When California charged motorists ten cents more a gallon for cleaner gas, the complaints were few. If that ten cents went to mass transit, it would do more good. "The principle is simple: an increase in the gas tax is not an increase in taxes but in the fee for using the highways," writes John E. Hirten, executive director of RIDES for Bay Area commuters in San Francisco, put it aptly. "Freeways are not free."


Jane Holtz Kay, an author, journalist and architecture critic for The Nation, has written widely on the built and natural environment. Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America, and How We Can Take It Back. New York: Crown, 1997. p. 346-47

We need to make [cost of car use] calculations, to develop awareness. We need to change our mindset and reset the cash register. Remember the quote "We ‘invest’ in highways. We ‘invest’ in airports. But we ‘subsidize’ trains"? More than simply remember, we should alter it. Officials attack rail and other public transportation for 'losing money,' when, in fact, these civic necessities no more lose money than schools and police. Never should we accept the phrase 'money-losing public transportation' without considering the costs of sprawl, of pollution, of congestion, of commuting - of the money-losing car. We know what should be done (for mass transit need mass), but how to do it is more difficult.


Jane Holtz Kay, an author, journalist and architecture critic for The Nation, has written widely on the built and natural environment. Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America, and How We Can Take It Back. New York: Crown, 1997. p. 346-47

While cheap U.S. gas encourages driving, in Europe, Canada and Australia motorists pay $2 to $4 in taxes per gallon, restraining driving and boosting the health of cities and economic well-being. Combine true pricing with good transit and you lessen car dependency.


Jane Holtz Kay, an author, journalist and architecture critic for The Nation, has written widely on the built and natural environment. Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America, and How We Can Take It Back. New York: Crown, 1997. p. 346-47

We must, also, examine the world around us and think through our lives and landscape. We must probe why we put the pedal to the metal in our two- and three-car households to get from our marooned homes to our stranded offices. We must question why we travel at all, why we run – or rather drive – in circles. One doesn’t have to adopt a Luddite mentality or the “voluntary simplicity” of environmental purists to consider our restless lives and to wonder what accounts for America’s belief scheme based on hypermobility. It is time to question the dream of mobility that has set us on an odyssey to nowhere. Where is it written that dwellers in the next century will find more contentment in an asphalt nation than in 'a greened and pleasant land'?


Jane Holtz Kay, an author, journalist and architecture critic for The Nation, has written widely on the built and natural environment. Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America, and How We Can Take It Back. New York: Crown, 1997. p. 357

"Why don’t the Amish use cars?" asked a tourist brochure from western Pennsylvania. "The Amish believe that cars pull people apart, and that a car distorts its owner’s sense of self-importance in a world where humility is a necessary virtue. Besides, they haven’t adopted a belief that faster is automatically better. The Amish don’t believe that the internal combustion engine is inherently evil. Their primary aversion to cars is their belief that cars pull families apart".


Jane Holtz Kay, an author, journalist and architecture critic for The Nation, has written widely on the built and natural environment. Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America, and How We Can Take It Back. New York: Crown, 1997. p. 31, 32

Denied the right or place of assembly in a car-filled landscape, shunted from car-dominated privatized spaces, citizens allow political life to wither. The call to community formed by an intimacy with one’s surroundings and neighbors dwindles, and civic values fade.


Jane Holtz Kay, an author, journalist and architecture critic for The Nation, has written widely on the built and natural environment. Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America, and How We Can Take It Back. New York: Crown, 1997. p. 31

What people don’t want, [planner Anton] Nelessen affirms, are places that look like strip malls. They don’t want concrete islands or wide streets. What they do want are older places, the shaded sidewalks, houses with detail, Main Streets with life and texture. They want the amenities of car-free architecture on the small scale. This is what altering zoning to allow a new kind of land use can allow.


Jane Holtz Kay, an author, journalist and architecture critic for The Nation, has written widely on the built and natural environment. Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America, and How We Can Take It Back. New York: Crown, 1997. p. 298

Given the anonymity of tinted glass windows, isolated highways, and sidewalks emptied by a driving population, the car culture sets the stage for antisocial behavior.


Jane Holtz Kay, an author, journalist and architecture critic for The Nation, has written widely on the built and natural environment. Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America, and How We Can Take It Back. New York: Crown, 1997. p. 18

Distance is dollars. Congestion is cost. And, as the Europeans and Japanese know, walking, biking, and public transit lower costs. The urban axiom holds that the more public transit riders, the less the cost, and the more drivers, the higher. Talk about losing money. Public transportation gets rapped for low profits at best; automobile subsidies are ignored. A one-mile trip for a carload of rail passengers equals six to ten miles avoided by car. Over any given distance, the automobile expends more in terms of energy, amount of lane capacity, and capital. And that’s not calculating the environmental or land use exactions. The fact that rail transit is fixed means that it stabilizes the land, gives some permanence to place, defines how to locate buildings and services, and creates compact, less costly living. Its stability is at least as much a plus as the automobile’s vaunted flexibility.


Jane Holtz Kay, an author, journalist and architecture critic for The Nation, has written widely on the built and natural environment. Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America, and How We Can Take It Back. New York: Crown, 1997. p. 135-36

By paying a truthful $5 a gallon, plus three to five times what the United States pays in visible car-based fees, the Japanese and Europeans have an awareness of costs. That consciousness makes them decrease their driving and curbs cars in cities. It encourages a more compact land use policy and hence promotes four to eight times as much public transport. The reverse obviously holds: Americans pay less for gas and little for tolls and user fees – and this freewheeling policy encourages them to use almost five times as much gas per capita as residents of European cities and ten times as much as those in typical Asian ones; to drive infinitely more, undercut mass transit, build more roads, buy more costly cars, pay more in personal and social fees, and spend more for maintenance.


Jane Holtz Kay, an author, journalist and architecture critic for The Nation, has written widely on the built and natural environment. Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America, and How We Can Take It Back. New York: Crown, 1997. p. 129

While critics target 'subsidized' rail and paste the prefix 'money losing' on mass transit, we rarely consider the deficit-breeding, subsidized automobile.


Jane Holtz Kay, an author, journalist and architecture critic for The Nation, has written widely on the built and natural environment. Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America, and How We Can Take It Back. New York: Crown, 1997. p. 118