Guest it came to me, i thinki used the word karma; theres lots of bad puns in writing a book about automobiles, but karmy karma waswe had a working title, carbound, 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, were going to call it asphalt nation. and i said, oh, thats good. Wheredwhere 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. Cspan whats the point of your book . Guest 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 rinkydink. But its been very helpful. If somebody says, whats your book about . and its how the automobile took over america, how the servant became a master and how we can alter that relationship, end automobile dependency. Cspan has anybody ever been successful in stopping the automobile or stopping a road or stopping some of this Mass Transportation that youre talking about thatnot mass, but the specific transportation with the gasfed engine . Guest 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 carters library; there are roads that people are proposing nowcorridor h in west virginiathat are being stopped as a vehicle thats ever accelerated its milesnot yet. Cspan got a lot of statistics in the book. The first one i wrote down was that 9 percent of the nations household own no car. Guest right. Cspan explain that. Whats that mean to you . Guest 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 cardependent society, need to get a job; that is, it impinges on policy right now, the welfare issue. Everybody now needs a job; theres 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. Cspan break down that 6,000 a year. How did you get that figure . Guest 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 doesnt 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. Cspan last year was the 100th anniversary of the car . Guest well, by some lights. Its 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, youd have gone back even further and taken the french, who inventedwho were the mechanical geniuses behind the automobile. But somewhereand this is my next history projectaround a hu50 years ago they had the first 50thanniversary celebration. And i have a feeling they took the duryea brothers, who turned out eight automobiles in springfieldthat was springfield, massachusettsthat was america. And it was in the heyday of the gas guzzlers and going further out. And my abstract senseand i didnt even think it was an anniversary when i wrote the bookis that theres a story there that harry truman and somehow the automakers decided this would be the time to light the candles. But thats the next book, when i find that one out. Cspan how did the automobile change us initially . Guest change us initially . Cspan as a country. Guest 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 farmers 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 andwith 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. Cspan you had a figure in there, something likewhat . 12 million, 14 million horses. Guest yeah, right. Right. Cspan did people ride all those horses . Is thatwas that the only reason that they were kept . Guest no, they were pulling carriages and they were pulling drays. Cspan but thats what i mean, they were being used . Guest yes. Right. Yes. Cspan did you happen to check and see how many horses there are today . Guest there are a lot now, i think, as i recall. Cspan when did the car become amass used . In other words, when wasi know in the beginning, of course, people that could only afford it. But when was itwhen were there a lot of cars in this country . Guest 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 ive 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. Houstonyou 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 soslow progression through our culture. Cspan whats the negative of the automobile . Guest the negative of the automobile today . Cspan i mean, i could say, read your book, but i mean, w. Guest chapters 1 through 6. No, no, i wont 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 citys devoted to the car and 50 percent of our notsogood city so we had an architecture of the exit ramp, and as i broadened 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 fastestgrowing age skew, soccer moms, shopanddrop lives spent behind the wheel. And it was compellingly, to me, an environmental and economic argument of the damage done by the car. Cspan when wouldwhen did you have your first car . Guest i had my first car with my first child. I went to work. Cspan had you not had a car up until that point . Guest no, no. I took a somewhat onerous trip to my first newspaper job. Cspan where was that . Guest patriot ledger, south shore of quincy. And. Cspan massachusetts . Guest 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. Cspan how many cars have you owned in your life . Guest i think this was my third car that i sold. Cspan did you ever like the car . Guest did i ever like the car . Yes, i was kind ofthoughtit was red, andand it was pretty and it enabled me to do some things in my life. Im not, like, this awful, awful artifactinmygarage kind of person. But i also like my life a lot better without the automobile. Cspan whats your life like now without a car . How do you travel around . Guest i travel on foot and i travel on mass transit. And i have all sorts of alternatives that ive developed betweentaxis. I mean, for openers, i know that of that money ive discussed, i had 20 a day that i could spend. And thatll take you in a cab, and thatll get you a messenger or a delivery. And its been very freeing. Theres a little arranging here and there, but i dont have to take care of this very large, very expensive piece of machinery. Cspan were you ever around people that just loved the car and it was theirthe most important thing in their lives . Guest oh, yes. There are a lot of car lovers, and ive heard from them on the radio and ive 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. Im not trying to take everybodys car away because that would make me havehave a problem as a human being or change agent, if you will. Im just saying that we dont need two and three automobiles per household; that we can live better