From you all about which one of these is best. Think about it a second. Which one, weve got a paper clip, binder and a stapler. Which one is best . Which one is best . Its not that hard. Which one is best . We have an intellectual in the room. Im looking for someone with an answer. Which one is best, david. Stapler. Youre wrong. If the stapler is not best, jack, which one is best. Wrong again. The right answer is the binder clip. The binder clip is in my opinion the best. All right. I will admit as she points out if i had a 100 page document too fasten, binder clip would be best. Stapler is not going to do the job very well. On the other hand, if i want to fa fasten a receipt to a note, maybe i need the paper clip. In effect, im coming around to her answer. Depends on what were talking about here. We are up against a point of view that takes these things and says one is definitely best. The reading contends the bottom device is just plain best. Greatest invention. Wherever you are on a rural highway, city street, in a shopping mall, going to a store, going to work. That is your device. The rest are perhaps not obsolete after all the author is a cyclist, but bear no comparison to these things. Well, i guess if i had to reduce my climb to a thesis, its that wrong turns out each one of these things has its place and more. Were coming along with you guys. Coming up with more stuff all the time. Electric bicycles for example or high bus transit. All kinds of things are possible and depending what you need, you may want to take one of these other modes. I would suggest people who say this is always best are the same people who if we could ever see them trying too fasten together a 100 page document would probably be banging this with a hammer. Doesnt make sense. Its wasteful. Inefficient. Breaks the stapler, doesnt do the report any good. Doesnt document and accomplishes nothing. I would suggest there are situations in which we in this country in trying to accommodate the automobile are doing essentially the same thing. Im going to recommend you try something sometime. Maybe youve already done this. Go to google satellite view. Everybody has something on the web that kills their spare time or even kills time that isnt spare time. For me, google satellite view is a major culprit in that regard. If you go there, take a look around American Cities. This is houston. Its not a totally random shot, but nevertheless, i find it striking. Im actually wondering, what are these people parking for . To go to another parking space . Theres nothing else to go to. Theres a building on the top lefthand corner. Maybe theyre all going there. Thats a lot of parking. This about parking for a moment. Think about the thing that is most distinctly valuable in a city. Its land. City by definition is a place of dense si. Right. If density is what were talking about, then land is scars. Why dont we put a car on every 100 square feet of land in a city and this is what youll get. I wonder if this is like trying to fasten a 200 page report with a stapler and a hammer. This is houston as well. How the cars got to the parking lots. They went on this interstate highway. This is indianapolis. May not immediately jump at you, but the f you look carefully youll sigh a lee a lot of surf parl parking lots here. Strange thing to do with a city. There we have tysons corner. This is the mills. Here we have atlanta. Not only do we see cars parked off the street everywhere, we also see major interstate highways accommodating cars at extraordinary expense. This is like taking your stapler and 200 page report and getting a sledge hammer to force that staple there. At least thats one way of possibly looking at this. Our reading for today says to the contrary, this is something we accommodate. The automobile is something we accommodate because it is so valuable to our economy, to our society, to the freedom of residents. Its worth it. Hes not saying its not costly in some senses. It is costly, but its worth it. For example, look at the economic benefit. More jobs. More income for people. Of course being a good skeptical reader look for the data myself. If you look, youll see cars and trucks in the u. S. Increasing in numbers from 1960 on the left to 2010 on the right. You can loosely correlate that to gdp. The curves are not the same, but theyre both going up. Maybe u. S. Gdp growth from 1960 to 2010 is attributable in large part to the growth of cars and trucks. At least thats possible. On the other hand, if youre a skeptical reader, you should see if it correlates with other things, for example the growth of the number of mcdonalds. If anything, the correlation is slightly better. Maybe we should say u. S. Gdp breath from 2010 was caused by the growth of mcdonalds. Or maybe we could do the causal analysis the other way around and maybe the growth explains the growth in the number of cars and trucks. Im let you decide which is more plausible. All right. So thats one way of looking at it. Also our author for today also contends that the car has social value thats not economically obvious. If its truly socially valuable as the author contends, maybe its worth the cost. For example, according to otoole, the automobile was an indispensable means of womens liberation and civil rights move. I think its helpful to check. Check your sources. If we go back and look, i think feminists would agree these three women were monumentally important, at least the first two were on the left. Jane jacobs, one of the leading lights in city planning. You cannot get through your first year of City Planning School without reading jane jacobs life and death of Great American cities. All right. We also have here maybe somebody recognizes, betty fredan. The single most important book most people would say of second wing feminism published in 1963. Nobody is going to recognize hel helen levit, but what these women have in common is that all of them were depending on which one you mean, at least skeptical or outright hostile to the suburbanization trend that the automobile is connected with. Jane jacobs was a defender of urban density and said cities are dense places. We dont need to suburbanize everything. What makes cities thrive