Case Study I The Automobile PhenomenonCities, after all, have a great deal in common with cars. More and more, in fact, they often seem to be turning into cars. There are deep mysteries here, impenetrable to the present shallow state of human understanding. Somehow, we know not how, things communicate. Russell Baker,New York Times, March 8, 1973In the beginning the automobile was of course a mere curiosity, but developed rapidly into a luxury good entering into the consumption of the upper class. "As long as motor cars were few in number," Lewis Mumford wrote, "he who had one was a king; he could go where he pleased and halt where he pleased; and this machine itself appeared as a compensatory device for enlarging an ego which had been shrunken by our very success in mechanization.This was clearly the situation which obtained before the First World War: in 1910 there were some 19,000 people for every car in the United States. During the next decade, however, the automobile began to enter into popular consumption, the ratio of people to cars dropping precipitously to approximately 11 to 1 by 1920. On the side of technology and production, the decisive factor here was Henry Ford's introduction of the low-priced Model T, involving (as both cause and effect) such cost-reducing technologies as the assembly line and interchangeable parts. Since 1920 the people/car ratio has further declined as follows: 1930 4.5; 1940 4.1; 1950 3.1; 1960 2.4; 1970 1.9. At the present time, there are 250 million cars for 320 million populations, i.e. one car per 1.28 persons in the United States. The automobile has become a mass-consumption commodity in the fullest sense of the term. And in the process it has profoundly altered many aspects of social existence for all classes and strata of society.

The most obvious manifestations of this process someone called the "automobilization" of society are traffic congestion and pollution, and these are also the effects which have been most instrumental in focusing public attention on the social and environmental implications of automobilization. But congestion and pollution are essentially superficial phenomena, comparable to the outward symptoms of a disease with deep roots in the organs of the body. If we are ever to deal with the disease itself we must go beyond the symptoms and study its etiology. In the present instance what we need first of all is to understand the ways in which the automobile in the process of becoming a mass-consumption good impinged upon and ultimately transformed the geography and demography of the country.

In the early years cars were expensive and unreliable so that only the well-to-do could afford them and their upkeep. In addition, except for city and town streets, roads were few and bad. Under these circumstances as far as the suburbs were concerned, cars complemented the existing patterns rather than changing them. Owned by the upper-income commuters and largely chauffeur-driven (the chauffeur fulfilling the role of mechanic as well as driver at a time when repair and service stations were all but nonexistent), cars expanded the area within which commuters could conveniently live but introduced no new elements into the picture. The 1920s saw the beginning of an extremely complex cumulative process, culminating in what it has become usual to refer to as today's "urban crisis." The immediately propelling forces underlying this process were, first, the cheapening of the automobile; and second, the extension of the road and highway network.In conclusion one can say that while it is possible to provide certain palliative measures to control the automobile onslaught, at least in principle, within the framework of the present monopoly capitalist system, there is no reason to believe that fundamental changes in the structure of cities and their relation to society as a whole can be effected without a radical change in the social order..When Lincoln Steffens went to the Soviet Union just after the Bolshevik Revolution, he proclaimed, "I have seen the future and it works." Today's visitor to any major world city might paraphrase Steffens and say, "I have seen the future and it doesn't work."