Booknotes

Ms. JANE HOLTZ KAY (Author, "Asphalt Nation"): 1991, when I began this book and dispensed with the automobile.

Ms. KAY: Oh, yes. I actually was at a lecture at George Washington University in St. Louis, and someone in the audience said to me, `Do you have a car?' And it was kind of--the duck came down. `Oh, I'm only going to get asked this question again and again.' So I sold the car and it was a very positive experience, but I was prepared, if it hadn't been, to have gotten the car back again and written a different book.

Ms. KAY: It came to me, I think--I used the word `karma'; there's lots of bad puns in writing a book about automobiles, but kar--my karma was--we had a working title, "Car-bound," that nobody, including me, liked. And my editor asked me for a list of cars, kind of a brainstorming thing. I sent it to him. He called back and he said, `We're going to call it "Asphalt Nation."' And I said, `Oh, that's good. Where'd--where did that come from?' And he said, `It was on your paper.' So somehow in this list of playing with metaphors, that one surfaced and that was the title of the book.

Ms. KAY: The subtitle, "How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take it Back," which they came up with, but I thought it was kind of rinky-dink. But it's been very helpful. If somebody says, `What's your book about?' and it's how the automobile took over America, how the servant became a master and how we can alter that relationship, end automobile dependency.

Ms. KAY: Well, certainly, there are a lot of cases where the roads have been stopped. The Macadaire in San Francisco is the classic; the highway that would have gone to Jimmy Carter's library; there are roads that people are proposing now--Corridor H in West Virginia--that are being stopped as a vehicle that's ever accelerated its miles--not yet.

Ms. KAY: Right.

Ms. KAY: It means to me, and the figures show, that the poorest segment of society, minorities and women, have least access to the things that you, in this car-dependent society, need to get a job; that is, it impinges on policy right now, the welfare issue. Everybody now needs a job; there's no more welfare. The entry ticket, to use another figure, to get that job is an automobile that costs a year, in personal costs, $6,000 to $6,500. And that, I think, raises high, as they say, the barriers of race and class that already existed in this country and add to the spatial entrapment.

Ms. KAY: Well, the $6,000 was from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; $6,500 is the more recent one from the AAA. And it is what we pay when we buy the automobile originally, spread over time, and the money that we spend on insurance and registration and gas and maintenance and parking and servicing, all the normal expenditures. Now that doesn't include social costs or environmental costs, which are between $3,000 and $5,000 or often more, but I tried to be conservative on those numbers.

Ms. KAY: Well, by some lights. It's a little bit of a mystery. I started the book in 1908, which is when the Model T came out and the car took over America. And if you were deciding on the merits of invention, you'd have gone back even further and taken the French, who invented--who were the mechanical geniuses behind the automobile. But somewhere--and this is my next history project--around a hu--50 years ago they had the first 50th-anniversary celebration. And I have a feeling they took the Duryea brothers, who turned out eight automobiles in Springfield--that was Springfield, Massachusetts--that was America. And it was in the heyday of the gas guzzlers and going further out.

And my abstract sense--and I didn't even think it was an anniversary when I wrote the book--is that there's a story there that Harry Truman and somehow the automakers decided this would be the time to light the candles. But that's the next book, when I find that one out.

Ms. KAY: Change us initially?

Ms. KAY: Well, I think in the opening stages, it was perceived as an element of reform. And it would get the farmer out of the mud; it would enable the farmer's children to get to the cities. It was going to be an agent of reform in the city, and it was a very positive element of the reform movement that started this century: that the turbulent, oppressed cities and--with the masses of immigrants were going to be relieved. And, of course, they were going to get rid of the horses and the horse manure and the difficulties of movement. So it was a very positive element in the minds of many reformers of the period.

Ms. KAY: Yeah, right. Right.

Ms. KAY: No, they were pulling carriages and they were pulling drays.

Ms. KAY: Yes. Right. Yes.

Ms. KAY: There are a lot now, I think, as I recall.

Ms. KAY: Well, I would say it was the 1920s when the automobile took over as an ...(unintelligible) and a means of transportation. And when you examine what happened with that absorption of the automobile in the culture and in our households, I came upon the fact that should have been known to me because I've written histories of cities and study histories. There is not a city that has evolved since 1920, when the automobile became the dominant mode of movement. You know, Los Angeles had pockets that looked urban. Houston--you can see places that looked like a city as we would define it. But everything receded in terms of looking and being walkable and urban once the automobile began its so--slow progression through our culture.

