Cars are horrifyingly fantastic machines, in that the industry that designs and manufactures automobiles are efficient networks of people and parts, and the final product is a fantastic means of transportation. The world we know has been created by cars, what with flat pavement, lanes of highway and plenty of infrastructure designed to accommodate them. The late Modernist theorizer and practitioner LeCorbusier was in love with the theoretical and practical applications of a car, postulating that a utopian future that would arise would a car-dominated one, the physical world defined (and made better) for it. Corbu, along with the late (douchebag) Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, proposed future cities planned according to the range and speed of the automobile.
Cars. We celebrate them with vintage car events, a deluge of commercials, huge lot sales encouraging every individual to have the freedom to move large distances. We also celebrate the aspect of freedom in that regard, with stereo systems and miles of highway and rest stops to put forth a lifestyle of speed and movement, of enjoying nature as it flies by, the cult of the roadtrip.
There is no denying that the Car has been a revelation for the development of the modern world, a product of the times symbolizing our own longings for freedom and speedy convenience. At the same time, unless you've been living under a rock in the United States, you might have heard about the impact of cars on the environment: not merely nature, but the natures that guide us, our spatial, economic and emotional condition. Pollution, congestion of streets and highways, and of course, neighborhoods dissected and destroyed by cars.
As an example of the positive and negative impacts of cars, take the city of Detroit. Since the assembly line instituted by Henry Ford at the beginning of the 20th century, the mechanization and availability of automobiles as a family item coincided with the flow of capital and increased demand of post world wars and the availability of cheap labor from the South. The city of Detroit in the first infrastructure works bailout with Roosevelt, at that time experienced a widening of the cities streets to 9 lane beasts (the main boulevards), highways like the John C Lodge dissecting the city and physically separating communities, and interstate freeways winding in and out of the cities into the greater metropolitan area. When push came to shove, the freedom of movement and capital made an exodus into that greater metropolitan area, leaving the city with a crippled tax base, a predominantly segregated and impoverished inner city, and plenty of problems. the speed of the car cut off the many avenues of pedestrian and bike movement that cities like Portland currently enjoy, and the result was that people found it difficult to go anywhere without driving. this pattern of highways cutting up the city and making it less friendly to a human scale of movement is a common theme.
Cars, ironically, are inefficient in their current incarnations.
A typical passenger car built to hold 5 on average carries 1.2 people, but still expends gasoline in proportion to the car, not the number of passengers. The synthetic materials and components and their chain of manufacturing spans the entire world and manufacturing and moving parts from China (low-environmental quality standard) to the US (where jobs are held because of the promise of a political system) is not the best standard to follow. Traffic flows and issues are always an issue, and so on and so forth.
By now, there have certainly been great strides in making cars that mitigate or even remove those issues altogether. Alternative fuel source engines (the Volt, the Prius,etc.), Hybrid vehicles (including Hybrid Escalades), and the move towards compact car offerings (the Ford Fiesta, a wildly popular compact the world over, is finally available in North America) and Tax incentives are pushing the market towards a cleaner and more efficient way of moving. A question, then, is where the autmotive field will be in the future, and if it will do more for the betterment of our society.
At the Shanghai 2010 world expo, the Rhone-Alps region exhibition pavilion proposed their version of the Smart City, where the major means of consumption came from local sources, the city itself would be a compact medium density entity laid in close proximity to other municipalities, and communities would be self-sufficiency.
In this world, Cars would be small, single or dual-seaters (think smart-cars), considering environmental and logistical efficiency and the close proximity of services, the zoned low-speed zones of the city. Most importantly, the smaller size of these cars would allow current and future transport infrastructure to experience less traffic, congestion, parking spaces and structures. For me, this makes a lot of sense, but the french/swiss ingenuity of the Rhone Alps region of europe is an isolated case. The need for compacting our lives is not a pressing need in America where we have so much space we can afford to waste it by growing grass and paying landscapers to fertilize, mow and water them. To Americans, cars are metaphors for our freedom, of mobility and convenience. We want 2 ton towing capcity, huge trunks for carrying things when we need them, and of course, a style that suits us.
The future makes sense, but there is certainly a lot more to it than providing purchasing options and tax incentives. If small, fuel-efficient cars are the backbone of a human-scaled mid-density city future, then we will have to do more: The cars must be cheap and readily available (if you can get the pricing to the 5000-10000 dollar range, it will be a viable option for city dwellers sick of tight parking spots and crappy public transportation), and it must be part of a holistic reorganization of city space (condensed spatial organizations that are pedestrian-favored, policies that reward public transportation programs and small cars, a shift in the automotive industry, the availability of elements that make city-dwelling more ideal than suburban in character, etc.)
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