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Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back Hardcover – April 1, 1997

by Jane Holtz Kay (Author)

4.1 27 ratings

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Provides a thought-provoking look at the devastating impact on America of the automobile from a political, social, economic, and cultural perspective, and offers a range of innovative solutions to help change Americans' relationships with their cars. 17,500 first printing.

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Amazon.com Review

Commuters, here's some food for thought: collectively, Americans spend more than 8 billion hours each year stuck in traffic. This is just one of the horrifying statistics mentioned in Jane Holtz Kay's Asphalt Nation, an eye-opening look at the relationship between Americans and their cars. Kay asserts that the automobile is destroying our communities, our environment, and our economic competitiveness, and her supporting arguments are pretty persuasive. In addition to the billions of hours wasted in gridlock, Kay notes that our daily drives are becoming longer and more frequent, and that increased mileage has nullified any advances in emission controls. Asphalt Nation is comprised of three parts: the first, "Car Glut: A Nation in Lifelock," examines the impact of the automobile culture on life in the United States today. "Car Tracks: The Machine That Made the Land" traces the history of cars from Henry Ford to the present, while "Car Free: From Dead End to Exit" imagines a happier future without automobile dependency.

What makes Asphalt Nation far more interesting than the typical anti-auto diatribe is Kay's discussion of the cultural mores that helped create America's current car glut--namely, our attitudes toward land use and growth management; her comparisons between American and European practices in these areas are particularly interesting. Others have written about the American love affair with the automobile, but Holtz revisits the discussion with lively writing and a dramatic narrative.

From Booklist

Despite some occasional discord, most Americans' love affair with the automobile continues unabated. In fact, highway speed limits have been raised in some places, and Chicago has reopened venerable State Street to auto traffic. Yet antiautomobile activists, highway engineers, and transportation bureaucrats have all begun to reach the same conclusion. Pollution, congestion, and destruction of our landscape from automobiles and highways have reached the crisis stage. Kay is the Nation's architecture critic and author of Lost Boston (1988). She documents the degree to which Americans have become dependent upon the automobile and measures the costs of America's "car culture." But Kay also offers solutions, many of which have been successful in places across the country. Hers is an impassioned plea to design public spaces to accommodate pedestrians, to stop building new highways, to reverse the neglect of public transit and mass transportation, to promote the use of bicycles, and to design communities for people instead of machines. David Rouse

From Kirkus Reviews

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 polity must 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. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review

Although Asphalt Nation largely succeeds in proving that it is possible to get where we are going without destroying where we live, it does not offer a systematic argument, and it does not break new conceptual or methodical ground. -- The New York Times Book Review, Kenneth T. Jackson

About the Author

Jane Holtz Kay is the architecture and planning critic for The Nation.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown; 1st edition (April 1, 1997)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 418 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0517587025
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0517587027
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.6 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.75 x 1.25 x 9.75 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,199,116 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4.1 27 ratings

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Angelina

Read About How Much Cars Have Affected Our World -- Far Beyond Transportation (and the lack of it)

Reviewed in the United States on July 16, 2016

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This book arrived well within the forecasted delivery and in good condition. I am in the process of reading about what cars have done to our culture, of special interest to me as the Millennials are the first generation in the past 50 or more years who are not buying cars -- Big Positive Changes are coming -- and about time, too.

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Rosalie M.

A must read for all Zoning Boards. Don't wait ...

Reviewed in the United States on December 27, 2014

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A must read for all Zoning Boards. Don't wait until your aquifer is depleted and vegetation is no longer absorbing the CO2.

Ms. Kay knows what she is talking about and expresses her ideas, oh, so well.

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Simon D. Levy

Great idea, bad writing

Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 1999

Verified Purchase

Although I wholeheartedly agree with Jane Holtz Kay that the car is ruining America (I just junked mine and started taking the train), I wish she had done a better job of writing about the problem. Asphalt Nation is chock-full of cliche's -- sometimes repeated on the same page -- and contains such horrible misquotations as "think locally, act globally" (p. 267), that one wonders whether the author was awake during much of her task, or perhaps writing under a strict deadline.
The content is wanting too. Despite the "how we can take it back" part of the subtitle, the book contains no apendices or tables listing resources for anti-car activism; I have had to jot down notes _en passant_ and look up the names she mentions using the internet.
This is all very unfortunate, because the point of the book needs to be made, and I give Jane Holtz Kay three stars for making it. But if this is the best kind of popular scholarship and writing we can expect in support of the anti-auto movement, then that movement is likely doomed.

