As you move away from mass transit you become more dependent on the automobile, so you have to spread the housing out more to accommodate the cars.
Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls. Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.
Every new development, highway, railroad, steamship line, building operation, whether it be a drainage project in old Greece or a new water system in Peru, means an added use of the automobile.
We loved cars until the '70s or so. Then they became appliances. They turned into motorized cup holders. Most of it has to do with urban sprawl. What began as pleasure ends up in necessity, as so many things do.
If we were redesigning around people instead of around automobiles, which I think the market is more or less going to do, although too slowly, than I'd be a lot cheerier.
People can't stay out of their cars. I do think we have a real problem staying out of our automobiles. We have a real dependency on them, and it may be for more than just transportation.
Not having to own a car has made me realize what a waste of time the automobile is.
To me, Los Angeles was the invention of the suburb. They figured it out and perfected it and created a city that was dependent on the automobile.
In a sense the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missing limbs, the auto-prosthetic is for a conceptually impaired body or a body impaired by the creation of a world that is no longer human in scale.
Cars are the most central thing in America, in a lot of ways. They've probably influenced the way we live more than anything else, and yet every really big problem - whether it's the environment or who dictates the international economy because of oil - is all tied to cars. Ultimately, cars are bad for civilization. I don't know if they'll end us.
The modern suburb is the product of the car, the five-day week, and the "bankers' hours" of the masses.
People don't like railroad tracks near them? We'll see how they feel when the percentage of U.S. citizens who can afford to drive a car goes way down, as it will.
Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.
