In 2012, there were ~ 8.6 million lane-miles of roads in the United States. Roads, parking facilities, driveways and sidewalks now imperviously cover > 43,000 sq mi, an area greater than Ohio. To learn more about how this happened, who some of the key players were, and why it may be a less stable result than you might think, you should purchase this book.
While attending a lecture by James Longhurst, author of Bike Battles, at our local library, one of the librarians attending recommended that I have a look at Car Country. Am I glad she did. This is a much-needed and appreciated book. It was wonderfully readable and, like all perspective-changing works, required pauses to think about the implications of this remarkable history. The author’s love of the subject and curiosity about where his research on the book led him are both wide-ranging and as delightful as they are informative. Prior to reading Car Country, I had little idea of the extent to which roads constrain our experience of topography and of our social/cultural/natural/political/economic/technologic and environmental world.
Dr. Wells is an environmental historian and provides information about our “received” mobility environment that helps one better understand the everyday world and provides historical context for it. This is information that should appear in our schools to help our younger citizens understand the world we live in and the forces at play in maintaining a mobility policy equilibrium of sorts. Structures that seem “inevitable”, from the gutting of mass transit in our cities, the decline of business in city centers and walkable, neighborhood-supporting businesses in abutting neighborhoods are the result of largely unplanned, crisis-mode adaptations to rapidly growing motor vehicle ownership/use as the primary mobility mode. “Visionary” urban planners with little sense of downstream effects on liveability took the motor vehicle as the determinative element in nearly all future urban design. Opportunistic motor vehicle-driven suburban “design” with traffic-flow driven zoning ordinances followed in the post WW2 period. Planners. Developers in collaboration with planners and city councils now take these approaches as written in stone, although they were originally manifestations of cheap fuel-cheap land opportunism with little more planning than how to optimize profits and meet minimum zoning requirements.
The cultural, political and economic drivers how we got to Car Country are splendidly described in this wide-ranging work. The history of road funding mechanisms and how fractious and resistant our countrymen were about road development and maintenance in the late 19th and early 20th century is fascinating. The role of the railroads in undermining rural road development is another aspect to road development I had not previously appreciated. I had previously thought (and lore in the League of American Bicyclists maintains) that 19th century bicyclists were major drivers for Good Roads, prior to the large-scale appearance of motor vehicles on the scene. While bicyclists were a part of the story, more significant forces were in play.
The author provides very good secondary and ample primary sources in his bibliography. I’ve read some of the secondary sources and appreciate that they are by the best in their fields. I will continue to cherry-pick this excellent bibliography for some time.
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