How the Rise of the Car Failed American Society
Now households spend (in the suburbs) 1/4 of their income on transportation or (in the cities) more than 1/10th. This is, in many ways, where everything went wrong, writes Christopher Leinberger in The Atlantic: "In the early 20th century, every town of more than 5,000 people was served by streetcars, even though real household income was one-third what it is today. A hundred years ago, the average household spent only 5 percent of its income on transportation. How did the country afford that extensive rail system? Real-estate developers, sometimes aided by electric utilities, not only built the systems but paid rent to the cities for the rights-of-way."
Obviously that went south. But one thing this analysis doesn't really explore is how big cities like Cincinnati, and its smaller-town counterparts as well, once actually had thriving local industries and incomes! You could afford to run a public transit system when residents were viewed as (and largely were!) the subjects of a thriving kingdom of local industry. When, more recently, many of these cities lost the ability to have income, the burden of transportation was shunted to the individual.
That's when both the society and geography of the cities became car-focused. Here's a look at how Cincinnati once was in the era of street cars. While streetcars were on the way out, the city actually planned and built an immense subway system and then never even put it into use. Now there's not much of any going back. In Cincinnati, the average resident spends 1/5th of his income on transportation, and a planned (very minor) light rail system faced strong opposition on budgetary grounds.
Kansas City, ditto. Google-Map/Sat of the downtown is a sea of surface-parking, where there were once hordes of multi-story commercial buildings.
This place is a mess.
But we're rebuilding! one empty-nester condo and douchefied "entertainment complex" at a time.
When they say income, is that before or after taxes? Because as a car-free city dweller, I spend far less than 10% of my income on transportation. Probably closer to half that.
But, assuming you don't live in NYC, how much more do you spend on rent/mortage in order to live close to a decent public transportation line?
Here in Boston, my landlord rapes my wallet monthly for a fucking shithole. And I suck it up because I'm across the street from the (relatively decent) C Line, about 3 blocks west of Fenway Park.
Rent stabilized…ah, socialism.
Yeah, I spend 3%-6% of income on transportation, depending on whether we're talking pre-tax and how many drunk cabs I take each month.
But I imagine the 10% comes from averaging out those with cars or more complicated commutes with those who just buy an unlimited metrocard once a month.
riggssm – hmmm. good point.
Oh Boston landlords, and other things I do not miss.
Boston real estate is a wretched racket; I had my agent in my cell at SATAN when I was in the process of moving here. I have lived in three apartments with the same landlord over the past 6 years largely because I can't bear the idea of mining again.
I lived in like four or five apartments when I lived there, and three of them at LEAST were owned by the same shitty 'company' that was basically a group of slumlords who own half of Brighton and all of Allston.
I almost got conned into one of those places .. they told me it would be a 20 minute commute from Allston to my school on the E line (GAH)!
My landlord is an Irish immigrant with whom I have a DADT relationship when it comes to non-life-threatening repairs, but I have never had my rent raised & utilities are included.
Garge, I have much better contacts when it comes to Boston R.E… I can totally hook you up. Call me.
I visited an apartment complex last night on Grand Street in Manhattan that was built by the Garment Workers Union for garment workers in the 1920s. The workers owned their own apartments, the heat supplied by cheap Con Edison steam, and the electricity purchased in bulk at commercial rates.
People were a lot smarter in some ways a century ago.
It would be interesting to see how the percentage of income going to transportation has changed with the rise of telecommuting. I used to spend ~$100-150 a month in car/T transport; now it's (almost) zero.
I agree, but I'd say that the shift of transportation onto the individual predates, and in many cases is responsible for, the loss of income to cities.
I'll be interested to see what will happen with NJ Transit now that they've raised rates to the point at which its actually cheaper to carpool to the city. I've been commuting for years and they finally broke me — moving to BK soon.
Alas, poor Ohio. One day the Midwest will rise again.
Rail > cars, but jet packs > rail.
My car got wrecked by a drunk driver just a couple weeks ago. It was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I got a fat check from the insurance company and I don't even need a car anyway. It was more of a burden than anything else. Unfortunately there are only a handful of cities in the country where you don't need to own a car.
Oh man, MAZEL TOV. I have been secretly praying for such a thing to happen to me (without me in the car at the time, obviously. I'M SPECIFIC with God, I know how tricky she can be).