31 people found this helpful

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Flycatcher

A terrific primer on America's car culture

Reviewed in the United States on March 2, 2018

It has been many years since I read this book. But I recall enjoying it thoroughly and getting through it pretty quickly. Contains a great deal if information I had been unaware of. Well done and highly recommended.

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mrehm@austintx.net

Asphalt Nation: Step One of Twelve

Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 1999

If this country did not have the First Amendment, Asphalt Nation would probably have been one of several books banned from public circulation. Asphalt Nation justly attacks one of the most influential inventions of the modern age, the automobile. This book is an attempt to define our addiction to the personal automobile and the negative effects of this addiction. If you have ever lived in an environment designed for human beings rather than motor vehicles, then you will understand why the people of our country should read a book like this. Places like Paris, Barcelona, Venice, and thousands of small-scaled European cities are examples of the anti-thesis to modern American cities that were built around the daily use of the automobile. I was extremely fortunate to have lived in Europe for half a year and without that experience I would probably not be interested in this topic.
The decisions that propelled the automobile into all of our daily lives were made before most of us were born. Past governing officials, business leaders, and our grandparents made these decisions during a period of time before the now evident problems could be foreseen. The development of our built environment (mainly suburbs and shopping centers) can be directly related to the increasing influence of the automobile. Our own culture is very much intertwined with the car, and the problems that it brings effects our society deeply. The car is not the American Dream, it does not symbolize freedom, and, if we act responsibly, it will not be the only option for our children as it was for us.
Read this book to see the problems of automobile addiction and not to find solutions to the problems defined. There are no books currently written that have solved, or even come close to solving, the problem associated with this addiction or the secondary problems of urban decay, suburban sprawl, co-dependence on Middle Eastern oil, destruction of our natural environment, drive-thu culture, separation of the extended family, etc. The admittance of the addiction is the first and most important step in finding a solution. This is the point of Asphalt Nation. As people become familiar with the ideas contained in Asphalt Nation, as well as other books, some alternatives like New Urbanism and Co-Housing (community/shared living) will begin to spawn better and better concepts toward a more human-scaled way to live in the next millennium.

19 people found this helpful

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Mark

Nothing new to make this worthwile.

Reviewed in the United States on June 14, 2002

Verified Purchase

This book is very thorough about describing how cars became ingrained in our lives, but it didn't offer much insight. I'm guessing most people who read this book have some notion of how urban sprawl leads to car dependency and lack of inner-city. This book does little more than re-state that.
Additional weak points:
- No presence of counter argument.
- Repetitive
- Not enough attention was payed to the 'taking it back' portion of the title. Roughly 4/5 of the book were taking over America, 1/5 taking it back. No new ideas were presented in the 'taking it back' section.

18 people found this helpful

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Bougainvillea

A worthy thesis, well presented

Reviewed in the United States on June 20, 2004

I've noticed how much design caters to car traffic for some time now. Not only are bus systems left behind in plans, but it is also difficult to walk anywhere these days. I'm not crazy about her ideas like raising gas prices, or anything that raises the misery factor for low income people struggling to keep their jalopy running (like harsh smog test requirements) but the idea of making alternative transportation easier and more attractive is good.
There could have been a little more attention to using the already in place car infrastructure for alternative fuel vehicles. But that doesn't take away from the basic idea behind the book.

5 people found this helpful

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David Greusel

A little more of this, a little less of that...

Reviewed in the United States on September 3, 2004

Verified Purchase

Less a book than a book-length sort of reportage, Asphalt Nation builds the case against the automobile to almost absurd heights. After reading the first half of the book, you wonder why cars are even legal in this country! Cars pollute, pollution is toxic, OK, we get that. Enough already.

I was more taken with the second part, where Kay reports the history of how automobiles, and specifically traffic planners, conspired to create the sprawling, pedestrian-hostile multilane disaster we call the modern American city. This portion of the book was fascinating, and I would have liked twice as much of it.

At the end of the day, however, I was hoping the author would have a more nuanced and thoughtful point of view than, "Cars are bad, walking is good." I already knew that. Still and all, a great book if you're inclined to think that maybe what your city needs is NOT one or two more left-turn lanes.

14 people found this helpful

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