It took me a couple of tries to get through it, seeing as how I had to periodically walk away to avoid swallowing my own tongue in rage, but the gist is thus: the car is awesome (in fact its what make us great! Better than them Commies, anyway.) and central urban planning and smart growth suck because they are incompatible with the American Dream of a house in the suburbs.
I'm not interested in delving too deep into the shallow waters of Tierney's analysis (though I will mention that his paean to the horseless carriage omits one cost: each year the car kills more than 40,000 Americans and maims millions more. That and the whole "dependence on foreign oil" thing and the trouble that can cause.), so I'll just look at the last bit of his essay, the part entitled "The Car-Culture War".
It's interesting that Tierney would attack anti-auto advocates on a class basis. Tierney frames the car clash as a battle between elitist, intellectual "Gulfstream liberals" and hard-workin', car-drivin' suburban day traders. It's as if the working class doesn't even exist. That's because, in Tierny's suburbia, they don't. Or if they do, they don't matter. Tierney assumes that all city cores are havens of wealth and cultural elitism like his native New York. He's wrong. The fact is cars and car-friendly urban development is decidedly anti-poor. Anyone familiar with urban planning theory will probably know how sprawl leads to the "doughnut effect": as population moves from inner suburbs to the outer suburbs in search of newer, larger or more affordable houses, the urban core decays (Detroit's a good--or bad--example). The people who get left behind are the poor who have to contend with declining infrastructure and services. Here in Edmonton, a number of inner-city schools had to shut down because tight resources needed to be directed to new suburban schools. But to Tierney, these people don't matter, probably because they don't listen to Lou Reed and drive cars with leather interiors. In any case, basing an argument on class and then subsequently overlooking an entire category of people is pretty fucking stupid.
Another interesting tidbit can be found in the midst of his tirade against urban planning. Tierney suggests that "old-fashioned city neighbourhoods" were not the result of central planning, but of good old-fashioned free enterprise and, I daresay, gumption.
"...those old neighborhoods and their transit systems were not built by planners at regional authorities imposing their visions of how people should live and travel. They were built by housing developers and private streetcar and subway companies responding to their customers' desires in an era when politicians were content to guide development with fairly simple zoning codes. It was only later, in the middle of the 20th century, that urban planning became a bureaucratized profession with sweeping ambitions, like the ''urban renewal'' projects of the 1960's and 70's that mostly served to hasten the urbanites' flight to suburbs."So what prompted this shift towards central planning, Johnny Boy? Why I do believe it was the automobile! Let's not forget the role of the auto and oil companies in crushing alternate bodes of transport like streetcars. Finally, let’s dispense with the nonsense that developers and auto manufacturers were (and are) just giving people what they want. The “American Dream” model of suburban life (big house, big yard, big car) is a product of the post war prosperity that allowed so many middle-class Americans the chance to access what was until then a primarily upper-crust, bourgeoisie lifestyle. The car companies and developers were simply packaging those aspirations and selling the lifestyle back to people, even if they didn’t know they wanted it. In other words, car-centric suburban development did not become the norm and, indeed, the only option for North American living because of mass consumer pressure but because the oil, car and development barons decided that promoting such a lifestyle would ensure they would make a handsome profit (curiously, do you ever notice how few super-rich people live in the ‘burbs? In my neck of the woods, the ultra rich live near the core in elegant old mansions, not cheap-ass showhomes. Hmmmm.)
Which brings me at last to the fatal flaw in Tierny’s argument for the car. Smart growth and urban revitalization (in fill development) won’t work because people want the suburban lifestyle. So, because one model has been enshrined as the dominant one, all other options shall henceforth be disregarded (save those that simply make the status quo more manageable: wholesale change is not in the cards). The real problem here is taht change will come whether you like it or not. the current car-centric North American culture is fundamentally unsustainable. The tweaks Tierney and the car advocates propose are the equivilant of giving a band-aid to a cancer patient. When the system reaches the end of its tether and we are forced back to square one, Tierney and his ilk will wish they spent more time looking for real solutions and less time on high-tech toll booths and other stopgaps.
“… for most middle-class families, the ideal of city life conflicts with the reality of their own lives. Even if they're willing to do without a yard, how can they afford to live in a decent neighborhood within easy commute of their jobs? How will they go shopping on a rainy day with a child in tow? Where will the children go to school?”
This is what it boils down to: short-sighted suburban angst. Never mind that there’s no schools in the city because they had to close to fund the new ones in the suburbs. Never mind that there’s so few “decent” neighbourhoods because you fuckers took your jobs and bolted, leaving the cores to rot away. No sir.
The deficiencies of the city are directly related to suburbia and the automobile. And this imbalance is self-perpetuating.
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