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.”
Wilson, who is a professor of public policy, former Chairman of the White House Task Force on Crime former Chairman of the National Advisor Commission on Drug Abuse Prevention and has been a member of several public policy commissions, initiates the discussion in response to Kunstler’s 1996 publication Home From Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century. In Kunstler’s book, he promotes the “new urbanism” movement which advocates mixed-use live/work neighborhoods and takes aim at sprawl, zoning laws, the U.S. property tax system, and particularly the automobile that makes it all possible. Wilson protests the depiction of American suburbs and reliance on the car as “catastrophic.”
At almost 10-years old, the debate isn’t exactly “news,” but the arguments remain much the same today and are a terrific intro to the contested role of urban design, what America should look like, and whether getting a carectomy is, in fact, sensible.
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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Kate, I haven’t seen you post on it but here are some similar links that help promote the cycling lifestyle.
[url]http://www.bikely.com/[/url]Bikely is a place to put your Bike routes. it is for all types of routes and integrates google maps for the picture.
[url]http://www.mycyclinglog.com/[/url] here is another one that will track as much as you want to track about your ride even your calculated C02 usage if you used a car. you can even link your bikely routes to the information.
You should have some handy bike links on the carectomy home page as well.
It’s cool to promote biking on Facebook, but it looks like just repackaging generic features for bikers.
Cooler web-apps and Facebook apps provide unique, rich functionality.
See: A Facebook app that helps arrange rideshare (I’d love to see carectomy do a post on this) http://www.zimride.com/
And the earlier mentioned bikely.com, http://www.mapmyride.com and http://bycycle.org/ are very cool, but not on Facebook.