Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back.

In the late 1950s, a senior editor for Fortune magazine named Jane Jacobs began - to the surprise of her colleagues - bicycling to work. Disturbed by the deterioration of the streets of New York City, she channeled her community activism into the writing of a major manifesto. Published in 1961, Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities eventually became a classic critique of the state of the urban environment in the United States.

Thirty years later, an architecture critic for The Nation magazine named Jane Holtz Kay sold - to the surprise of her colleagues - her car. Fed up with "shuttling a ton of steel to buy a popsicle," the Boston resident transformed her exile from the car culture into a labor of love. Published this past April, Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back is a brave foray into the world's most car ridden society - a "38.4 million acre monoculture of roads and parking lots" - that may, in time, also become a standard work in its field.

The automobile's tragic and devastating impact on U.S. cities and landscapes certainly deserves an epic, and Kay's five-year "odyssey through America's late auto age" makes a heroic effort to answer that call. Unlike its predecessors in the canon of car culture criticism, Asphalt Nation benefits from the ever-more sobering hindsight of the late-twentieth century - a point at which the car population of 200 million has since 1969 grown six times faster than the human population. As such, it opens the widest window to date on the complex relationship between a country and the car.

Even at the automobile's first appearance 90 years ago, several observers feared this so-called servant of society, for all the freedom and mobility it provided, would in time become its master. During the car's early heyday in the 1930s, one critic predicted the man-made creation would turn into a "Frankenstein of the twentieth century," spewing smoke and running out of control. Such nightmarish visions have become modern-day routines, condemning drivers to 72 billion hours stuck in smog-filled traffic each year.

But the importance of Kay's book lies in showing that these are superficial critiques: the influence of the automobile runs far deeper than most Americans realize - or are willing to admit. It is pervasive, she reveals, yet subtle in its control over virtually every dimension of life. Like Virgil in Dante's Divine Comedy, she guides the reader downward through the circles of hell (on wheels) into which a car-dependent society descends - such as the spiraling costs of environmental pollution, and the slippery slope of oil dependence that sent the country to war in 1991. The result is a combination of exhaustive documentation and eloquent observation, imbuing one with the sense that if, as today's carmakers proclaim, "what America drives, drives America," then the nation may be heading for a dead-end.

One need not abandon all hope, however: Asphalt Nation has its own progression of Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise, and maps a way up from the depths and toward a transportation system that serves to move people, not automobiles. Kay argues that the country is approaching the end of its "car frontier," a boundary as significant as Frederick Jackson Turner's western frontier of a century ago. "It is this book's conviction that we can and must bring an end to the late motor age."

To accomplish this, however, the uninitiated must gain a deeper appreciation of America's "lifelock" to the automobile as the dominant means of transportation. As Kay rightly argues, this grip is so tight that few perceive the decline in quality of life and mobility. Like the television, the car invades space so completely that it is impossible to find a vantage point from which to fully gauge its impact.

The gross inequities of the car culture too often escape our attention, and Kay takes care to describe them. In particular, the country largely deprives mobility to the 80 million young, poor, and old in the dawn, darkness, and twilight of life who are unable to operate automobiles. Neglect of public transportation thus becomes central to the nation's race, gender, and class problems.

Less tangibly, the car eradicates public space - which first drew Kay to the subject after discovering the extent to which builders plan for parking spaces, not people. With an eye for harmony in design, she describes how the car has shaped (or misshaped) America's man-made environment - its buildings, sidewalks, city layouts - and across the country created "an obliviousness to place" and an "anti-civic impulse." To the growing lexicon of words describing the auto-centric landscape planning of cities like Phoenix, Arizona - the geography of nowhere, exurbs, edge cities - Kay adds her own: "carchitecture."

The car's assault on the natural environment, meanwhile, is nothing less than an ecological Vietnam - another war fought but never declared. Indeed, Kay's staggering statistics of car-related fatalities and health and pollution costs are not unlike the Pentagon Papers in their breadth. In the course of a year, a single car imposes an estimated $5,000 in such costs to society - along with $6,000 in costs borne by the driver. Yet, adds the author, "the automobile's abuse overruns our capacity to record it."

Kay also dispels the economic assertions often made in defense of the car. That "market forces have made the car king" seems dubious given that more money is spent to support driving than education or health. Nor can public transit be called a "money-loser," when it receives one dollar for every seven given to the car - and states must support it while the federal government provides 90 percent of highway funds.

The origins of the country's private car-oriented public policy become clearer when one reviews the past century of U.S. history from "behind the wheel." Early on, the car's proponents ranged from Progressive reformers to President Roosevelt to Frank Lloyd Wright. All endorsed, and helped to spur, flight from the city as an antidote to urban life - while letting once-prosperous rail, streetcars, and trolleys languish.

