Road to Nowhere

Abstract

The suburban, a ented future offered market opportunities for automotive companies, property developers, and consumer goods manufacturers. Their combined influence, paired with a brilliant marketing campaign, was enough to get political leaders to respond to their demands and direct significant resources into realizing their vision of the future. The corporations didn’t predict a car-centric, consumerist future—they made it a reality.

After restructuring how we communicate with one another, entertain ourselves, buy consumer goods, and far more, the companies that have prospered as the internet expanded to every corner of the globe are now setting their sights on the physical environment, with a particular focus on the transportation system.

But after a century of living in cities built for cars, we must be wary of embracing sweeping master plans that fail to properly consider the full effects of what elite proposals will likely mean for the rest of us.

In the following chapter of the book the author makes the case that we need a better transportation system and by extension better cities. Starts by digging into the history of automobility to illustrate how transportation systems—both in cities and beyond—were reconstructed through the twentieth century to make way for the automobile and how that change was not one that was demanded by the public, but rather was implemented against their wishes by capitalist interests.

The author’s argument is not that we do not need a significant overhaul of the way transportation works, nor indeed that we do not need to reimagine how we approach urban planning. In recent years, there has been a lot more discussion about the need to challenge auto-oriented development in favor of prioritizing pedestrians, cyclists, and public transit to enable denser, greener, and more walkable communities. But progress is far too slow given the harms and inequities of the current system. Where changes do happen, it is not uncommon that they benefit only the wealthy while excluding the poor and the working class.