car-free Europe

David Jennings [MSAI] djenning at ai.uga.edu
Tue Sep 21 06:23:45 PDT 1999


I'm not sure how this falls, but I wonder if the example of Atlanta GA could be instructive. Atlanta is notorious for its absymal air quality, due to a combination of geography and automotive congestion. The latter is due primarily to white flight -- young suburbanites pursuing the american dream of working in a city but living at a far remove from black and brown people. As a result, most work for people without college degrees will be found in the low-paying service sector in the exurban hamlets that ring the city -- meaning long commutes from the city outward.

So a few years ago the EPA started leaning on the state of GA to improve its air quality standards. How does it go about doing this? As fish are made to swim and fowl are made to fly, so Georgia politicians are made to blame the victim: mandatory emissions inspections for all cars. To see the gist of this, consider which car is more likely to pass an emissions test: a 98 Lexus, or a 79 Lincoln.

I think that we can demonize "The Car" all we please, but in the US anyway we cannot divorce our perceptions of automotive travel (pollution, gridlock, highway deaths, etc etc) from the social conditions that make driving what it is for most people most of the time. Cars are marvelous things (even Ralph Nader has said as much), particularly for working class people, but the tyranny of the car that many people feel is not completely illusory. However, the 'tyranny' is not really that of some popular consumer product, but rather that of a fragmented, racist, classist society. The danger is that in addressing the problem of "The Car", we will simply reinforce the social conditions that make the situation objectionable in the first place. This is the direction that Metro Atlanta is headed now -- gentrification of the highways.

-d



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