In 1998, a back-and-forth email exchange between James Q. Wilson and James Howard Kunstler got to the heart of the debate over the role of the automobile in America. Slate.com preserves the correspondence, dubbed “The War on Cars,” in its Dialogues series. The series features “e-mail debates of newsworthy topics.”

Cities are useful to many people and very attractive to some, who insist on living there. But suburbs and small towns, reachable only by car, are very attractive to many people and most want to live there. The massive popular vote for cars--despite government-subsidized railroads, subways, and bike paths--is a vote for freedom, mobility, privacy, convenience, and for the scale of life--distinctive neighborhoods isolated from urban turmoil--that cannot be linked by mass transit at any price government is inclined to pay. If the use to which we put cars is "catastrophic," what does that say about human freedom? And what alternative to that freedom do the catastrophe-mongers wish to impose?

The problems associated with automobile use are not a figment of the imagination of some supposed snooty elite of irrational car-haters. Rather, these problems, and the issues they raise, go directly to the question of what it means to be civilized. In the past century, we have transformed the human ecology of America, from sea to shining sea, into a national automobile slum. This is the terminology we must use to understand what has happened to us. Chiefly, we have degraded that portion of our everyday world which belongs to everybody, the public realm. The public realm is the physical manifestation of the common good, and by degrading it we consequently degrade our ability to conceive of the common good or the public interest--or to solve many of our abiding social problems. The result, in plain English, is that we have created thousands of places in America that are not worth caring about, and these will soon add up to a nation--and a way of life--that is not worth defending.

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jeff said:

It would be interesting to see this debate taking place again today. Given that the Census Bureau has found there are more people living in poverty in suburbs than in cities I think it would be difficult to defend the idea that everyone wants to live there. Apparently people with money are choosing cities and exurbs. I don't have the official reference off hand but here's a quote from a Brookings report: In 1999 large cities and their suburbs had nearly equal numbers of poor individuals, but by 2005 the suburban poor outnumbered their city counterparts by at least 1 million. http://www.brookings.edu/repor...erube.aspx The saddest part is that people who can ill afford cars in the first place feel more need for them and often can only afford older, lower mileage, higher emission vehicles, compounding their problems. There's got to be a better way.

November 27, 2007

Frank said:

Interestingly enough, some of the earliest "suburbs" were areas outside of a city's center made accessible by new train lines being built. This raises an interesting idea--what if developers were required to provide a portion of funding for mass transit access to areas being newly developed?

November 28, 2007 | url

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