Ms. KAY: The negative of the automobile today?

Ms. KAY: Chapters 1 through 6. No, no, I won't say that. Well, clearly, I came to it as an architecture and planning critic, very aware of the damage it had done to our environment, having seven parking spaces per automobile. And that figures out to one at the mall, one at the house, one at the office, and all those spaces that turn around in. Plus, 30 percent of our good city's devoted to the car and 50 percent of our not-so-good city.

So we had an architecture of the exit ramp, and as I broadened the argument, because I think it needed broadening, to the way of life that we live because of the automobile, and charted the people who were suffering or abused by having this dependence on the car, it was that 9 percent of households you mentioned. But it was the elderly, our fastest-growing age skew, soccer moms, shop-and-drop lives spent behind the wheel. And it was compellingly, to me, an environmental and economic argument of the damage done by the car.

Ms. KAY: I had my first car with my first child. I went to work...

Ms. KAY: No, no. I took a somewhat onerous trip to my first newspaper job.

Ms. KAY: Patriot Ledger, south shore of Quincy. And...

Ms. KAY: Massachusetts, sorry. And they demanded going by bus to one stop, train to another stop and bus again. Later, I got a ride. And today, actually, that route is done very nicely by a mass transit system. But that was how I went.

Ms. KAY: I think this was my third car that I sold.

Ms. KAY: Did I ever like the car? Yes, I was kind of--thought--it was red, and--and it was pretty and it enabled me to do some things in my life. I'm not, like, this awful, awful artifact-in-my-garage kind of person. But I also like my life a lot better without the automobile.

Ms. KAY: I travel on foot and I travel on mass transit. And I have all sorts of alternatives that I've developed between--taxis. I mean, for openers, I know that of that money I've discussed, I had $20 a day that I could spend. And that'll take you in a cab, and that'll get you a messenger or a delivery. And it's been very freeing. There's a little arranging here and there, but I don't have to take care of this very large, very expensive piece of machinery.

Ms. KAY: Oh, yes. There are a lot of car lovers, and I've heard from them on the radio and I've heard from them since the book came out. And there are those who say, `Any politician who takes away my car will never get elected,' which is a little megalomaniacal to think that that one person would happen. But I try to say that there are 200 million vehicles and more vehicles than people. I'm not trying to take everybody's car away because that would make me have--have a problem as a human being or change agent, if you will. I'm just saying that we don't need two and three automobiles per household; that we can live better if we learn to decide for ourselves--200 million cars, 200 million decisions in the naked city--that we can reduce our driving 10 percent, car-share, find traffic-calming means to make our streets pleasant and safe so our kids can walk, reduce six trips.

You know, there's 100 pages of very small, personal decisions and also larger political ones to address what's happening now in Congress with our transportation bill that's trying to maintain our capacity to have flexible funding: half our funding go to non-motorized vehicles. So we can act in many ways, bo--fu--bond or fund mass transit, on and on and on.

Ms. KAY: Again, it's what we--what I would prefer, because I love where I live--New York has 30 percent of the country's mass transportation and o--you know, quite a miraculous subway system. Portland is taken as a place that was very creative...

Ms. KAY: Portland, Oregon--in terms of stopping a highway and then installing a n--a new system that enabled people to build up the city and to conduct their lives not on wheels. But there are 12 new lines of mass transportation, and there are a lot of places--the best places we have in this country in terms of livability and also not just aesthetics--the most expensive residential housing we have is p--are places where you don't really need a car: the Georgetowns, the Back Bays, the San Franciscos, where you can walk around without an automobile.

Ms. KAY: Well, I think the superstore is really the enemy of Main Streets. This is an argument that has at its root a kind of notion that distance is dollars and distance is destroying our lives and that we should be concentrated on cores and Main Streets, walkable ones. It doesn't have to be Manhattan, super density, but it can be a way of--of walking around and conducting. Two-thirds of our--the miles we travel on our cars, 10,000 to 12,000 miles, are spent shopping and dropping, you know, a third doing purchases with a ton of steel to buy a quart of milk, another third chauffeuring parents and kids. And it seems to me that there's a better way of doing that. And that's what this argument is all predicated on.

