7: The Automobile Era: A Cultural Analysis

By now it is hardly news that the United States' major metropolitan areas, and even many of its minor ones, are in a state of crisis. While the extent of the problem may differ, the basic symptoms are the same everywhere. In spite of urban renewal, large areas of the cities are in a state of physical decay; slums are growing, not shrinking. The central cities and surrounding suburbs reel from waves of violence. Crime rates, particularly those for violent crimes, are shockingly high and generally rising. Drugs are common in the inner city as well as the most affluent suburbs. Alienation abounds. Increasingly, people feel that they are no longer master of their fate, that they are picked on and put upon, that they are buoyed about by forces they do not control, and that those in control do not understand their needs, hopes and desires. Meanwhile municipal services are deteriorating. Quite apart from public transit, neither the schools, the hospitals, the police, nor the garbage collectors represent the quality of service and responsiveness they used to. In reciting such a litany it makes little difference if one thinks of the older cities along the Eastern Seaboard, such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia or Baltimore; the industrial giants of the Midwest, such as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland or St Louis; the newer metropolitan areas, which had most of their growth in the last thirty years, such as Los Angeles, Houston or Miami; or such smaller cities and their environs as Columbia, La Crosse or Nashua. The problems everywhere are more or less the same.