is pedestrians. What makes cities thrive is dead city. If we try to make a suburb out of the city, we ruin all that. Thats what made the book the single most significant work in American City planning. Most City Planners would agree thats true. Feminine mystique, shes writing a 1963, the housewife located in the suburbs while her husband goes to work is in. Theres a controversial analogy. Called it a comfortable concentration camp. She felt unfree in the suburbs. One response is she should get a car. Now were talking about not only a world where every adult has a car instead of every home, but also a world that was unrealistic in 1973 when she wrote the book. Otoole says the car gave us better social equity, but how could it argue this when it was not economically possible for most couples to have two cars. All right. And in an age when men were expected to be the breadwinner, he takes the car and shes left alone. So she was not a fan as the car as a tool of womens liberation. Helen levit. Although i doubt anyone has heard of her. If youre from nova or d. C. , you should. You all know about i 95 im sure. What you probably dont know is if you look at the blue prints for i95 from the late 50s to the early 60s when they were designing this, i95 was not supposed to go around washington on the beltbeltway. It was supposed to go through it unsbrumted right through washington, d. C. Wisconsin avenue and a block on either side of wisconsin Arodys Vizcaino avenue, everything was going to be levelled. Helen levit fought this tooth and nail. She investigated it. Decided it was a super hoax. Wrote this book. It was a significant seller in its day. Thats 1970. Whats more significant is im sure youve all heard of the interstate highway system. Something else you might not know about it is this, on the book there was supposed to be 42, 500 miles. It never got there because of the violent i shouldnt use the word violent. Vehement opposition to it in americas cities. Some were built. The opposition was intense. So intense it spread that finally they had to give up trying to build the you shall ban segments of u. S. Highway system. In that movement, many i dont have the numbers, but probably most of the active leaders were women. Women spear headed the movement against the freeways in the cities. And these pictures while they dont prove it, give you a taste for that connection, that women saw urban interstates as dangerous. You see this also in remember jane jacobs author of death and life in American Cities, the planners of her day which includes the highway engineers, she saw as people who were ravrgeing the cities. Helen levit put it this way. Now, i dont think we have seen a case for women having welcomed the automobile as womens liberation. Im not saying that have none did. Surely some did, but it was a mixed story, at best. The same could be said about the role of the automobile in the American City from the point of view of africanamericans, all right. Here we see a neighborhood of miami called overtown. Overtown was nick naked the harlem of the south because all the businesses were black owned. The residences were all black. Thriving black community. Im using the past tense in showing you an old picture because this is overtown in the mid 60s. Theres nothing left. Angers in every direction has been totally destroyed to make room for the southern end of interstate 95. This does not to me make a case for the interstate highways or cars in general having been a tool of civil rights. It is definitely true that without the car, it could not have successfully organized the montgomery busboy cot of 1955, but clearly the story is more complicate ed than that. Overtown is a case in point. You could look at almost any American City and reach the same conclusion. This is a sign that was carried around in the protest against these projects in American Cities in the 60s. Everyone has heard of the civil rights movement. Not many people know about this aspect of it. The antiurban highway aspect of it. Here is detroit. On the left we see a neighborhood called Paradise Valley. Like overtown. Virtually 100 black. 100 black owned businesses, and yet when this picture was taken in 1964, it was already mostly gone. This was a city block, left to right, up and done. Making room for i75. The chrysler freeway in detroit. Totally destroyed Paradise Valley. The little bit that was left was unsustainable and quickly dec decayed. Now, let me share an observation ive made with you that might be interesting. You know, as a historian, im sort of interested many what people know a lot about and what people havent heard of. Ive noticed a lot of people have heard of the riots of 1960s. There was a riot in detroit in 1967 that was the worst riot of the 20th century until the 1994 logs angle lolos angeles riots. 4050 people were killed. Lasted several days. What people dont seem to know is that it happened almost immediately after this happened. This is the chrysler freeway in detroit under construction. Everything you see used to be part of Paradise Valley and here we see the riots that broke out months later in the summer of 1967. I ha havent proved a connectio but i think when you droi a city and its neighborhood, dont be surprised if you encounter trouble after that. Im not at all persuaded we see the automobile as the key to civil rights the way the author for today portrays it. Theres another group that otoole doesnt mention, but i believe belongs in any discussion about the social aspects of this. Heres where im going to bring in an english guy. His name is william bird. Hes a medical doctor in britain. He was interested in declining independent mobility among children in britain. He as a medical doctor observed that physical and Mental Health in children correlate strongly with that i reca with their activity level and mobility. Can they go on their own outside to play and can they go very far. In this report, he has a great deal of data to show declining mobility in children in britain, which correlates, i think, to declining mobility of children in america, but for an audience like you all, i think the most compelling bit of evidence, even though its not the most conclusive is this simple study of one family, four generations. So these are four generations. In other words, edwards mother is vickie, vickies father is jack. Jacks father is george. Those years are the years when those people were eight years old. And one of the many data points that william bird put together was when he asked them, and theyre all alive so he could ask them, to plot on a map their home and the farthest place they could go to as an unescorted eightyearold. He found george could go six miles and did. He liked to go six miles is a long walk. Six miles each way on foot george would walk. Jack was only going a mile. Onesixth of that. That was twice as much of vickie who went half a mile . 