It actually happened overnight when the car was parked. Fortunately I was parked on the same block as the district police station and they arrested the guy so I got paid by his insurance company. Plus his insurance company paid me twice the value of the car for some reason.
/Drinks on me!
I'll take a Martini, dry – but first let me just find a parking spot and I'll be right in.
@Choire: Have you cleared this with Tom Scocca?
I make that exact prayer all the time. Hats off, indeed!
I sold my last car to a trick for even money, one of the best fucks I ever had.
The proposed DC streetcar he refers to is already on its way – the rails have already been laid on the H Street NE corridor: http://ddot.dc.gov/DC/DDOT/On+Your+Street/Mass+Transit+in+DC/DC+Streetcar
There're actually two lines being built – one in H St NE, one in Anacostia. I wonder which one that study was done on? Also, isn't there some major holdup on both lines because of city ordinances preventing overhead wires?
There is but they actually already have the streetcars built and delivered so there's no way to really change the plans. It will eventually blow over once people stop complaining and realize that there's no feasible way to change it. H St. is a lot of fun but there's no way to get there outside of a cab or bus so it will be great when they finally finish.
I'm really looking forward to getting drunk and riding on the H St streetcars.
Agreed!!!
I find it interesting how into light rails all these cities seem to be. They're supposed to be building some in the city in which I'm currently dwelling, but I have doubts about anybody actually using them when/if they start running. The M.O. for public transportation here seems to be ensuring that the services go absolutely nowhere useful, so if that continues to be the trend, it'll be a gigantic waste of money.
I don't really understand where the H Street line goes or what it will do. It doesn't connect the Union Station/Red Line metro to the H Street corridor which would seem to be the point, right? But I'll ride pretty much anything when I'm drunk.
This was the best map I could find: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/housingcomplex/2009/08/26/does-h-street-really-need-a-streetcar/
And it looks like it comes within stumbling distance of Union Station.
I don't know – pinning all of this on the car seems to ignore a lot of broader social changes. E.g. families splitting into smaller units and getting bigger homes, which means more space, which makes streetcars far less useful.
…true, but those bigger homes and larger lots were made possible by the advent of the automobile and its ability to transport an individual farther away from the urban centers in a much shorter period of time.
Yes. Also, money spent on car transportation/increase in cars is due in large part to the fact that people seem to prefer cars. Even in so-called walkable neighborhoods (and I'd love to see that definition), there are a crapload more cars than there used to be (HEEEEELLLLLOOO, PARK SLOPE). One other point: public transportation relies on a lot of people commuting from place A to place B, whereas these days people who live in the same place tend to work all over the place.
@kneetoe There is a difference, though, in using a car in a place like Park Slope, where cars are a convenient alternative to public trans., and using a car in a city like Cincinnati or KC, where there is no alternative.
Not only is there little or no alternative, but with two-or-more person households where everyone "works all over the place", this necessitates a two-or-more vehicle household, adding to the sheer cost-fuckery of it all.
@CHL: Absolutely. For many in Park Slope the car supplements public transit to meet particular, intermittent needs. And in places where there's no public transit families these days seem to own, like, 5 cars each.
There are bicycles. I can get around my city of 230, 000 with a 56 square mile footprint quite handily. There isn't very much bike-specific infrastructure here though, and I realize it's not for everyone. But hot damn, do I love not paying for gas.
Bikers might as well hang a target over their tail-reflector, in this town.
@Art Yucko: Great minds, mine is just slower.
@myfanwy: But where do you put the Thule?
On the xtracycle, naturally.
@CHL: Have you taken a ride on our public bus system lately? I used to do it religiously with no worries (until the price of gas went down again, heh!) …but the other day I had to ride one-way (car repair, heh) and got to thinking about those cushiony, fabric-upholstered seats. And how, if (or more succinctly, when) we ever get hit with the Bedbug-wave, how absolutely fucked anyone riding that bus is going to be unless they hose those things down with DDT every single night (they won't.)
The bus system is a strange beast. The Max is pretty good, often convenient, as long as you're going somewhere in its line and don't plan on taking it late at night. To take other lines, you have to know their schedule, and even then you might be stuck in the rain or cold, and you might not be able to get north of the river or go anywhere on a Sunday. It is possible (as in Chicago or NY) to make an excellent bus system. But at this point the public life of this town is basically hostile to its own citizens (conversely, people are quite hospitable in private). Which is an interesting kind of identity, but also perverse.
