (new and wider roads don't end congestion, they spread it); divert highway money to improving train and streetcar transportation; change zoning laws to encourage small apartments (for the young and the elderly) in downtown areas, which, she thinks, would encourage walking and biking; make cities more walker-friendly; cut down on the number of parking lots; increase the cost of car registration. This is an unabashed polemic; the problems Kay portrays so vividly in the first two thirds of the book are more convincing than the solutions she suggests in the last third.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A committed, soft-spoken diatribe against the car culture that romanticizes the alternatives, by the architecture critic for the Nation. Kay marshals all the expected arguments plus a host of novel ones (behind the wheel "we forfeit the . . . right to muse"), addressing issues of social, political, industrial, and individual responsibility, and costs to health, to ecosystems, to humane and aesthetic ideals. In a long-winded and discursive narrative, she makes the case that the proliferation of highways generates more traffic and exponentially more accidents, pollution, and by extension more sprawl, more waste (antifreeze, tires, etc.), and more environmental toxins. Her most sobering chapter examines the spiraling inequity of automotive disenfranchisement for the poor and older citizens: the destruction of poor urban neighborhoods for highway projects, the diversion of public monies away from public transit. After identifying the symptoms of "car glut," Kay looks at the history of the problem, citing Franklin Roosevelt for ratifying the motorization of America with the New Deal road-making programs and postwar Veterans Administration mortgages for enabling suburban single-family housing (which spurred the growth of the Interstate Highway System and suburban sprawl). Kay advocates housing centralization and calls for the development and linkage of quality train and trolley systems; for rezoning to legalize multifamily and pluralistic building usage; and for city and town design that fosters walkability, privacy, and pleasure. Also, she recommends levying higher tolls and gasoline taxes, smog fees, and peak-congestion fees to discourage driving, and contends that the politymust say no to future highway expansion. There's little question that Kay's earnest arguments are compelling, but they seem to downplay the difficulties (and costs) involved in getting from our present situation to this new world, and the impact that such changes would have on an American economy deeply dependent on the automobile. They also ignore the essential fact that Americans have largely embraced a car culture.

Kirkus Reviews