Have car, will commute

The relationship between the automobile and the suburbs

By Douglas S. Wood
CNN Interactive

(CNN) -- America's long love affair with the automobile helped spawn its sprawling urban areas as suburban residents favor the car as their primary method of transportation.

Before mass numbers of automobiles littered the American landscape, suburbs had to be constructed within walking distance of the city or transit systems like trolleys or subways. But the car allowed developers to build suburbs farther and farther away from the central city and people quickly adopted the personal mobility and freedom offered by the car.

Those conveniences led to a change in lifestyles that has made the nation dependent on the car. In "Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States," Columbia University history professor Kenneth Jackson wrote that the automobile "fundamentally restructured the pattern of everyday life in the United States."

Jackson quoted an Atlanta drugstore owner, forced to close his business in 1926, who said in a bit of foreshadowing, "The place where trade is, is where automobiles go. ... A central location is no longer a good one for my sort of business."

Gasoline 'cheaper than water'

In an interview, Jackson said that a key decision in America's growth was to pass along the costs of the automobile to the general public instead of making individual drivers pay for it. Most roads, he said, are not paid for completely by gasoline taxes but also are funded by income, sales and other taxes.

"Whereas everywhere else in the world they look at it differently. If you're going to drive the damn car, [you're going to] pay for it, so they charge much higher gasoline taxes," he said.

Gasoline costs $5 a gallon in the United States, Jackson said, but the person paying at the pump puts in $1.50 while general taxes pick up the rest. A recent spike in U.S. gas prices led to complaints and has become an issue in the presidential campaign but Jackson said the reality is that gasoline is so cheap in the United States that drivers do not calculate it as part of the cost of travel.

"It's cheaper than water. You cannot go to your local grocery store and buy bottled water as cheaply as you buy gasoline, and they're getting water by sticking a container in a stream somewhere and bringing it up," he said.

Jackson said that during the years after World War II, the prevailing public view was that the automobile and the suburbs represented the way of the future.

"We really believed that the automobile was the answer to everything, that cities were doomed and [you'd better] get out as fast as you can," he said.

A little help from the government

The exodus to the suburbs was aided by government policies favoring the automobile over other types of transit and supporting the extremely successful program of federally insured home mortgages, which allowed millions of people to buy a home of their own for the first time.

The federal government also made a key decision in the 1950s to devote tax dollars to construct the interstate highway system, which helped provide the roads that make today's commutes possible.

Then-President Dwight David Eisenhower, Jackson writes, gave four reasons for signing the 1956 Interstate Highway Act: traffic jams, unsafe highways, high transportation costs faced by business due to poor roads and the need to have routes to evacuate cities in case of nuclear attack.

But the decision also was influenced by the automobile industry, which was lobbying for better roads and certainly stood to benefit from the creation of a national highway system.

Eisenhower had appointed a committee to study the idea of a national highway system. Its chairman was Lucius D. Clay, a member of the board of directors of General Motors. The committee considered no alternative to building a national highway system and its final report led to the bill that Eisenhower signed. That bill called for a 41,000-mile system, 90 percent of which was funded by the federal government. The system was eventually expanded to 42,500 miles.

Americans quickly took to the road. Motor vehicle registrations increased steadily from 1900 to the present, with large increases after World War II. The average miles traveled per vehicle also has steadily increased over time, according to the U.S. Federal Highway Administration.

And with most Americans traveling in their cars, public transit struggled to compete. The highest-ever public transportation ridership was recorded in 1946, with 23.4 billion trips taken, according to the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). The APTA estimated ridership in 1999 at 9.1 billion, a 4.5 percent increase over 1998.

Public transportation ridership had grown steadily until the Great Depression caused a steep decline as people made fewer work trips and often could not afford to take pleasure trips, according to the APTA. Ridership rose during World War II due to motor fuel rationing. But that artificial increase quickly declined after the war, spurred on by cheap fuel and government policies favoring low-density suburban growth, according to the APTA. In 1973, the APTA says ridership began to grow again, albeit modestly.

