Why do we, the taxpayer, pay for roads? Ever think about it? Whether you want to or not, you kick in thousands of dollars every year to pay for roads. Well, you say, you like the roads. You use the roads a lot. But what if someone told you that you could save a lot of money if we just got rid of most of the roads and spent about half as much money on public transit? Who says this is the only way to move people around?
Have you ever thought about cities? Cities suck, big time. I know, there’s all sorts of glamour and excitement about “downtown”, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about suburbs and neighborhoods and freeways. I’m talking about the homeless and the panhandlers and squeegee kids. I’m talking about traffic tie-ups, pollution, and over-crowding. Cities suck, big time.
Why do we have so many problems in our cities? Whenever people talk about big social problems, like drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and crime, they tend to blame social and cultural developments. Kenneth Starr and his repressed buddies on the Republican Right, like to blame the sixties, with all that evil rock’n’roll and anti-authoritarianism and draft evasion and lifestyle experimentation and, later, feminism. That’s why our society is falling apart. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to blame our oppressive economic system. We don’t share enough of what we have with those in need. We need to pour money into projects that will revitalize our cities. We need a higher minimum wage. We need more development.
No one seems to realize that cities, with all their problems, didn’t happen by accident. Most of us used to live in the country. Then, around the turn of the century, we began to mechanize the farms and build factories. So jobs moved from agriculture to industry, and industry located itself in cities, because they needed the transportation and support industries and other resources that were located in the cities. So people moved to the cities. These people needed places to live. So developers started building houses and apartment buildings. As more people wanted to live close to their jobs, the prices of these houses went up higher and higher. People were forced to move into apartments, or farther and farther away from the downtown.
So how do you get these people to work? How do you get them to sports stadiums and art galleries and malls? You have two possible options. First, you can build a whole bunch of buses, trolleys, and streetcars, so you can move fifty or sixty people at a time fairly efficiently. Doesn’t that make sense? Why have sixty huge automobiles clogging up the streets, filling the air with carbon monoxide, wandering around looking for a place to park, when you can have just two or three streetcars? The streetcars drop you off and then get out of the way. Cars stay there, taking up miles of valuable real estate. Look at all the parking lots and parking garages in the downtown of any major city? They are ugly and useless. The cars just sit there all day. They just sit there, waiting for the owner to finish his work or his shopping or whatever. What a waste!
Public transit isn’t the only alternative we’re talking about here. New York City had developed a very interesting, complex set of pneumatic tubes throughout the downtown area in the early 1920’s. These tubes moved small items through large buildings fairly fast and efficiently. Then General Motors got some of their cronies elected to city council and they voted to replace the pneumatic tubes with stinking, clumsy, big GM trucks. This was not a magical strategy developed by the “free market”. It was sabotage.
You can spend so little on public transit that you make it necessary for anybody who can afford it to buy their own cars. The result, in Chicago and other major U.S. cities, is that only the poor and destitute use public transit. Nobody listens to the complaints of the poor, so public transit is often poorly maintained and unsafe. All the money goes into highways instead, and cops to patrol the highways, and signs, and lights, and parking lots. When all those people in their own cars clog up the streets, you just keep adding new highways to accommodate them. And when those highways get clogged up, you start demolishing neighborhoods and dividing communities with great big ugly freeways. And when they get hopelessly clogged, like the 401 is now, every day, from Mississauga to the Allen Expressway, you suddenly realize that you have a serious problem with no solution. That, in fact, is what they now realize in Toronto, Canada’s fastest growing city. They can’t build any more freeways—it’s too expensive and people are too smart: they won’t let you just plow their neighborhoods under anymore. But the 401 can’t handle all the traffic coming into the city. So what do you do? If you’re Toronto, basically, nothing. People waste hours and hours every day sitting in their cars staring at the trunk of the car ahead of them. It is not unusual for a citizen of the metropolitan Toronto area to spend four hours of his day, every day, sitting uselessly in his car. Chances are also pretty good nowadays that he’s driving a four-wheel-drive sport utility, sold to him on the illusion that it would provide him with a liberating sense of adventure and freedom.
What many people don’t realize is that the government pays a huge subsidy to the automotive industry by providing us with endless highways, traffic lights, streetlights, bridges, freeways, police, and parking spaces. And don’t forget the cost of hospital emergency wards which spend a lot of time treating victims of accidents. The subsidy is way, way more than it would have cost if the government had simply developed public transit more effectively, and required car-makers to make their own roads and bridges. Hardly anyone would own cars today if that had happened. Think about that, the next time you start rhapsodizing about how great the “free market” is. Do you love your car? Well, you can love your car because every taxpayer in the province is chipping in to make highways for you to drive on.
A number of things happened in the 1940’s and 50’s that created many of the social problems we have today.
Firstly, people started to do pretty well for themselves. They made money. And, thanks to the huge government subsidy of the auto industry (especially the Interstate system in the U.S.), many people could afford cars.
Secondly, developers began to build a new type of residential community: the suburb, which was designed around the principle that everyone would have a car. The suburb was located away from the downtown (cheap land), which meant a lot of people had to drive their cars around in order to get to work. Public transit doesn’t work very well in the suburbs because of all the winding streets and the low density of population.
Thirdly, effective birth control allowed families to reduce the number of children they would have. This, in turn, allowed women to re-enter the work-force more quickly. It allowed numerous families to send their children to college who otherwise couldn’t have afforded it. It changed the character of the family.
Fourth, the tax base shifted away from the inner city and out to the suburbs. As a result, city governments lost their ability to pay for the upkeep of downtown areas. These areas decayed, housing prices plummeted, the poor moved in with even more social problems, unemployment among the inner city poor soared, drug and alcohol addiction increased, and so on and so on.
In the 1960’s, this was all no secret. Sociologists and social scientists understood very well the negative effects of urbanization. Lewis Mumford wrote some sensational, amazing books on the development of cities. We studied them in high school as late as the early 1970’s. Too many people living too close together tended to develop strange behavior patterns. Most of us have heard about the girl who was raped and murdered while dozens of her neighbors leaned out of their high-rise windows and listened, and not a single one of them decided to call the police and go to help her.
The suburbs are no better. Instead of communities, where people know each other and interact with each other at local businesses, and operate schools together, and build playgrounds together, and help each other out, people barely know their own neighbors, because they can travel to see their friends, in their cars, and you don’t want to get too friendly with a person who lives just 30 feet away from your lawnmower.
But nobody could do anything about urbanization. It was easier to blame hippies or blacks or other minorities, or a decline in “family values”, or softness on crime. That way, you could elect fascist leaders, give more money to the police, sentence people to thirty years in jail for possessing marijuana, and execute developmentally delayed adults for murder. This, apparently, is more satisfying to some people than reconsidering the huge subsidy to the auto industry.