Correct. All of it.
Between the Chastain Crusader (-headdesk-) and Mr.&Mrs. Mayor's Circus (-facepalm-), this town has gone completely bat-shit.
…Then there's the fact that more than half of us who live on the other side of the State Fence often don't get any say at all- even if we want it.
I like to refer to South OP as North Dallas, but when even a sprawling entity like Dallas has a more progressive Public Transporation system than your own Sprawlville, it's time to check yourself in for a citywide Psych-evaluation.
@kneetoe- No condescension meant by that whatsoever. I just wanted to give you due "props." (since we're reliving the 90's!) You can be assured I'd lose to you handily in a mind-slug race.
@Myfawnwy What do you do at Portage and Main about Jan 20th?
We're investing $25 mil in bike lanes over in British California, and the moment we have a bit of rain bike traffic dries up.
@Mindpowered: I'm considerably west of the 'Peg. As for rain, just pay Woody Harrelson whatever he wants to ride around in it and yell "Nut up or shut up!" periodically.
@ Mindpowered Non-sarcastic reply: Make cycling cheaper, more convenient and faster than driving. People won't switch to biking en masse for physical exercise and environmental reasons. Also? Drop the mandatory helmet law. Nothing kills cycling faster.
I'm pretty much of the notion that you should be able to take a train or some sort of convenient public transportation within a ten-to-fifteen minute walk of ANYWHERE.
Some of us are terrified of cars.
Me too! I don't even have a license! But I do have a severe fear of traffic and killing people if I ever do get behind the wheel.
I'm a good driver, having learned on the winter roads of Vermont; but damned if those things aren't little four-wheeled Death Machines.
This is oh-so-true, far and away the biggest killers, for example, of American teenagers. In general people woefully underestimate the risk of cars vs. the risk of, well, most other things.
Most other things don't have ridiculously expensive and slick marketing campaigns behind them.
True, and people downplay risks that they take for themselves/feel in control of. Smoking is another good example.
europe! my lord, everywhere we went there were trains and buses and subways. paris, besides being FUCKING FANTASTIC IN EVERY OTHER WAY, has a sweet system. the eurail pass was more than out plane tickets over there, but so worth every penny.
If you drive through the burbs where the huge McMansions are, you rarely see any signs of life. The inhabitants are spending all of their time communting back and forth to "all the places they will go."
It's not really an issue with cars. It's, as always, an issue with how we culturally construct our notion of governance. It's pretty easily demonstrable that when you make cars available at an almost competitive price, the freedom (or illusion thereof) means people move quickly towards car ownership. The numbers about transpo cost also reflects that people buy new cars far more frequently than is required. Look, if you can park it, having a car is great. Hands down. Very few inventions have really effected the idea of personal liberty, absent class, as much as cars.
If you make parking difficult, you can build a transit model based on other modes. But even NY is drifting towards zoning models that require off-street parking, which drives up ownership, even if it is economically irrational.
Rather than push for light rail in highly dispersed areas (most of the country), transit planning should probably focus on the other options — car/ride-sharing, telecommuting, time-shifting — and all the attendant issues there (no fault insurance, intermodal planning, rejiggering tax structures personally and in businesses) to 'retrain' people to see commuting as something other than sitting alone in your car. Then you will see more support for light rail, high speed rail, etc. But we also have to agree that government planners know better than private real estate companies the best way to build cities. Because there is no extant evidence in the history of organized society that anything other can centralized regional planning can enforce effective transit planning.
Right, the place to start in most of this country (I'm looking at you Knoxville, TN), is ANY. PLANNING. WHATSOEVER.
Also the stigma in places other than a handful of major metropolitan areas that public transportation is for poor/gross people.
Whereas when you're in your car, you can run those horrid people down, right?
@Goons & Kneetoe. Ugh, the south. I am convinced there was some kind of town hall meeting in like 1967 where they just said "We'll set up the subway so as to keep them colored folk off the streets… and ensure it services zero white neighborhoods." Some of you may know the alternative acronym often used for Atlanta's MARTA system.