Jackson also documented in "Crabgrass Frontier" how General Motors helped spur the demise of the streetcar. The company formed a subsidiary corporation in 1926 that bought nearly bankrupt streetcar systems and replaced rail cars with rubber-tire vehicles for the next 30 years.

GM was involved in replacing more than 100 streetcar systems -- including systems in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Baltimore -- with GM-manufactured buses. The company was eventually convicted of criminal conspiracy for its efforts but was fined only $5,000.

Build roads and development will come

As the interstate highway system was completed and local and state governments added their own road projects, new development followed. Many cities lost population as millions of Americans moved to the suburbs, which became bedroom communities and then centers of commerce themselves as commercial development followed the residential construction.

In Atlanta, even as recently as the start of the 1990s, a new road project led to an explosion of growth. Georgia 400 used to stop north of Atlanta at Interstate 285, the city's perimeter highway. But in the early 1990s, the road was extended south to connect to Interstate 85, opening up north Fulton County to development by expanding access to downtown Atlanta.

The areas along the highway quickly boomed, attracting residential, office and commercial projects. The ease of access offered by Georgia 400 quickly led to the development of new subdivisions even further away from downtown Atlanta. But along with the growth came traffic and Georgia 400 is now one of the region's most congested roads.

"It happened so amazingly rapidly because these physical infrastructure developments can be built in no time. You can build a road in, like, six months or less. And then all of sudden you wonder where did all the traffic come from," said Douglas Bachtel, a demographer at the University of Georgia who has tracked Atlanta's growth.

Many experts believe America is unlikely to switch to public transportation anytime soon. Mass transit has a negative image in America, unlike other counties, Jackson said. "I think public transit just got a very bad reputation and it went into a steep decline after World War II that's only now being arrested and I'm not sure it's being arrested nationally," he said.

Jackson also said the average American has gained access to consumer goods -- like the television, computer and automobile -- faster than people in other countries due to mass production techniques that make those goods affordable.

"We're into mass production of consumer goods more than other places," he said.

Stuck in traffic

By any measures, the suburbs remain very popular with Americans. The country became a suburban nation in 1970 when more Americans were living in suburbs for the first time than in cities or rural areas, and that trend has only continued.

But the recent concerns over urban sprawl, Jackson said, are partly due to the realization that "the car is not just an unmitigated good," citing concerns like traffic and air pollution.

A nationwide study released last year warned that urban areas across America are more congested than ever. The Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) urban mobility study found that the national average of time spent in traffic congestion was up about 30 percent over five years, to 34 hours a year.

But while traffic is a bad thing, the TTI study found that it is a sign of good times. When the report was released, co-author Tim Lomax said that traffic generally corresponded with a city's economy. Cities where mobility held steady generally went through recessions, while most of the increasingly tangled cities posted economic gains.

Atlanta is a perfect example. Its economy boomed in the 1990s and the Census Bureau recently estimated that the region's population increased by almost one-third as 880,000 people moved to Atlanta between 1990 and 1999. But its traffic worsened, placing the city fourth on the TTI's most-congested list with Atlanta drivers stuck in traffic for an average of 68 hours per year, up from 54 hours in 1996.

Atlanta's growth is envied by other cities but its problems are feared as well. A recent television ad by Mayor John Delaney of Jacksonville, Florida, in support of a sales tax increase there, told city voters, "There's a word for a city that doesn't plan for its future: Atlanta."

Atlanta's problems, however, are national problems. Concerns over traffic, pollution and the realization that car doesn't work for everyone, including the elderly, teenagers not old enough to drive and handicapped people, are causing the public to look for alternatives, Jackson said.

"We still love the car, we still love the things the car gives us, but I think we're a little less enamored with the car as a nation than we were 34 years ago," Jackson said.