Ms. KAY: It means that we are basically deprived of accessibility. The issue we all talk about is mobility, but how do we get the goods of life? How do we make them accessible? Do we have to wrap the superstore, as we were discussing, or the mall in concrete where the price of admission is $6,500 a year or a $20,000 vehicle? Can't we live in a better way? And can't we stop funding the superstore and the mall? And when I say funding, I mean--I don't talk about the automobile, per se; I talk about the car culture. And we have been funding a drift from the cities to these evermore distant fringes since--especially since World War II when we gave $500 apiece in mortgage down money to our $10 million vet--to our 10 million veterans and we started building the interstate highway system.

And that goes on and on today, and not only with highways, where the culture aspect comes in that we are building highways out to the fringes, but we are also putting in sewage and pipes and electric lines. And the inner suburbs or the inner city or the city are paying for all that. And I don't even just mean the older ones. If you have a home that was built in '97, you are now paying for the dispersion of two million houses a year, by and large.

Ms. KAY: Yes.

Ms. KAY: Well, I think we have to walk from our car to our mall as well as anything else. But I think that's a lowball figure. Actually, we could be what I like to use is that 30 percent of our trips are under a mile. So, potentially, we could all be walking 30 percent of our trips. And we do--do many of them, but the reason we don't do that mile, which is 15, 20 minutes--it'd be nice not to be car potatoes--is because it's such a grim landscape; that--in order to do it, you have to cross the highway, you have to cross the mall, you have to do acres of parking. So that's basically why the walker is the key, and the walker is the person who takes mass transit, takes a car also. But if we manage to live in a little closer fashion and not, you know, continue to sprawl, within--if we're within seven minutes of mass transit, we can expand our lives and live in a m--a car-free, less car-dependent environment.

Ms. KAY: I walk a lot. I'm not a triathlon walker. I take mass transit to work. I try to get off at a stop or so before my house. But I would say I do a mile or two a day...

Ms. KAY: ...but casually.

Ms. KAY: I live in the Back Bay.

Ms. KAY: I work downtown. Mm-hmm. Back Bay of Boston.

Ms. KAY: Writing.

Ms. KAY: Writing.

Ms. KAY: This is only my third book. So I'm basically a journalist or an architect critic for The Nation and for other publications, professional some of them. But this has been the consuming one.

Ms. KAY: The first book was called "Lost Boston," and it was a history of the city illustrated with photographs of buildings that came down. And it was a `pave paradise, put up a parking lot' kind of book then, even though I didn't quite realize that that was some of the motivation.

And my second book was a bit more expansive, both geographically and in terms of the landscape it was describing. It was called "Preserving New England," and it was about preserving not only our urban environments, but our farm and wilderness or what passes for wilderness in New England.

Ms. KAY: The first book came out in 1980, and it's still around--didn't get out of date because the buildings were already flattened. The second book was '86, "Preserving New England." And then in the interim I did a lot of writing and tried to find a subject that was compelling, and it was five years ago it came to me.

Ms. KAY: I was born in Boston.

Ms. KAY: I'm native.

Ms. KAY: Radcliffe.

Ms. KAY: Right. I didn't travel very far.

Ms. KAY: Well, I think it's an older attitude towards the landscape and cityscape. We can walk around. But there's a defining quality about living in New England, despite the malls and the s--the strips and everything else. And that was the message of "Preserving New England," a message that cities and inner suburbs are cities and inner suburbs and country is country, and that one--there were two ways of life. It was the old Henry Adams--winter was city and summer was country. And the kind of mindless scattering in this green countryside not only messes up the environment and takes two million acres of farmland a year, but destroys the sense of abandoning on the one hand and a true link with the natural environment on the other hand.

Ms. KAY: Right.

Ms. KAY: Yeah, 15 million cars, 12 million bicycles.

Ms. KAY: It's been static. The automobile--both cars and bicycles have been pretty static.

Ms. KAY: Not a large percentage. It's very difficult...

Ms. KAY: Oh, way down. I mean, we don't provide a place where bicycles can go. A lot of it is recreation. We've been building, with this transportation bill I was telling you about, some bike paths. There's plans for them to go across the country in several directions, like the Lincoln Highway was the road of choice. So that's what we're doing with the bicycles. But we don't tend to our sidewalks and we don't tend to our bike paths. The figure I like to use--people always say it's impossible to bicycle in much of the country because it's snowy, a lot of inches just recently in--in Boston and the Midwest and everyplace else. In Finland, it's 90 percent or 95 percent of the year; the bicycle paths are open. I mean, all this is an attitude towards the public realm, if you will, and the public sector. And I think that's why the European countries and Japan have such vastly superior transportation systems and cheaper.