if we learn to decide for ourselves200 million cars, 200 million decisions in the naked citythat we can reduce our driving 10 percent, carshare, find trafficcalming means to make our streets pleasant and safe so our kids can walk, reduce six trips. You know, theres 100 pages of very small, personal decisions and also larger political ones to address whats happening now in congress with our transportation bill thats trying to maintain our capacity to have Flexible Funding half our funding go to nonmotorized vehicles. So we can act in many ways, bofubond or fund mass transit, on and on and on. Cspan if you were to pick a spot in the United States where they have the bestthoughtout urban area for the kind of things that you think are important, where would you go . Guest again, its what wewhat i would prefer, because i love where i livenew york has 30 percent of the countrys Mass Transportation and oyou know, quite a miraculous subway system. Portland is taken as a place that was very creative. Cspan oregon . Guest portland, oregonin terms of stopping a highway and then installing a na 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 placesthe best places we have in this country in terms of livability and also not just aestheticsthe most expensive Residential Housing we have is pare places where you dont really need a car the georgetowns, the back bays, the San Franciscos, where you can walk around without an automobile. Cspan what haveor what has the walmarts done to the country, to the cato the automobile . Guest 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 doesnt have to be manhattan, super density, but it can be a way ofof Walking Around and conducting. Twothirds of ourthe 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 theres a better way of doing that. And thats what this argument is all predicated on. Cspan you wrote what seemed to me to be kind of your philosophy on page 51. You say, the pubs, the coffee shops, the communal collage vanish. Cordoning us from community life, the car accentuates an environment of exclusion. The mall cafe is our vacuous symbol. Its umbrellas lack breeze or sun, its security guards manning the escalators to handcuff spirited teens. Its architectural island walled by the automobile offers access only to the licensed shopper. No public realm here. what did you mean by that . Guest 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 . Cant we live in a better way . And cant we stop funding the superstore and the mall . And when i say funding, i meani dont 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 sinceespecially since world war ii when we gave 500 apiece in mortgage down money to our 10 million vetto 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 dont 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. Cspan you had a statistic that the federal Highway Administration says that 7. 2 percent of americans are walkers. Guest yes. Cspan what does that mean . What kind of walker . Guest well, i think we have to walk from our car to our mall as well as anything else. But i think thats 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 dodo many of them, but the reason we dont do that mile, which is 15, 20 minutes itd be nice not to be car potatoesis because its such a grim landscape; thatin order to do it, you have to cross the highway, you have to cross the mall, you have to do acres of parking. So thats 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, withinif were within seven minutes of mass transit, we can expand our lives and live in a ma carfree, less cardependent environment. Cspan how much do you walk . Guest i walk a lot. Im 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. Cspan where do. Guest . But casually. Cspan where do you live now . Guest i live in the back bay. Cspan in boston . Guest i work downtown. Mmhmm. Back bay of boston. Cspan and whatswhat would you call your fulltime job . Guest writing. Cspan writing . Guest writing. Cspan how many books have you written . Guest this is only my third book. So im 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. Cspan and what were your other two books . Guest 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 didnt 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. Cspan what year did you write the first book . Guest the first book came out in 1980, and its still arounddidnt 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. Cspan where were you born . Guest i was born in boston. Cspan so its. Guest im native. Cspan its everything. Now whered you go to college . Guest radcliffe. Cspan right there in boston . Guest right. I didnt travel very far. Cspan what do you think those that grew up in boston see that sthose that, say, maybe out in the midwest or in the far west dont see . Guest well, i think its an older attitude towards the landscape and cityscape. We can walk around. But theres a defining quality about living in new england, despite the malls and the sthe 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 onethere were two ways of life. It was the old henry adamswinter 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. Cspan you say that there are 12 million bicycles bought a year in this country . Guest right. Cspan sameroughly the same number of cars bought . Guest yeah, 15 million cars, 12 million bicycles. Cspan is that number going up or down . Guest its been static. The automobileboth cars and bicycles have been pretty static. Cspan what do people buy the bikes for . I mean, how many of them commute with it . Do you know . Guest not a large percentage. Its very difficult. Cspan how does that compare with other countries . Guest oh, way down. I mean, we dont provide a place where bicycles can go. A lot of it is recreation. Weve been building, with this transportation bill i was telling you about, some bike paths. Theres plans for them to go across the country in several directions, like the lincoln highway was the road of choice. So thats what were doing with the bicycles. But we dont tend to our sidewalks and we dont tend to our bike paths. The figure i like to usepeople always say its impossible to bicycle in