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An automotive city or auto city is a city that facilitates and encourages the movement of people via private transportation, through 'physical planning', e.g., built environment innovations (, parking spaces, automobile/pedestrian interface technologies and Suburb containing detached dwellings with driveways or garages) and 'soft programming' e.g., social policy surrounding city street usage (traffic safety/automobile campaigns, automobile laws and the social reconstruction of streets as reserved public spaces for the automobile).Norton, p. 2008, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, published by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, Clapton, R. (2005) Intersections of Conflict: Policing and Criminalising Melbourne’s Traffic, 1890–1930, Doctor of Philosophy Thesis, submitted to the Department of History, The University of Melbourne
Multiple competing views have attempted to explain the rapid dominance of automobile use over alternative modes of transportation in North America in the early 20th century. Two compelling arguments are:
While both arguments are nuanced, the basic principles behind each – advocacy of private transportation and advocacy of automobile production and consumption – informed the American automobile manufacturing boom of the early 1900s. By the late 1920s, the automobile industry was producing millions of cars each year, its surging growth due in part to the sociology of industrial phenomena related to Fordism.Maller, J. and Dwolatsky, B. (1993) 'What is Fordism? Restructuring Work in the South African Metal Industry', in 'Transformation', 22:70–86
The creation of the automotive city may be due, in part, to an attack on old customs by the good roads movement, seeking to pave the way for the rapidly expanding automobile market—and to the triumph of individual liberties, associated with consumption and the free market, over restrictive governance of the built environment and its use. By the 1930s, the interaction of automotive industry interests, a vocal, growing, minority of city motorists and favourable political sentiment, worked together to reconstruct the city street as a reserved space for the automobile, delegitimising previous users (such as pedestrians) and forging the foundations for the first automotive cities.
This transformative process could not have succeeded, were it not for the development, and deployment, of a system of symbols, codes and laws which would become the language of , and infrastructure design.
In the early 1920s this reconfiguration of American city transport infrastructure around the automobile, at the instigation of traffic engineers, resulted in the rewriting of an old English common law (which had previously defined the street as a space where all users were equal) to define the street as a space which privileges cars, allocating them the right of way (except at intersections).
This early and prolonged reconfiguration of the American, and Australian, city around private transportation served to dramatically alter the course of city development within these countries. This is made most tangible through the generally accepted shape the man-made environment has taken in cities such as Melbourne (which never got rid of its Yarra Trams), Los Angeles and Detroit, which cater to the needs of automobile ownership (i.e. , grid city layout linked with , and private transport corridors, and the securing of land for car spaces).Newman, P. and Kenworthy, J. (2000) 'The Ten Myths of Automobile Dependence', in World Transport Policy and Practice, Vol. 6 No. 1, 2000, pp. 15–25Holtz Kay, J. (1997) 'Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take it Back', published by Crown Publishers, New York, 1997,
Before usage of the automobile was ubiquitous in these regions, and its presence believed to be necessary to the efficient dispersion and mobility of human capital within a centralised, low density, metropolitan area, it was introduced to mixed traffic conditions, and was commonly viewed as a nuisance which endangered historically legitimate street uses.Mcshane, C. (1999) 'The Origins and Globalisation of Traffic Control Signals', in Journal of Urban History, 1999, 25: 379, published by SAGE online, electronic resource retrieved; 5/05/2011, In 1913, New York was experiencing frequent congestion, and by 1915, many individuals had reverted to using the subway.
Chicago's electric streetcar company indicated that it had slowed by 44% in the city's CBD between 1910 and 1920. In San Francisco in 1914, the number of automobiles surpassed the city's 10,000 horse-drawn vehicles. By 1910, Los Angeles had the highest per capita car registration in the world, Detroit and other Midwestern cities followed shortly thereafter. This time period for North America was marked by substantial growth in automobile ownership amongst the population, creating friction between private transportation interests and mass transit interests.
They were viewed as obstacles to what was generally accepted, among stakeholders in the automobile, as the future of North American transportation.Snell, B (1974) American ground transport: A proposal for restructuring the automobile, bus and rail industries, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. Electronic Resource retrieved 5/05/2011 from; http://www.worldcarfree.net/resources/freesources/American.htm
The purchase, and ultimate closure, of the electric street car systems by National City Lines, occurred approximately 10 years prior to the United States Congress proscription of diversification among rival industries, outlined in the Transportation Act of 1940.Slater, Cliff (1997). "General Motors and the Demise of Streetcars". Transportation Quarterly. pp. 45–66 The intent of this, in the words of the Interstate Commerce Commission, was, "to protect each mode of transportation from the suppression and strangulation, which might follow if control thereof were allowed to fall into the hands of a competing agency". In 1949 a Grand Jury ultimately convicted National City Lines, and its constituents; General Motors, Standard Oil of California, Mack Trucks, Phillips Petroleum and the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company on criminal indictment of anti-trust conspiracy, this decision did not, however, result in the return of electric street car systems.