Ms. KAY: Mm.

Ms. KAY: That figure seems to be about the same. The length of time we travel has stayed the same since the 19th century, interestingly enough, when it used to take a half an hour to get to work and people were doing it on foot or mass transit. So that's staying somewhat the same, but it's basically growing. Every f--all the car statistics are growing, and that's distressing because it reflects moving further outwards.

Ms. KAY: We all do. They're kind of social costs. They come out of the property tax. They come out in mysterious way. A hundred billion dollars goes to support the military budget and half our military budget in the Middle East. So there's a lot of subsidies for the automobile that we don't really think about.

Ms. KAY: The Gulf War, right.

Ms. KAY: Oh, from my perspective, from Daniel Yergin's perspective, from lots of folks' perspective, it's our oil interests. There's no question in my mind that--why are we so protective about the Middle East? I mean, I'm not a foreign-policy expert, though people expect me to be an expert on crime and education and the city and everything else. But, I mean, we are running out of oil in this country. The estimates are 20, 30 at best. And it's one of many subsidies. There are other figures about what we subsidize at a local level: for example, the ambulance calls, the fire calls.

One of the fascinating events that happened to me on the road to telling this book and trying to do it as stories, not just as, you know, throwing numbers at people, is going to a pedestrian conference that's held every year in Boulder, Colorado. And we sat there and they poured the figures out. And we were sitting in this audience, and the numbers were flying. And all of a sudden, through this gauzy white window, the lights start to flash, the sirens start to come and a car is caught on fire. And we can sort of see what's going on. And the fire engines come; they wash it down. It goes on and on as we're sitting and listening to this unreeling of numbers. And then the ambulances finally come, take the cars away and someone in the audience who's recorded all of these elements of the burning car says to the guy who's putting out the figures, `Did you stage that?' You know, it was like an epiphany or an icon or something about how our lives and our expenses are conditioned by the automobile.

Ms. KAY: Right. Advertisements. There is no cost equation on the lobbying, the PACs, the whole--without being conspiratorial, but the whole collusion of the highway people in our political system and in our local politics, very pertinently in the local politics where a lot of the dollars get spent.

Ms. KAY: It's advertising and it's--yeah, it's advertising and it's advertising in the sense of wining and dining as well.

Ms. KAY: No, I didn't. Next book.

Ms. KAY: Yeah.

Ms. KAY: Well, with difficulty. There are ways out of this solution. Either they are being driven around by their parents, who are also driving another kid who goes to McDonald's to make $6 an hour to buy a car--is taken there by his mother, basically. And the elderly are being dependent on that kind of treatment--I mean, which is why, when I started to deal with the solutions to this, that is really the thorny problem. But at the same time if we manage to siphon some of our money into para--transit to take elderly people around, or if they're within a range of a walkable older core, we can solve some of these problems without, again, these two- and three-car households.

Ms. KAY: Well, I think it means that the ticket of admission to a job is a staggering amount. And not only the ticket for admission to a job, i.e., buying the automobile, but the ticket to all kinds of accessibility of goods and services.

I talk about this environmentalist doctor who was discussing a woman who had to take her child to a hospital. And by the time she got on rotten public transportation, deprived because we don't tend to provide the good things in life for the poorest among us, was exhausted in terms of going to work.

No, again, I try to be positive. I mean, one of the things that hadn't happened when I wrote this book, but the transportation bill that I've been talking about, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, had some things, for example, such as putting day care in a mass-transit node so that, theoretically, somebody could drop off a kid and head to work. There are all these little solutions that we've basically denied by putting all our eggs in this one automobile basket.

Ms. KAY: It's a drive-in movie from the '50s, the heyday of `take a Chevy to the levee,' and they're watching an airplane. And the train's in the background, and it's in the Midwest. And all the appurtenance of the automobile, including the--What was the word then?--smooching couple, are played out in that picture, which has its charm to all of us. I mean, it's the "American Graffiti" way of life.

Ms. KAY: There are two collectors who had an art show and--about the automobile in art. And most of them were paintings, but this was one of their photographs.

Ms. KAY: Well, it was a long way aborning, but it basically came to connect the cities across the nation. And it came from the post-military--the postwar impulse. The road gangs, so-called, that had run the war effort, the World War II war effort, were very much involved in both the new transference from making war goods to making military goods and were in the seats of power, and both urban mayors, who thought that these roads would give their cities some money, and the urge to stop the congestion and relieve--there was always, always congestion as soon as the automobiles started coming, and the solution was always to build more roads. I mean, let's build it before we're too old to enjoy it in the teens. Let's build it because our cities are impacted in the '20s, the 30s. And always, the solution was to widen and build.

