With an answer, okay . Which one is best, david . Well, youre wrong. The stapler is not best. Jack, which one is best . I like wrong again. It is the the right answer is the binder clip. The binder clip is in my opinion the best. All right . I will admit if i had a 100 page document to fasten, the bientder clip would be best, stapler is not going to do the job very well. On the other hand, if i want to fasten a receipt to a note, maybe i need the paper clip. In effect, i think im coming around to oshas answer. Depends on what were talking about here. The rest are perhaps not obsolete. After all, the author is a cyclist, but no comparison to these things. I would guess if i have to reduce my claim to a thesis its that, wrong, turns out each one of these things has its place and more, and you guys are coming up with more stuff all the time. Electric bicycles, for example. Or high bus rapid transit, which we have dedicated bus lanes for buses to go faster. All kinds of things are possible, and depending on what you need, you may want to take one of these other modes. I would suggest the people who say this is always best are the same people who if we could ever see them trying to fasten together 100 page document, we would probably be banging this with a hammer. It doesnt make sense. Its wasteful. Its inefficient. It breaks the stapler. It doesnt do the report any good. It doesnt fasten the document, and it plishz nothing. I would suggest that 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 that 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. I admit its not a totally randomly chosen shot. Nevertheless, i find it striking. I actually wonder what are these people parking for . To go to another parking space . I mean, theres nothing else to go to. There is a building in the top lefthand corner. Maybe theyre all going there. Thats a lot of parking. Think about parking for a second. Its land, right . Think about the thing that is most distinctly valuable in a city. Its land. Whats scarce in a city. City by definition is a place of density. Right . If density is what were talking about, then land is scarce. 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 isnt, like, trying to fasten a 200 page report with a stapler and a hammer. Right . This is houston as well. Youll see we have a lot of surface parking. Maybe half of this is surface parking lots. Strange thing to do with a city. There is tysons corner. I think you are probably akwabted with this. This is potomac mills. Here we have atlanta. Not only do we see cars parked off the street everywhere, but we have major interstate highways accommodating cars at extraordinary expense. This is like taking your swing line stapler and your 200 page report and getting a sledgehammer to force that staple through. At least thats one way of possibly looking at this, right . Our assigned 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 its residents. Its worth it. He is not saying, you know its not costly in some senses. It is costly, but he is saying but its worth it. For example, look at the economic benefit. All right . More jobs. More income for people. I, of course, being a good skeptical reader look for the data myself, and 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, and you can loosely correlate that to gdp. The curves are not the same, but theyre both going up, okay . 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. It may be the growth of u. S. Gdp explains the growth in the number of cars and trucks. Ill let you decide which is more plausible. All right . So thats one way to look at it. Also, our author for today also contends that the car has social value thats not economically obvious. I think its helpful to check. Check your sources. If if we go back and look, i think feminists would agree that these three women were monumentally important. At least the first two were. On the left jane jacobs, a 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 freidan, author of the feminist mystique. Thats the most important book, most people would say of second wave feminism published in 1963. Jay 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 density. If we try to make a suburb out of the city we ruin all of that. Thats what made death and life of Great American cities the single most significant work in American City planning. Most City Planners would agree thats true. Feminine mist even, shes writing in 1963 the housewife isolated in the suburbs while her husband goes to work is in an this was a controversial analogy. She called it a comfortable concentration camp. Right . She felt unfree in the suburbs. Now, of course, one response is, well, she should get a car, right . 