As a temporary New Yorker moving down here, not being able to just hop on a train has been maddening.
http://www.assmotax.org/Releases/AMCT%20release:%20The%20Automobile%20Subsidy.php
@HeyThatsMyBike: A while back the plan to redevelop old downtown Knoxville (where I grew up–Knoxville, but not downtown) involved building a giant prison there. Creative, right?
@kneetoe I've got a friend living in downtown Knoxville who I have visited a couple of times. It's pretty cute, and looks like it is sort of being "revitalized," as she keep claiming, but it still doesn't look like much goes on there.
@propertius: If you raise the gas tax to $9 (an excellent idea), it will result primarily in people buying more fuel efficient cars, not less cars overall. We should definitely add that into the mix, but, again, since most metropolitan areas exist near a boundary (meaning multi-jurisdictional tax and infrastructure planning issues) or have sticky city/ex-urban governmental relationships (LA County vs. Orange County, e.g.) — to say nothing of the 160 year old scandal that was and is right-of-way rail line ownership — fetishizing a Europe-like rail system for at least the NE is going to remain just that.
@HeyThatsMyBike: Yes, they've tried a number of different things. Some have sort of worked (your friend lives there, for example), while others have totally failed. And to be honest, I don't know what would work, it's such a stange, cut-off (by highways especially) place, but a big prison probably would have cut out most future options.
I believe Copenhagen has quite high taxes on new cars – something like 130-200% (depending on who you ask). I don't know if it applies to used, but it's a lucrative way to reduce the amount of new vehicles on the road and, I think, more effective than a gas tax.
@NinetyNine: If you raise the gas tax to $9, it will result primarily in people driving down to the polling place and voting you out of office.
LA used to have one of the best public transportation systems in the entire country–no joke. But then they started building more and more roads and everyone fell in love with cars and it was all downhill from there. There's actually a surf break off of Santa Monica called Trolleys–which only breaks very occasionally, when the wind and swell is just right. Its man-made, really, because the waves are breaking over the rusted-out remnants of the Santa Monica streetcars which were dumped in the ocean after the city was through with them.
that sounds about right.
I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure GM or another auto company bought up the trolley system in LA and scrapped it.
Related: there's a talk called "Robert Moses, Jane Jacobs, and the Automobile" Monday night at the Museum of the City of New York, in conjunction with their Cars, Culture & New York exhibition. Because we all know how much better NYC would be if we had gotten those cross-town highways! I mean, just imagine.
that big hateful Corbusian bastard was so utterly determined to take a Giant Spaghetti-shaped shit all over everything unique about New York, wasn't he. = Analogous to how some
nouveau riche developerspeople buy modestly-sized homes in modest, affordable neighborhoods, then proceed to transform them into giant stucco-coated monstrosities that dwarf all the other homes around them. It's like……..why?!?! You could have driven 15 minutes away and built the same hideous box, probably for less and all brand-new, on an unbuilt lot.I work from home, my wife works from home, and still we somehow spend a repulsive amount of money to keep two cars parked outside. Payments, insurance, gas, oil changes, repairs, registration, the motherfucking speeding ticket I got yesterday from some kind of transsexual robocop CHP creature …. it's vulgar, and it adds up to more than my *total annual income* during most of my adult life.
This is why I just threatened divorce unless my wife's employer immediately provides her with a company vehicle. We would not have two fucking cars if she didn't have a lot of work travel by highway.
I think of all the cities where I lived without a car — DC, San Francisco, Prague, Budapest, even LA for many years — and how I don't remember ever thinking "Jesus I wish I had a car to deal with." Cabs and streetcars and subways do work pretty well, and actually walking to the store or park or restaurant provides free daily exercise.
And as we all know, repulsive amounts of money spent on equally repulsive vehicles generally ends in repulsive credit card debt, for many people.
Speaking of excercise, I'm probably on the short-list for deep-vein thrombosis over here from sitting, sitting, sitting, sitting, followed by some more sitting.
I'd walk more to the stores/restaurants around my lovely country town/exurban bedroom community but they are miles away and there are no sidewalks and I'm terrified of getting run over by idiots who take our town roads at 40-50 MPH. So I guess we're stuck driving for now.
My husband is a road biker and every time he goes out I pray I don't get That Phone Call.