Wartime brought back public transit: "World War II would mark the last time that catering to the car and using it to disperse the population did not constitute the nation's manifest destiny." With rail as a war industry, buses, rails, trolleys, and interurbans "bulged with passengers," while "cities at the center of this rail network throbbed with life." But federal funds bankrolled "the shift from transit-based towns to the suburbs, depriving the old nucleus to fuel the new fringe...a portend of times to come." The end of the war brought the beginning of the military-industrial complex, with the now-familiar pattern of big government handing contracts out to big business - including the auto industry, one of the biggest "war heroes." As the Senate put it: "The hand that signs the war contract is the hand that shapes the future."

The military mindset shaped U.S. transportation policy through the largest public works project in human history: the mammoth highway trust fund of 1957. Pouring concrete for highways fulfilled a "national defense mission," and facilitated another heavily subsidized mission: the suburban exodus from cities. The renewed rise of the car also mirrored the fall of the city, as public transit largely died from the disease of "urban renewal" - a euphemism for road building still in use today.

Urban crises forced Americans to rethink car-dependence during the 1960s, aligning conservationists, highway opponents and a host of other groups. Several battles were won: freeways blocked, waterways restored, and new rail lines opened. But with government footing more than half the driver's bill, the war continues to be lost: Americans drive more than twice as far now as in 1970, and the vicious circle of road building and congestion persists.

Kay's blueprint for change is far-reaching: "The way to end the auto age has many courses.... Securing the next frontier of livability step-by-step is a task that should arouse the imagination of a new generation." But the approach may be comfortingly familiar to Americans: "It is conservative in its localism, traditional in its individualism, and historic in its 'use-it-up, wear-it-out, make it-do- or-do without' mentality...that mindset suits the turn to the next century. As a nation we are coining around to the power of limits and the strength of incrementalism."

Also familiar are the politics of "Highway-fighting, traffic calming, depaving and pricing.... The struggle engages a new constituency...the process is participatory as democracy itself." Kay lists inspiring stories - New England waterfronts saved, Midwest rail routes revived, Los Angeles trolley systems brought back to life - that provide hope amid gloomier national statistics. The end of the auto era bas already begun. Local governments are now able to direct half of federal highway funds to mass transit and are required to seek community input in their planning. But as the distorted signals from Washington are corrected, the battleground will move to states and cities, where the momentum to "build more roads" - like that to "send in more troops" during that other quagmire - remains formidable.

Kay is calling not for automobile antagonists but rather for pro-mobility advocates. "Deposing the car from its dominion over the earth is a radical, even revolutionary move. It is not only an attack, however; it is also an invitation to create alternatives in our most basic decisions on how to go from here to there." The challenge is convincing Americans that these alternatives are preferable.

Land use reform - reversing the sprawl that fosters car dependence - will be more difficult. Fortunately, some policymakers are recognizing that promoting urban density and rebinding the nation with public transportation can also help reverse the social unraveling of crime, poverty, and pollution. This may be how we reach the end of Kay's car frontier: by drawing lines at the city limits just as Portland, that endpoint of the Oregon Trail, has done with much success. Such efforts need to be multiplied, or else the strip malls and Wal-Marts will simply take root where the political resistance is weakest.

While the Wild-West mentality of the car culture appears to be alive and well, typified by the growing popularity of sport-utility vehicles, the growing number of aspiring sheriffs - be they preservationists or pedestrians - instils optimism. People are beginning to make the myriad connections - between sprawl and inner-city poverty, cars and the loss of community - encompassing the costs borne by an auto-centric society, and to act. Just as similar concerns brought together Black Panthers and society ladies during the 1960s, today's transport crises are fueling local initiatives by groups of people as diverse as the country itself. Thirty years after Jacobs' book, her hometown New York City is experiencing something of a revival. With a mobilized effort, Kay's vision of a "walking nation," with all types of transport in balance, could also be realized.

As we embark on designing transportation systems for the twenty-first century, it is essential to reflect upon the successes and failures of the twentieth. For the latter, Asphalt Nation is a fine place to start, since it serves as a powerful reminder of what can happen when we forget how to design for people. And in a world of half a billion cars, it also offers other nations a potent amulet against the temptation to follow America's car-dependent route. That country's late auto era must be quickly brought to an end, not exported, if we are ultimately to solve looming global environmental problems such as climate change, in which motor transport is among the fastest-growing contributors.

Broader issues of personal lifestyles and values are involved here as well, and perhaps there is another American classic waiting to be written in the new millennium: that of a hypermobile society coming home to the realization that mobility is not an end in itself. Kay urges, "The way to stop the auto age begins with affirming the value of place and the role of transportation in casing our access to it." In other words, we must not, in deciding our transportation future, lose sight of its original, human aim. "The mission is to evoke the very root of transportation in the word 'transport' that can carry us to a loftier place and state of being." That seems a paradise toward which all societies - not just those in purgatory - should strive.

Seth Dunn is a staff researcher at the Worldwatch Institute.