much of the country because its snowy, a lot of inches just recently inin boston and the midwest and everyplace else. In finland, its 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 thats why the European Countries and japan have such vastly superior Transportation Systems and cheaper. Cspan two hundred million automobiles, but 80 million commuters by car. Guest mm. Cspan whats happening to that figure . Guest 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 thats staying somewhat the same, but its basically growing. Every fall the car statistics are growing, and thats distressing because it reflects moving further outwards. Cspan you say that if people travel by amtrak, they pay 80 percent of the ticket, the government paying the other 20 percent. If they travel by car, its 50 percent costi mean, the cost to the individual driving . Who pays for the other 50 percent . Guest we all do. Theyre 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 theres a lot of subsidies for the automobile that we dont really think about. Cspan the gulf war. Guest the gulf war, right. Cspan what do you think caused the gulf war, from your perspective . Guest oh, from my perspective, from daniel yergins perspective, from lots of folks perspective, its our oil interests. Theres no question in my mind thatwhy are we so protective about the middle east . I mean, im not a foreignpolicy 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 its 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 thats 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 whats going on. And the fire engines come; they wash it down. It goes on and on as were sitting and listening to this unreeling of numbers. And then the ambulances finally come, take the cars away and someone in the audience whos recorded all of these elements of the burning car says to the guy whos 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. Cspan you say that american corporations spend 40 billion a year to promote autos. How . Guest right. Advertisements. There is no cost equation on the lobbying, the pacs, the wholewithout 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. Cspan you said 1 billion is spent by General Motors. Is that all advertising . Guest its advertising and itsyeah, its advertising and its advertising in the sense of wining and dining as well. Cspan did you figure out how much in a cars cost is actually advertising . Guest no, i didnt. Next book. Cspan rural america60 percent of the elderly are not licensed to drive. Guest yeah. Cspan how do they get around in the Rural Communities . Guest 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 mcdonalds to make 6 an hour to buy a caris taken there by his mother, basically. And the elderly are being dependent on that kind of treatmenti 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 paratransit to take elderly people around, or if theyre within a range of a walkable older core, we can solve some of these problems without, again, these two and threecar households. Cspan that80 million americans do not operate autos; theyre too old, theyre too young or theyre too poor. What impact has the automobile had on the poor . Guest 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 dont 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 hadnt happened when i wrote this book, but the transportation bill that ive been talking about, the intermodal surface transportation efficiency act, had some things, for example, such as putting day care in a masstransit node so that, theoretically, somebody could drop off a kid and head to work there are all these little solutions that weve basically denied by putting all our eggs in this one automobile basket. Cspan show this photograph right here. It kind of opens your book up. Where is this photo from, and whats in that picture . Guest its a drivein movie from the 50s, the heyday of take a chevy to the levee, and theyre watching an airplane. And the trains in the background, and its in the midwest. And all the appurtenance of the automobile, including thewhat was the word then . Smooching couple, are played out in that picture, which has its charm to all of us. I mean, its the american graffiti way of life. Cspan where did you get this picture . Guest there are two collectors who had an art show andabout the automobile in art. And most of them were paintings, but this was one of their photographs. Cspan where did the interstate highway system come from . Guest well, it was a long way aborning, but it basically came to connect the cities across the nation. And it came from the postmilitarythe postwar impulse. The road gangs, socalled, 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 relievethere was always, always congestion as soon as the automobiles started coming, and the solution was always to build more roads. I mean, lets build it before were too old to enjoy it in the teens. Lets 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 thatthat 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 ofcachecache 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 sensewe hid under our desks. And if there were an atomic attack, you were supposed toand i remember this as a kidyou were supposed to be able to get in your car and head out. And i remember people thinking it was laughable, but it wasnt so laughable, either. Cspan who started the highway system . Guest oh, well, i think were all coresponsible for that. But i thought it was very interesting that dwight eisenhower, whos 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 roadbuilding urge spread. There were these very splashy, very colorfuland i must say i enjoyed reading about all that; i wasnt so anticar that i couldnt 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 theyre 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. Cspan what. Guest . Which i think was a teletechnological marvel, actually. Cspan what happened to them . Guest they were dismantled. There are many theories. Theres 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 stheir 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 isnt only because of these disastrous enemies, strong