I mean, `If you build it, they will come' is a cliche now, but that--that was always true, and that bred the interstate highway system for our automobiles. But it was not an accident, it seems to me, that it was called the Interstate Highway and Defense Act. And I talk about the sort of load, the cache of--C-A-C-H-E--cache of images that someone found that showed photographs of cities. There was a sweet little Swiss village, and underneath it said, `Unsafe in times of atomic attack.' And then there was the picture of the spaghetti highway: `Safe in times of nuclear attack.' I mean, this is the era of the atomic cafe And there was definitely the sense--we hid under our desks. And if there were an atomic attack, you were supposed to--and I remember this as a kid--you were supposed to be able to get in your car and head out. And I remember people thinking it was laughable, but it wasn't so laughable, either.

Ms. KAY: Oh, well, I think we're all co-responsible for that. But I thought it was very interesting that Dwight Eisenhower, who's not such a heavy in some aspects of the highway system, was leading one of the first convoys across the country after World War I when it started to pick up and the road-building urge spread. There were these very splashy, very colorful--and I must say I enjoyed reading about all that; I wasn't so anti-car that I couldn't enjoy, you know, the fun and games of going out on the road. And they go through these roads which were disgusting and rutted and pitted, and they're showing with these long convoys of Army cars how we could have a better American way. And of course, I enjoyed only one thing more, and that was the web of streetcars that laced the nation all but 200 miles in the earlier part of the century...

Ms. KAY: ...which I think was a tele--technological marvel, actually.

Ms. KAY: They were dismantled. There are many theories. There's a very strong theory that General Motors and the bus companies bought out, bribed, did all sorts of dirty tricks to make sure their buses were installed and that the cities dismantled their s--their subway systems. I myself tend to be less, in a way, Manichaean about this. I feel that it was a combination of our will and indifference. I mean, people bribe, people cheat, society evolves. But it isn't only because of these disastrous enemies, strong as they might be, but it's their own enchantment with the automobile on a personal level and their failure to see its consequences, that technology bites, that things get out of hand, that we can't know the consequences and we fail to s--think this all through.

Now there was also a very good kind of structural reason. The trolley cars were owned by the developers, and they were used as a device to open up the land to either side. And people didn't like them a lot, and they didn't like developers--I mean, they're not crazy about developers today--so that everything that they were doing to improve the quality of the streetcar was considered a bit of a bad item as opposed to the roads, which were seen as public good and were paid for and provided by the municipalities. So the streetcars also had a heavy burden. So it was an unfortunate combination. And always, as opposed to Europe, a government that didn't interfere, wouldn't put the tax--the gas tax in alternate modes of transportation and didn't care to plan. You know, we had so much land; it wasn't like Europe, where you had to be a little bit careful or protect your centers, that--this is a vast continent. So it was--it would have been tough to stop this juggernaut.

Ms. KAY: Forty-two thousand miles.

Ms. KAY: Well, it started in '56 and my own state is supposedly doing the last five miles at $10 billion to complete the system.

Ms. KAY: A stone's throw from my office. It's been a little disrupting. It's between--there's a big central artery in front of the waterfront, like so many places. And in theory, it's a very good idea to bury it underneath and connect to the waterfront. In practice, the city's grown up around it and what's happening is that this vast amount of money is being spent so you can speed commuters north and under the city and south and under the city. But we're not--I mean, the interstate is finished, but there are 16 beltways planned across the country; you know, loops everyplace. And the trick now, as far as I'm concerned, is just to stop them, to just say no. It's the solution that failed, and we have to move on to something else.

Ms. KAY: Yeah.

Ms. KAY: Yes.

Ms. KAY: That was in--it started in the '60s.

Ms. KAY: I'm sorry. It started in the mid-50s. Yeah.

Ms. KAY: Altogether?

Ms. KAY: Well, the money came from the gas tax for the interstate system, as opposed to the local roads. The local roads to this day are paid for 60 percent--different in different states--by the property tax.

Ms. KAY: I don't know. I--that's a good question. I don't know that anybody's assessed it because you'd have to do inflationary material for it.

Ms. KAY: That money comes from the gas tax, still.

