Provocateur: Auto Addiction

By George F. Kenna

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The automobile has turned out to be, by virtue of its innate and inalterable qualities, the enemy of community generally. Wherever it advances, neighborliness and the sense of community are generally impaired.

One might have thought that this alone, much of which was surely becoming evident in the 1920's and 1930's, would have sufficed to cause Americans of that day to pause and ask themselves whether they really wished to junk 99 percent of the great railway system that then existed and to confer upon the automobile and the truck the sort of near monopoly on transportation which they have now achieved. And the wonder as to why this question was never asked is enhanced when it is considered that this, the effect on the community, was by no means the only drawback from which the automobile, as an alternative to public transportation, suffered (and continues to suffer).

There is, in the first place, its extreme unsociability. Just as it destroys community in human residence so it destroys community in travel. Surely there has never been a lonelier means of moving great masses of people about.

Second, there is the automobile's extreme wastefulness. It is wasteful of material, of energy, and of space. The very idea that for the displacement of one or two human bodies on their daily comings and goings there should be required something upwards of a ton of metal, the power of something like a hundred horses, and some ninety square feet of paved highway, is in itself an absurdity of the first order.

Third, the automobile is, as everyone knows, a major polluter. So, no doubt, was the steam locomotive, but in a different way, and in far less volume.

Fourth, the automobile, insofar as it replaces walking for the displacement of human bodies over short distances, is a distinctly unhealthy innovation. Walking, the experts tell us, is the most useful and readily accessible form of exercise available to the average human being. In an earlier age, adult people walked for a great many of their comings and goings. They walked to and from church, the trolley stop, the corner emporium, the houses of friends. Today, most of these movements are performed, expensively, awkwardly, and at the cost of considerable nervous strain, in the automobile. I find it hard to believe that these changes have constituted "progress."

It has taken seven or eight decades to bring about the present, unhealthy dependence upon the automobile; it would presumably take nothing less than several further decades to reduce it to its proper place in modern American life. But every useful process has to have a beginning; and in this instance the beginning is far overdue.

The only hopeful approach to the correction of these conditions would require the recognition by public authority, at long last, that the assurance of reasonably priced public transportation facilities, serving not just the rich but the poor and not just the great urban area but the small community as well, is a proper responsibility of public authority, no less than are those other facilities, such as the sewage system and other public health arrangements, that are commonly and traditionally recognized as such.

George F. Kennan is one of the nation's most distinguished political scholars. He has been awarded two Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award.

Reprinted from Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy, by George F. Kennan, with the permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright (c) 1993 by George F Kennan.