Asphalt Nation
Book Review By Ken Coughlin

Around the turn of the last century, a scourge visited our land. It slowly ravaged our cities, decimated the existing transportation infrastructure, plunged millions of families
into unprecedented debt, and began killing and maiming millions around the word. This scourge, of course, was the automobile. But the fact that Americans would not recognize this description is a testament to how insidiously the car has threaded its
way into the fabric of our culture. Jane Holtz Kay's project in this disturbing and inspiring book is to unravel this weave and reveal the shocking economic, environmental and cultural price we are paying for our dependence on the auto.

Kay's underlying thesis is that no amount of band-aid approaches--such as "clean" cars or "smart" roads--will end the havoc caused by the automobile. Instead, it is
time to question the dream of mobility that has set us on an odyssey to nowhere. She debunks the myth that the automobile is indispensable, noting that one-half of all car trips are less than three miles and that two-thirds of the miles Americans drive are for "the ministuff of life"; errands and entertainment. Kay then skillfully uncovers the many hidden prices we pay for ferrying that quart of milk in style. For instance, "traffic management" accounts for three quarters of all state and local law enforcement activities. Nevertheless, Americans' lives remain grid locked. We spend 8 billion hours a year stuck in traffic, at a cost of at least $43 billion in wasted time.

In assessing the environmental and health toll that cars take, Kay wisely goes beyond the usual suspects of tailpipe pollutants and highway carnage. Instead, she exposes lesser-known but equally alarming threats to life and breath such as the baneful effects of reduced walking and the billion pounds of rubber shed on U.S. roads each year.

The tale of how the oil interests and our government brought us to this calamitous juncture has been told before, but rarely so incisively. We learn that while America was dismantling its rail and trolley network and replacing it with the Interstate system, European countries were investing U.S. Marshall Plan dollars in public transit. Kay gathers a wealth of data to show that this imbalance continues today, as we "invest" in highways but subsidize mass transit.

In the books final section, Kay reports on the heartening efforts now underway to "depose the car from its dominion." She acknowledges that this is a radical, even
revolutionary" enterprise, but declares it to be "a challenge of the first order" that "should arouse the imagination of a new generation." The new road warriors she describes are fighting to block highways, change sprawl-encouraging zoning codes, calm existing traffic, de-pave, and force motor vehicles to pay their way.

Ironically, the experience of reading Kay's book is often more like viewing a landscape from a speeding car rather than absorbing it at the more leisurely pace of a bicycle or
a stroll. The architecture critic for The Nation, Kay writes in the columnist's clipped, shorthand style, restlessly leaping from one example to another. So much so, portions of the book come off as a collection of elegantly-crafted sound bites.

But Asphalt Nation remains an intelligent and powerful indictment of the devastation wrought by our misguided reliance on the automobile, and we should rejoice that a
major publisher has seen fit to release it. Not only that, but T.A. is cited twice within its pages. Could this be a sign of the times?