Ms. KAY: Mm--well, what they give out every five years is $151 billion. So...

Ms. KAY: Over five years, $30 billion a year.

Ms. KAY: Well, this is a highway bill again. And it's supposedly flexible. But basically, more than 80 percent goes to roads. And some of the roads are widening while we don't maintain, and because of the bill, there's more going to things of--that are alternate kinds of mobility and intermodal, as the act's name says, that connect the dots, which is very important, but still, the bulk of that money is going to roads.

Ms. KAY: This is Central Park swallowed up by an automobile. And the advertisers are promoting the convenience and sense of being able to control the whole world and your whole destiny in this automobile.

Ms. KAY: This is an advertisement. I'm sorry. Step one.

Ms. KAY: Ah, I've forgotten the name of the car, which is small, actually, a compact car, but is nonetheless occupying...

Ms. KAY: Mazda, sorry. You can see I'm not a car fan. It's taking up the whole 789 acres of Central Park. I do know the figures on the park.

Ms. KAY: Basically, aside from that automotive editor you just mentioned, I've been surprised that I haven't gotten more trashed by attacking, if you will, this icon. I think people sense that there are problems with the automobile and that there ought to be alternative ways. And the questions are couched in a very civilized way. Very often, I have people come--I say that I have become the Dr. Ruth of how you can make your life more car-free, because they come with their very personal problems. And they're very painful, and again, I just say, `You are the expert in your own life.' I mean, I find it quite fascinating how people move and how--the choices they make. But there's no question in my mind that you can reduce your automobile driving 10 percent. You can work politically to have neighborhoods that are more walkable. And we could do what the Germans do: have 100 days where you don't use an automobile; see if you atrophy.

Ms. KAY: Well, they have a 100-day program that's just being initiated that I just happened to read about, 100 days without a car. Now I don't think we can do that. We're not so compact and we haven't got good mass transportation. But again, if we have two or three cars in the garage, what could we do if some--one of us decided not to drive? And if at the end of that time we can't do anything, then maybe our lives need rethinking. And the 30 million of us, for example, who are self-employed can think, `Is this where I want to run my life, that I need a ton of steel to get a Popsicle, that I need to take my kids everywhere in the car; they can't bicycle or walk?' There are a lot of personal decisions we can make, and there are political ones in our local areas: supporting mass-transit bonds, moving to have safer neighborhoods through traffic-calming devices, which is narrow the street, widen the sidewalk. There are, as you know, 100 pages of solutions in there and right--making the price right, paying for the automobile.

Ms. KAY: A few have been mad. There was one man who said to me, `Any politician who takes away my keys is never going to get elected,' as I mentioned. But I got a reviewer real mad. But sometimes, the people who get the angriest tend to say, `Yes, we know; this is kind of old stuff. So--so what?' And I think the anger is the entrapment, not to be too psychiatric about this. And I think it's a period in time where social activism is not a major way of life for most Americans and they feel powerless to do things. But what I feel very strongly is that we have seen major changes in our life, that this may be a sea change, but we've gone through them. We have seen women enter the work force. We have seen the environmental movement. We have seen recycling. We have seen smoking become a pariah.

The natio--one transportation writer said to me that the road gang who was acting really vicious in this current fight reminds him of the NRA. When he was a boy living in New Hampshire, the NRA was like the Boy Scouts. They taught you how to shoot safely, which wouldn't have been my preferred mode of upbringing, but it taught you all the rules of the gun. And they became so militant and so hostile that they're now seen as a threat. Now will that happen? Could that happen to the highway? Well, I think there are enough excesses out there and enough reason to change our lives and attitudes to the automobile, to make us freer and to improve the quality of our cities, the quality of our landscape, that there could really be a change.

Ms. KAY: Well, not--not on the highways, per se, but...

Ms. KAY: ...on--automobile accidents. They have been stable: 43,000 a year. And this is one of the interesting little corkscrew aspects of--of life that made me become especially alarmed--or especially aware of how hidden the automobile is in our life. I mean, we have a--an airplane accident, and the sirens ring, the emergency vehicles come, it's on the news, FAA spokesmen, the president--everybody speaks. We stand in airports waiting hours to be grilled on whether we talked to anybody as we came into the airport.

We look at the automobile statistics and 43,000 a year, and 1/5th of them pedestrians, and the highway people say, `This is great.' They really do. They say, `This is great because we're driving more and we're not killing any more people than we have over time.' But I say what kind of blinders do we wear that we can't analyze why this is happening and do something about it?