as they might be, but its 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 cant know the consequences and we fail to sthink 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 didnt like them a lot, and they didnt like developersi mean, theyre not crazy about developers todayso 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 didnt interfere, wouldnt put the taxthe gas tax in alternate modes of transportation and didnt care to plan. You know, we had so much land; it wasnt like europe, where you had to be a little bit careful or protect your centers, thatthis is a vast continent. So it wasit would have been tough to stop this juggernaut. Cspan how many miles are there in the interstate highway system . Guest fortytwo thousand miles. Cspan how long did it take to build . Guest well, it started in 56 and my own state is supposedly doing the last five miles at 10 billion to complete the system. Cspan where is it beingwhere are those last five miles . Guest a stones throw from my office. Its been a little disrupting. Its betweentheres a big central artery in front of the waterfront, like so many places and in theory, its a very good idea to bury it underneath and connect to the waterfront. In practice, the citys grown up around it and whats 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 were noti 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 im concerned, is just to stop them, to just say no. Its the solution that failed, and we have to move on to something else. Cspan did you say that 128 up around boston was the first loop . Guest yeah. Cspan first . Guest yes. Cspan what year was that built . Guest that was init started in the 60s. Cspan and what did this inter. Guest im sorry. It started in the mid50. Yeah. Cspan what did this interstate highway system cost the taxpayer . Guest altogether . Cspan and whered the money come from . Guest 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 percentdifferent in different statesby the property tax. Cspan and what dowhat do you think that whole thing cost since 56 . Guest i dont know. Ithats a good question. I dont know that anybodys assessed it because youd have to do inflationary material for it. Cspan how big is the federal Highway Trust Fund today, and where does that money come from . Guest that money comes from the gas tax, still. Cspan do we know how much is in it . Guest mmwell, what they give out every five years is 151 billion. So. Cspan every five years . To do w. Guest over five years, 30 billion a year. Cspan to do what . Guest well, this is a highway bill again. And its supposedly flexible. But basically, more than 80 percent goes to roads. And some of the roads are widening while we dont maintain, and because of the bill, theres more going to things ofthat are alternate kinds of mobility and intermodal, as the acts name says, that connect the dots, which is very important, but still, the bulk of that money is going to roads. Cspan heres another twopage picture. What is this . Guest 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. Cspan is this an ad . Guest this is an advertisement. Im sorry. Step one. Cspan for. Guest ah, ive forgotten the name of the car, which is small, actually, a compact car, but is nonetheless occupying. Cspan its a mazda. Guest mazda, sorry. You can see im not a car fan. Its taking up the whole 789 acres of central park. I do know the figures on the park. Cspan now whats been the reaction from the kind of folks youve talked to about this bookcallin shows, automotive editors in papers youve talked to . Guest basically, aside from that automotive editor you just mentioned, ive been surprised that i havent 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 comei say that i have become the dr. Ruth of how you can make your life more carfree, because they come with their very personal problems. And theyre 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 howthe choices they make. But theres 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 dont use an automobile; see if you atrophy. Cspan explain that. Guest well, they have a 100day program thats just being initiated that i just happened to read about, 100 days without a car. Now i dont think we can do that. Were not so compact and we havent got good Mass Transportation. But again, if we have two or three cars in the garage, what could we do if someone of us decided not to drive . And if at the end of that time we cant do anything, then maybe our lives need rethinking. And the 30 million of us, for example, who are selfemployed 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 cant bicycle or walk . there are a lot of personal decisions we can make, and there are political ones in our local areas supporting masstransit bonds, moving to have safer neighborhoods through trafficcalming devices, which is narrow the street, widen the sidewalk. There are, as you know, 100 pages of solutions in there and rightmaking the price right, paying for the automobile. Cspan so you havent made anybody real mad with this book yet . Guest 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. Soso what . and i think the anger is the entrapment, not to be too psychiatric about this. And i think its 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 weve 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 natioone 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 wouldnt 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 theyre 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. Cspan you say theres 120 deaths a day on the highways. Up or down . Guest well, notnot on the highways, per se, but. Cspan automobiles. Guest . Onautomobile accidents. They have been stable 43,000 a year. And this is one of the interesting little corkscrew aspects ofof life that made me become especially alarmedor especially aware of how hidden the automobile is in our life. I mean, we have aan airplane accident, and the sirens ring, the emergency vehicles come, its 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 were driving more and were not killing any more people than we have over time. but i say what kind of blinders do we wear that we