Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take it Back

by Jane Holtz Kay. Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1997. Hardback, 418 pages, $27.50.

Asphalt Nation is a powerful book—intense, eye-opening, depressing, scary. Very simply, the book is a searing indictment of the automobile. Page after page explains how automobiles are killing and maiming us, inflicting untold damage on our environment, destroying family interaction, robbing our economies through lost productivity, and driving us (figuratively) down a one-way street of no return. Automobiles, Jane Holtz Kay explains, have been the primary agents of change in our built environment—from the dissecting of inner-city neighborhoods to the sprawling suburban subdivisions that define America’s post-World War II housing industry. 

Kay, a Boston-based journalist and the architecture and planning critic for The Nation, has done exhaustive research tracing the history of the automobile and its impact on us. We are told, for example, that automobiles in the U.S. are not only consuming more than a third of our energy, but also spewing out two-thirds of our carbon dioxide emissions, a quarter of our CFCs, more than 50% of our methane, 40% of our nitrogen oxides, and most of our carbon monoxide. We are told that the amount of hydrocarbon pollution which resulted from the Exxon Valdez oil spill is almost trivial compared with the 240 million gallons we introduce into the environment each year from illegal dumping of used motor oil and leaks from underground storage tanks at our gas stations. We are told that 54 million Americans live in areas that fail to meet federal air quality standards. We are told that a suburban adolescent male is more likely to be killed in an automobile accident than his urban counterpart by a gunshot.

Kay addresses the issue of subsidy received by the automobile and associated industries, pointing out the inequity between private automobile and mass transit subsidies. She claims that a poor Roxbury, Massachusetts resident taking public transit to work pays 80% of the cost of her transportation, while a rush-hour commuter pays only 20%. She notes, ironically, that “the freeway is as much an oxymoron as the expressway at rush hour.” A section of the book on the history of the automobile traces its role in bringing on the Great Depression, describes how automobile interests systematically bought and dismantled more than 100 streetcar systems in 45 cities, explains how the FHA and VA mortgage programs fueled urban exodus and suburban sprawl, and describes the irrevocable impact of our interstate highway system on life in America.

Indeed, Asphalt Nation is a numbing book, but it also looks beyond the nefarious impacts of the auto, addressing what we can do to turn things around. Kay examines some of the bright spots, providing hope that we can begin to shift past trends: Portland, Oregon’s urban growth boundary; the pedestrian-friendly New Urbanist movement; new light-rail systems being built in a handful of cities today; and recognition of non-automobile-based transportation in the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA—the nation’s transportation funding law, which is currently up for renewal). We have a long way to go in reducing the impact and prominence of the automobile, but if more people read Kay’s book, our chances of finding an exit at the end of the tunnel will be just a little greater.

Incidentally, I write this aboard an Amtrack train en route from Brattleboro, Vermont to Washington, D.C.—my second such trip in the past month-and-a-half. Along with getting me away from the telephone, the train provides a superb opportunity to gain a new perspective on the urban core through which it travels.

—A.W.