1979. To me the clencher is edward is going 300 yards maximum unescorted as an eightyearold. 300 yards. Thats a major decline as you can see in the chart. This is one family. Its a sample size of one or four, depending how you look at it. Im not making any pretenses that this is conclusive data. I am claiming however this is not at all atypical of a trend you find both in britain and the United States over time. There are reasons for this. You guys have lived this yourselves. I have as well. I want to ask you all why, why this decline . Theres multiple reasons. Whats one of them . Herbert . Can you think of one . I guess you could say the development of neighbors are more like densely, houses are more densely situated now. Houses are more densely situated now so why would that make so its not as far to walk because okay. That sounds plausible. How about another possibility. Just lsafety. The chances of edward being hit by a car is far greater than george. Very true. I want to point out this is britain even in 1926, he would have been in danger of being hit by a car in america, but in britain, cars were rare. His danger of being hit by a car was not high. You can see that changed. Jack, you know, his parntd par concerned and rightly so about him getting hit by a car. I want to point out as a parent im not advocating anybody let their child walk 6 miles away from home unescorted. I think thats nuts. Its not an attempt to defend that. It is a claim perhaps this has gone a little far. 300 yards, we practically disabled our own children when we cant go more than 300 yards. Theres also safety, ab durkss or attacks of kinds. Theres more. It has to do with the geography. Let me offer a geographic point. This is a street plan or aerial view of a typical american subdivision of the late 20th century. I think you can see that if for example you lived on the culdesac on the far right and you were eight years old and you wanted to walk to a friends house on the next street over, while you might be able to get there directly by trespassing, if you werent going to trespass, you would have a very long way to walk. If you had an Old Fashioned street grid, you would have a much shorter walk. Therefore the point is why people walked longer distances. Yes, its a longer distance here, but turns out to be less likely to walk at all if you have to walk that far to get to a close house. This is a street plan that makes a lot of sense from a drivers point of view. The intersections are much rarer in a grid. As a driver, the intersections are where all the delays happen. If you have fewer intersections, you have fewer delays. Better for a driver. If youre walking, a little drimpbt. I dont want to say its all one sided. Theyre kind of nice if your friend lives on the other side of the culdesac. Thats great. If he lives in another culdesac, youre kind of in trouble. I think this diagram made it more clear. This is a child who if they walked to school would have to take a very roundabout way or tress pa trespass. A lot of kids trespass. I did myself. With the grid, maybe you didnt have to. This reminded me of a personal experience myself. I spent four years of my childhood in Montgomery County maryland where there are a lot of subdivisions of this kind. And belong to one of these facebook groups that youll all join when youre getting nostalgic for the old days too. This one is about Montgomery County and the kids were remembering the black path. Whats going on here, theyre showing in the red line here, paths that did not exist on any map that nobody had made except for the kids themselves. What they did was overcome the restrictions of the culdesac plans by forging their own illegal, what we called, black pa paths, and you got certain amount of status points for taking these things. They were a little creepy and scary and so on. This person who posted this was rem miss iniscing about the blah being the lifeline to the rest of the world. Once the kid gets to a street, they might have this to face. So our eightyearold who made it out of the residential subdivision gets here. I hope no parent ever lets their eight yield get to this point unescorted or to this one. If you learn anything from 45 h you you learn to take point of different social groups. This street in ashville North Carolina is a nice one. A older one or flail orail one, is absolute barrier to mobility. When you hear about mobility, ask mobility for whom . On the left or in both of these, we see high mobility for drivers. We see something close to zero mobility for any child or disabled person or perhaps old person who wants to cross this street. All right. So not only should we talk about the womens mouchlt and civil rights. I think we should talk about children too when we talk about mobility. I want to recognize another thesis. Its not one that otoole explicitly references. I think hed be sympathetic to it. Its one we have to reckon with. It is probably the most common explanation for why america accommodates cars even in dense cities at almost any expense. Im not persuaded by it, but we need to recognize this thesis. At the top we see a Google Search bar. This is a real Google Search bar i just did a screen shot of. At americas lo, we see auto complete kicking in. Guessing i mean americas lost treasures. When i had a v, i knew before i tried it what would pop up. Maybe youve heard of this too. The reason im using this google example is auto completely is pretty good at telling us what is popular out there. This is a popular explanation. So w