cant analyze why this is happening and do something about it . Cspan how is it that its 43,000 every year . Guest well, give or take 1,000. Cspan or, i meanyeah, but why does it stay in that range . Ishave you ever analyzed that . I. Guest no. Thats a good question. I would say there must be improvement here theoretically, but maybe its because there are more people driving and so theyre a little more cushioned cars are a littlecars are definitely better padded. Its the same as theor protected. The steel frames are better. But its 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 warmingthe world stock of carsand we contribute half of that. And yet we are improving the automobile, and these destructive, ravaging conditions continue. Cspan how long have you written for the nation magazine . Guest oh, about 20 years. Cspan why do you do that . Guest 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 enveelement of our lives. Cspan but the nation, thoughwhat is that magazine to you . What impact does it have . Guest well, it gives me a voice. Cspan how often do you write . Guest not as often as i should, especially over the last five years. And a lot of my writingi 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 its very developerdriven. And i think one of the things about the nation that i like especially is that you can say that its developerdriven or you can say, without any restrictions, how you feel about the making of the society. Theres a lot of latitude there. Cspan how would you describe your political views and the nations political views . Is there any way to do that . Guest well, i think probablyi certainly am an architecture critic. Thats the title. And i dont know that the magazine is monomono minded. I think i tend to be an optimist. I tend to think that writing this isis an agent for change, not that people writing for any of these publications that care about social causes, not just the nation, dont 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 throughim from a political family. I had a father who ran for office. And i think that one goes out and does ones small bit. And, of course, if its approaching 200 million motor vehicles, its a massive bit at a certain level, but its a big juggernaut to face that kind of car situation. Cspan what office did your father run for . Guest well, he was a state rep, and then he ran for congress and lost. Cspan what year was that . Guest 56. Cspan did you participate in that campaign . Guest 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 handpainted billboards, and it was colorful, informing. Cspan why did he lose . Guest he ran in a democratic district. Firsthe ran twice, actually 54, sorry. Cspan whatwhat party was he in . Guest 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. Cspan do we know that name . Is it. Guest lawrence curtis. I dont 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 blackafricanamerican community and ipockets of middleclass irish. It was a fascinating experience, especially for a kid. Cspan what was your dads profession . Guest he was a lawyer. Cspan is he still alive . Guest no. Cspan you have here a dedication in your book, whowell get a closeup of it in just a second, so people can see it. Who are these two folks . Guest you just made my children famous my daughtersand readers, i should say. Cspan and where are they . Guest ones in paris and ones in new yorkcity kids. Cspan doing what . Guest my older daughter is teaching and translating and doing some crosscultural things in france. And my younger daughter is a lawyer with thewith womens issues. Cspan and what do they think of this book . Have you talked to them about it . Guest oh, yes, they read it im litthats literally true because ieven from the time they were freshmen in college, ii ran a lot of things by them because im trying to be mainstream. And i figured if a College Freshman cant understand what im writingand they were extremely helpful, both intellectually and a literary sense. You know, ii brought up my own editors inin that sense. Cspan youve got a picture here of sun city, arizona. Guest right. Cspan where did you get this and what does that say . Why is it in the book . Guest wow. the threecar culturei mean, it says that were living in this culdesac kind of community that we can only get around in because of the automobile, and that weve built oneuse suburbs; our zoning precludes having any kind of shops or mixeduse or landuse patterns, which is a very central theme of this book, that would enable us to use mass transit and get around on foot. Cspan it begs this question it seems like that if this was so bad, why do people buy these houses and live in that environment . Guest right. I think there are two reasons one, because they generally want to get to sunny places at the end of the road, and were 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 enableor the highway expenditures, the infrastructure of moving to the suburbsare all free in a certain sense. And their ride was paid for. It was, as one environmentalist said, a free ride thata free meal, a free lunch that youre getting paid to eat. Cspan whats the difference in the way we treat the automobile and, say, the europeans . Guest 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 theyre 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; theyve spent half of that, all the industrialized nations. And they have a balanced transportation system. Cspan you point out in your book that the first red and green traffic light stood on the cornerin aon a corner in cleveland in 1914 and that the first yellow light was in detroit three years later. Whered you find that . Guest oh, iyouve seen the bibliography. Im not exactly sure where i got it at the time. But theres 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 id like to see that published, too. Cspan well, you also said that the first gas tax was in 1919 in oregon. It was a penny. Whats been the history of the gas tax in the United States . Guest its stayed pretty low, as we all know. And in real dollars, its lower now than its been. Cspan why . Guest why . Its beencertainly been an unpopular