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 19d 63 when she wrote the book. Otool 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 . In an age when men were expected to be the breadwinner, he takes the car, and shes left alone. Betty was not a fan of the car as a tool of womens liberation. Although i doubt anyone has ever heard of her, but if you are from nova or d. C. , you should. You all know about i95 im sure. From the late 1950s to the early 1960s when the designer was designing the public roads in the department of commerce, i95 was not supposed to go around washington on the beltway. It was supposed to go right through it uninterrupted right through washington d. C. Whats more significant is we have all heard of the interstate highway system. Something else you might not know about it is this. On the book it was supposed to be it never got there because of the violent i shouldnt use the word violent. The viehement opposition to it in americas cities. Some were built. The opposition spread, and they had to give up building the segments in the highway system. In that Movement Many i dont have the numbers, but probably most of the active leaders were women. These pictures, while they dont prove it, give it a taste for that connection that women saw urban interstates as dangerous. Remember jane jacobs. The planners of her day, which included the highway engineers, she saw as people who were ravaging the cities. Helen levitt put it this way. It was a mixed story at best, and the same could be said about the role of the automobile and the American City from the point of view of africanamericans. Overtown were nicknamed the over the residences were all black. It was a thriving community. I want to show you an old picture because this is over town in the mid 60s. Theres nothing left. Acres 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 they could not have successfully organized the montgomery bus boycott of 1945. Clearly, the story is more complicated 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 protests against these projects in American Cities in the 1960s. Not many people know about the aspect of it. Here is detroit. Loeft here we see a neighborhood called paradise valley. Like overtown. Virtually 100 black. 100 blackowned businesses. Yet, when this picture was taken in 1964, it was already mostly gone. This was a city block left to right. Up and down. Its making room for i75. The chrysler freeway in detroit totally destroyed paradise valley. The little bit of it that was left was unsustainable and quickly decayed. Let me share an observation that might be interesting. I notice a lot of people have heard about the riots of the 1960s. There was a riot in detroit in 1967 that was the worst riot in the 20th century until the 1994 los angeles riots. 40 to 50 people were killed. It lasted several days. What people dont seem to know is that it happened almost immediately after this happened. I havent proved a kikds, but i think when you destroy a neighborhood and its contents, dont be surprised if you encounter some trouble after that. Im not at all persuaded that we can see the automobile as the key to civil rights the way our author for today portraits it. Theres another group that belongs in any discussion about the social aspects of this, and heres where im going to bring in an englishman. This guy is name is william bird. He is a medical doctor in britain, and he was interested in declining independent mobility among children in britain. He has said that physical and Mental Health in children correlates strongly with their activity level and especially with their mobility. Can they go on their own outside to play and can they go very far . He has a great deal of data to show declining mobility, and it correlates to declining mobility in america. Is this simple little study of one family. Four generations. These are four generations. Edwards mother is vickie. Vickies mother is jack. Jack ae father is i think his father is jack. Jacks father is george. All right. Those years are the years when those people were 8 years old. One of the many data points we could ask them to plot a map their home and the farthest place they could go to unescorted as an unaccompanied 8yearold. He found that george could go six miles and did. He liked to go. Jack was only going a mile. That was twice as much azzi who went half a mile in 1979. To me the clincher is 2007 edward is going 300 yards maximum unescorted as an 8yearold. 300 yards. Thats a major decline, as can you see. Now, this is one family. Its a sample size of one or four depending on how you look at it. Im not making any pretenses that this is conclusive data. I am claiming, however, that this is not at all atypical of a trend that you find both in britain and in the united sta s states. Can you think of one . I would say the development of neighborhoods. The more 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 here . Wade. Just safety. Explain. The chances of edward being hit by a car is far greater than joe. Very true. Now, i want to point out, this is britain. Even in 1926 george would have been in danger of being hit by a car in america, but in britain cars were rare in 1926. His danger of being hit by a car was not high. All right . But you can see that that changed. Jack, you know, his parents are concerned, and rightly so about him getting hit by a car. I want to point out, by the way, that as a parent im not advocating anybody let their 8yearold walk sixing miles away from home unescorted. I i this thats nuts. All right . This is not an attempt to defend that, but it is a claim that perhaps this is gone a little too far because 300 yards, well, thats we practically disabled our own children when they cant go more than 300 yards. Theres safety including traffic safety, also fear of strangers or ab ducks or attacks of various kinds. Theres more, and it has to do with the geography. Herbert mentioned a geographic point. Let me offer a geographic point. This is street plan or an aerial view of a typical american subdivision of the late 20th early 21st century. I think you can see that if, for example, you lived on the culdesac on the far right and you were 8 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 oldfashioned street grid, you would have a much shorter walk. All right . And, therefore, although