Ms. KAY: Well, give or take 1,000.

Ms. KAY: No. That's a good question. I would say there must be improvement here theoretically, but maybe it's because there are more people driving and so they're a little more cushioned. Cars are a little--cars are definitely better padded. It's the same as the--or protected. The steel frames are better. But it's the same thing as the pollutants: The pollutants are down; the tailpipe emits less, but we have the same amount of environmental degradation and our cars contribute half of global warming--the world stock of cars--and we contribute half of that. And yet we are improving the automobile, and these destructive, ravaging conditions continue.

Ms. KAY: Oh, about 20 years.

Ms. KAY: I think, as Winston Churchill say, we shape our cities and then our cities shape us; we build our buildings and then our buildings shape us. And I believe very much in planning and in good design and good architecture and good buildings and good cities and good countryside as a very important enve--element of our lives.

Ms. KAY: Well, it gives me a voice.

Ms. KAY: Not as often as I should, especially over the last five years. And a lot of my writing--I write in the Boston Globe and The Times and anybody who will, you know, take a story. For example, I wrote about traffic calming and the pedestrian movement five years ago when I began that. That was in The Times. These issues interest me, and I try to write for a professional audience often, because I think architects and planners are not always the best planners because it's very developer-driven. And I think one of the things about The Nation that I like especially is that you can say that it's developer-driven or you can say, without any restrictions, how you feel about the making of the society. There's a lot of latitude there.

Ms. KAY: Well, I think probably--I certainly am an architecture critic. That's the title. And I don't know that the magazine is mono--mono minded. I think I tend to be an optimist. I tend to think that writing this is--is an agent for change, not that people writing for any of these publications that care about social causes, not just The Nation, don't feel that way. But I think that this is an era that you can see very concrete change. And you can. I mean, we have preservation laws that protect our buildings. We have environmental laws that protect our air and water. And those were brought about through--I'm from a political family. I had a father who ran for office. And I think that one goes out and does one's small bit. And, of course, if it's approaching 200 million motor vehicles, it's a massive bit at a certain level, but it's a big juggernaut to face that kind of car situation.

Ms. KAY: Well, he was a state rep, and then he ran for Congress and lost.

Ms. KAY: '56.

Ms. KAY: Oh, yeah. We were kids. And I rang doorbells and heard my father say the same speech over and over again and did the whole thing. It was the first television and hand-painted billboards, and it was colorful, informing.

Ms. KAY: He ran in a Democratic district. First--he ran twice, actually: '54, sorry.

Ms. KAY: Democrat. He was the first Democrat to carry our town since Roosevelt. But it was an old, established Republican congressman who was there a very long time, and...

Ms. KAY: Lawrence Curtis. I don't know that anybody would know him anymore because this is awhile ago. And he lost. It was a very interesting constituency. It ranged from Back Bay, Beacon Hill, the very, you know, affluent aspects of the city, to Roxbury, the classic impoverished black--African-American community and I--pockets of middle-class Irish. It was a fascinating experience, especially for a kid.

Ms. KAY: He was a lawyer.

Ms. KAY: No.

Ms. KAY: You just made my children famous: my daughters--and readers, I should say.

Ms. KAY: One's in Paris and one's in New York--city kids.

Ms. KAY: My older daughter is teaching and translating and doing some cross-cultural things in France. And my younger daughter is a lawyer with the--with women's issues.

Ms. KAY: Oh, yes, they read it. I'm lit--that's literally true because I--even from the time they were freshmen in college, I--I ran a lot of things by them because I'm trying to be mainstream. And I figured if a college freshman can't understand what I'm writing--and they were extremely helpful, both intellectually and a literary sense. You know, I--I brought up my own editors in--in that sense.

Ms. KAY: Right.

Ms. KAY: Wow. `The Three-Car Culture'--I mean, it says that we're living in this cul-de-sac kind of community that we can only get around in because of the automobile, and that we've built one-use suburbs; our zoning precludes having any kind of shops or mixed-use or land-use patterns, which is a very central theme of this book, that would enable us to use mass transit and get around on foot.

Ms. KAY: Right. I think there are two reasons: one, because they generally want to get to sunny places at the end of the road, and we're always trashing and moving on rather than fixing and staying. And, two, because a series of economic decisions and subsidies, whether it was the postwar mortgages or the current mortgage deductions, just enable--or the highway expenditures, the infrastructure of moving to the suburbs--are all free in a certain sense. And their ride was paid for. It was, as one environmentalist said, a free ride that--a free meal, a free lunch that you're getting paid to eat.