tax, but its also been a taxno taxes are popular in america, but its been a tax that a lot of people want to pay or are willing to pay, and it doesthey should be willing to pay that little bit because it doesnt pay the whole freight. But i think theres a growing senseand this is one of the economic solutionsthat we should pay more for the gas tax and if we dont 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. Thats 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 theresthere is movement in that direction. Cspan back over the last so many years that youve been thinking about this issue, whend you first start thinking about architecture and transportation and all these issues youre talking about . Guest oh, architecturewell. Cspan whatd you study at radcliffe . Guest history. And i actually wrote my undergraduate thesis on lewis mumford, who was the man who invented the phrase a cloverleaf culture, though weamerica 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. Cspan the reason for the question is, if you look back over the history of all this, what would you say to people that are activists and have they been swhere have they been successful in stopping the kind of things that you think ought to be stopped . Guest well, some of the ones that i suggestedone of the ones that i think is especially wonderful is in my own hometown, where there was supposed to be an inner sinner 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 thiswhat would have been this road and, through the highway transfer act, didnt 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. Its 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. Cspan on a national basis, though, who has the most political clout to stop some of these things . Guest i think its a thousand flowers blooming. I mean, thats 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 theres a decision to be made by law, a transportationplanning element has to go into it. And that means the community has to be consulted. And if the community isnt consulted when theres an offensive road or, conversely, when a solution is evolved that isnt mass transit or that isnt a walkable, bicycle, sidewalk place, i think its up to everybody to get out there. Cspan wheres this picture from . Whats it represent . Guest that picture, like a lot of the other pictures, are from archivesbettman 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 orin the vehicle, who is underneath the automobile fixing it. And its a classic get a horse picture of that particular era. I think that was from the library of congress, actually, where a lot of these images came from. Cspan and then you have a cover that has a couple of stacked, wrecked automobiles on it. Whose idea was this . And where does this picture come from . Guest this cover, like every other authors cover, as you much know, has almost nothing to do with the author. Im actually quite fond of it. The picture came from a stockhouse. But the bottom car, by some mystericalmysterious process, is the first car i ever owned, which. Cspan what is it . Guest its a saab from the late 60s, twocycle engine, totally polluting. Talk about hidden elements of the caryou put the gas and the oil in the same place and it emitted disgusting smoke, like a motorboat. So nobody is born pure. Cspan so you did you know that this was going to be on the cover before it. Guest no. No. They didnt 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. Cspan whats your next book . Guest everybody asks that. I say, you know, son of asphalt nation. I dont know. I think ill go back to doing journalism and spreading this message for a bit and hope it doesnt take me 10 years to do another one. Cspan heres the cover of the bookthe full cover jane holtz kay, and the name of the book is asphalt nation. We thank you very much. Guest thank you for having me. It america has always had its generations because america is a Dynamic Society and we have aris head younger adults who see the world of early from their parents or grandparents but in this particular moment these gaps across all dimensions that we are interested in have gotten very wide. The largest of those gaps is racial and ethnic. We are now 40 or 50 years into the third great immigration wave in our countries history. It began in the mid60s when we pass legislation to open the borders having closed our borders in the 1920s in reaction to the previous immigration wave. The board has stayed close through world wars and depressions etc. We were ready to open them up again. What is distinctive about the modern immigration first of all an absolute numbers more immigrants than the two previous ways put together although its a share of the populations though not as big. But whats really distinctive as their first two immigration waves going back to the late 19th and early 20s century nine out of our 10 immigrants were from europe. In this wave half are from latin america and nearly 30 from asia and only 10 are from europe. So this is changing our racial complexion and make up and we are now a country that is on a path to become majority nonwhite before the middle of the century sometime in the early 2040s according to the census bureau. He dramatic change. So for someone my age and im one of those rumors is about to turn 65 this year so im born into a country that is 85 white and im going to be looking at a country soon that is 43 white. It is for people my age it is disorienting. For people my children and grandchildrens age it is the only america they have known and its the most natural thing in the world. Anybody who was criticizing a policy issue has nothing to do with religion, nothing to do with the five pillars, okay. There had been accused islamic phobia. This is very close to what the national in germany would have accused anybody who would criticize their policy. And even at the International Level it has become very dangerous. On u. S. Policy in the middle east tonight at 10 00 booktv smart added 9 00 on book tv after words. On april 6 more discussion on the middle east with military strategist and former vista with your calls and comments live in depth. Book tv every weeknd