the point is why people walked longer distances, yes, its a longer distance here, but turns out youre going to be less likely to walk at all if you have to walk that far to get to a closeby house. Right . This is a street plan that actually makes a lot of sense from a drivers point of view because the intersections are much rarer than they are in a grid, and you know as a driver that intersections are where all the delays happen, so if you have fewer intersections, you have fewer delays, better for drivers. If you are walking, a little different. I dont want to say its all onesided. The culdesacs are kind of nice if your 8yearold friend lives on the ear side of the culdesac. If your 8yearold friend lives on another culdesac, you might be in trouble. I think this pour trays it a little more fairly. If this child walked to school they would have to take a roundabout way or trespass. Lets face it, a lot of kids trespass. I certainly did as a kid myself. With a grid maybe you wouldnt have to to walk to work. This graph reminds me. It belonged to one of these facebook groups that youll all join when you are getting nostalgic for the old days too. So this one is about Montgomery County in the old days, and some kids were remembering something they called the black path. Now, whats going on here is theyre showing in the red line here paths that did not exist on any map that nobody you got a certain amount of steps because they were a little creepy and scary. Its their lifeline for the rest of the world. Ourleyearold has made it out of the residential subdivision. Now, i hope no parent ever lets their 8yearold kid to this unescorted or to this one because if you learned anything from sts 4500 you learn to look at different social groups. From a different point of view from a driver this in ashworth, peculiar North Carolina is wonderful, but for a pedestrian, especially a young one or frail one, this is an inpenetratable barrier to mobility. I ask 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 . Not only she we talk about the Womens Movement 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 otool explicitly referenced. I think you would be sympathetic to it. Its one that we have to reckon with because 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 here we see a Google Search bar. This is a real Google Search bar that i just did a screen shot of. At americas l. O. We see auto complete kicking in. This means americas lost treasures. However, when i add a v, says i knew before the first time i tried it what would pop up. Maybe you have heard of this too. The reason im using this google example is that auto complete is pretty good at telling us about what is popular out there. This is a popular explanation. So what do you think is going to happen if we add a v . Who fields like they know the answer . Adam. Ive heard americas love affair with automobile. You got it. Americas love affair with the automobile. Sometime somebody needs to explain to me americas lover boys. I dont know what that is. Americas love affair with the automobile is probably the single most common thesis to explain the extraordinary extent to which the United States has accommodated automobiles wherever they go, including dense cities. Its a thesis with a history, and its a very significant history, and i hope time will permit me to touch on what that history is, but, first, i need to go a slightly different direction. If we look around in the media we see this thesis everywhere. Notice, in all of these headlines we see love affair. Love affair. Love affair. Where why is this so ubiquitous . Its incredible. Right . This thesis is just about everywhere. It has a history which, as you all know, google end gram say good First Step Towards uncovering. I checked this little bump here is just noise. As we move to the right, you see that it has a fairly steep takeoff beginning circa 1959, 1960, and hits a high in the 1970s. It appears to plateau there. If we add americas love affair with the car, if you added the red bar to the blue bar, i think you would see that the growth actually continues right up to the present, although not as steep as it did in the 1960s. This thesis is everywhere and its used kbi both the critics and the defense of the automobile. Americas love affair with the automobile is not a very scholarly sounding explanation. I think you can see what kind of explanation would be in a more scholarly cost, right . We are talking about vehicular societies. Were not now talking about were not talking about individuals or or even really social psychology. Were talking about a culture asha. Its anthropology here, folks. Now, when you hear the phrase americas love affair, we see those headlines, anthropology is not being deployed explicitly. Its a cultural explanation, and as a cultural explanation, its implicitly an an thropological explanation. As an anthropological explanation, as any soberologist would tell you, most people would like to have a status symbol of practical value like the car all over the world, right, so illustration. Some of you might recognize this as rush hour in beijing in the 1970s. All right . This is rush hour in beijing in the 1970s. This means that in the 1970s you might plausibly be able to say that cars are an american thing, right . Amazing that as late as 1960, 70 of all the cars in the world wrap your mind. 70 of all the cars in the world were in the United States. Right . This is totally different. 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