Ms. KAY: Well, I would say the Europeans probably worship their car at least as much as we do, this pretty little toy. But they also have a $4 to $5 gas tax. They also preserve their cities. They're suffering from a lot of the problems of buying too many automobiles, but they have it more under control. We spend 15 percent to 18 percent of our gross domestic product on transportation, mostly the car; they've spent half of that, all the industrialized nations. And they have a balanced transportation system.

Ms. KAY: Oh, I--you've seen the bibliography. I'm not exactly sure where I got it at the time. But there's a lot of material about the car culture. And, also, a historian named Clay McShane has done a prodigious chronology of the automobile, unpublished, but I'd like to see that published, too.

Ms. KAY: It's stayed pretty low, as we all know. And in real dollars, it's lower now than it's been.

Ms. KAY: Why? It's been--certainly been an unpopular tax, but it's also been a tax--no taxes are popular in America, but it's been a tax that a lot of people want to pay or are willing to pay, and it does--they should be willing to pay that little bit because it doesn't pay the whole freight. But I think there's a growing sense--and this is one of the economic solutions--that we should pay more for the gas tax. And if we don't want to pay for the gas, per se, that we should be paying our way the way we do for a telephone call: that the more we talk, the more we pay, or perhaps a carbon tax or a gas guzzler tax. That's the kind of equity that I think Americans would accept. The more you drive, the more damage you do or the more you take advantage of the road, to put it both positively and negatively, the more you should pay for it. And there's--there is movement in that direction.

Ms. KAY: Oh, architecture--well...

Ms. KAY: History. And I actually wrote my undergraduate thesis on Lewis Mumford, who was the man who invented the phrase `a cloverleaf culture,' though we--America has adopted a cloverleaf culture, and wrote about the city and history and any number of these issues, was a great thinker and architecture critic.

Ms. KAY: Well, some of the ones that I suggested--one of the ones that I think is especially wonderful is in my own hometown, where there was supposed to be an inner s--inner belt. And it would have gone through poor communities, plus a more affluent, academic Cambridge community and poorer Cambridge community. They took the money from this--what would have been this road and, through the Highway Transfer Act, didn't build the road but covered over the train that comes out of the city and, on this linear path of five miles, connected two old districts. The path is beautiful. People bicycle down it. It's integrated. They play basketball. They have vegetable gardens.

Hartford also is taking its highway money and doing some good things with it. And Portland, that we mentioned, took its highway and did restore its city and its trolley lines.

Ms. KAY: I think it's a thousand flowers blooming. I mean, that's my attitude towards politics. I think that we have the energy and the power, both through supporting this legislation nationally, but then every time that there's a decision to be made by law, a transportation-planning element has to go into it. And that means the community has to be consulted. And if the community isn't consulted when there's an offensive road or, conversely, when a solution is evolved that isn't mass transit or that isn't a walkable, bicycle, sidewalk place, I think it's up to everybody to get out there.

Ms. KAY: That picture, like a lot of the other pictures, are from archives--Bettman Archives, some from activists, some like the New York Historical Society. And this gentleman waving his hat with great aplomb and happiness is looking at the suitor for the young woman or--in the vehicle, who is underneath the automobile fixing it. And it's a classic `get a horse' picture of tha particular era. I think that was from the Library of Congress, actually, where a lot of these images came from.

Ms. KAY: This cover, like every other author's cover, as you much know, has almost nothing to do with the author. I'm actually quite fond of it. The picture came from a stockhouse. But the bottom car, by some mysterical--mysterious process, is the first car I ever owned, which...

Ms. KAY: It's a Saab from the late '60s, two-cycle engine, totally polluting. Talk about hidden elements of the car--you put the gas and the oil in the same place and it emitted disgusting smoke, like a motorboat. So nobody is born pure.

Ms. KAY: No. No. They didn't show it to me. I mean, authors are the last to know, and especially a visual author because I came from an art criticism background as well as an architectural one. But, no, I think I got lucky.

Ms. KAY: Everybody asks that. I say, you know, "Son of Asphalt Nation." I don't know. I think I'll go back to doing journalism and spreading this message for a bit and hope it doesn't take me 10 years to do another one.

Ms. KAY: Thank you for having me.