280 million passengers were provided with the option of either taking the bus, or participating in the automobile industry. Within a few decades, the golden age of the automotive industry was well and truly under way, with cities such as Los Angeles being almost completely dependent on the automobile.
Substantial funds were required in order to develop and maintain infrastructure capable of sustaining the level of automobile dependence observed by the burgeoning automotive cities in North America. Advocacy for these funds was spearheaded in 1932, by General Motors' Alfred Sloan, who brought a number of automotive industry interest groups together under the banner of the ‘National Highway Users Conference’. The combined lobbying power of this organisation resulted in the substantial U.S. Highway Trust fund of 1957, through which the U.S. government invested $1,845 million in highways between 1952 and 1970. Rail systems only received $232 million during the same period.
The decisive early action of large automobile lobbies in the U.S., in securing road infrastructure funding for their product, helped shape, and protect, the growth of automotive cities in North America and Australia through the 1900s. In many contemporaneous European and Asian countries the influence of automobile lobbies were tempered by equally large mass transit lobbies, and the dependence on the automobile, evident in the urban sprawl of detached dwellings with garages, and accompanying street systems, in North America and Australia, has not been as significant, possibly due in part to this reason
In Hoyt's concept of the ideal post-war American city, low density urban garden homes in dormitory neighbourhoods on the urban fringe would be separated from industry and employment by a green belt, and connecting these zones to greatly expanded car spaces at the base of principal office buildings and would accommodate private modes of transportation, supporting independent mobility and accessibility in and around downtown areas. Advocacy for this form of automobile dependent urbanisation, segregation of land uses, and low density expansion of the metropolitan area, was heavily informed by preeminent planned community systems such as Clarence Perry's 'Neighbourhood Unit', and Raymond Unwin's 'Garden Suburb'.Perry, C. (1929) 'The Neighbourhood Unit', Reprinted Routledge/Thoemmes, London, 1998, p.25-44Unwin, R. (1911) 'Town Planning in Practice: An Introduction to the Art of Designing Cities and Suburbs', Reprinted Princeton Architectural Press, NY 1994, pp. ix–xvii,2–14
These new planned suburbs, located at the periphery of the metropolitan area, were advertised as a means of escaping the congestion and pollution associated with inner-city living in the early to mid-20th century. The development of replicable integral neighbourhoods, and processes of urban renewal (characterised by the development of street infrastructure) facilitated a suburban exodus from cities during this period, resulting in the dispersion of the western metropolis.Cherry, G. (1984) 'Britain and the Metropolis: Urban Change and Planning in Perspective', in The Town Planning Review,Vol. 55, No. 1, Jan, 1984, published by Liverpool University Press, electronic resource retrieved 9/05/2011, pp. 5–33 In a short space of time, a considerable burden was placed on the transit networks of many major North American cities, as processes of urbanisation created entire communities, isolated from what were popularly viewed as obsolete modes of mass transit, of automobile dependent commuters.
As early as 1925, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, had estimated that urban congestion costs were exceeding $2 billion a year. In 2009, The Texas Transportation Institute issued the Urban Mobility Report (2009), in which the estimated current cost of traffic congestion (in wasted fuel and lost productivity) was $87.2 billion in the U.S.Schrank, D. and Lomax, T. (2009) '2009 Urban Mobility Report', published by the Texas Transportation Institute, July 2009, electronic resource retrieved 15 May 2011, from
In Australia, through the twentieth century, Clapton makes the observation that the automobile has, "killed, injured and maimed more people than war has done to Australian soldiers" (Clapton, 2005, p. 313).
In the 21st century Western automotive city, road engineers fight against the phenomenon of induced traffic (new infrastructure creating more congestion), road authorities strive for balance between traffic safety, the independence awarded to private transportation users and the rights of various road users in a democratic society, while land speculators continue to design dormitory commuter neighbourhoods, in cities where planning agencies facilitate (or do not regulate) car dependent sprawl.
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