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Grid Shock

Hillary Schalit


By the year 2015, an estimated 273 million vehicles will be registered in the United States.

By Michael Mechanic


At 73, local history buff Leonard McKay is old enough to remember life in the Santa Clara Valley before World War II, when it was still one of the most fertile agricultural areas in the world. Back then, the valley's rich soil yielded bushel after bushel of prunes, apricots, pears, peaches, walnuts, tomatoes, squash and other crops. San Jose was a major canning center and an embarkation point for valley produce that was shipped by rail to East Coast destinations.

And people also got around by rail, by trolley or interurban rail. Public transit was efficient and widely used back then. Travelers could hop a quick train to Saratoga or Los Gatos. A jaunt from San Jose to Palo Alto took 22 minutes, faster than the same trip today.

But that was before the motorcar took America by storm. Before a collection of auto interests dismantled the local rail system. Before the postwar influx of veterans and their families created demand for new suburban centers. Before city planners covered the valley in pavement.

McKay estimates that 1 percent ("probably less," he notes) of the original farmland remains, the bulk of the land replaced by freeways and urban and suburban sprawl. McKay says the development was probably inevitable, but "it really destroyed the core of the cities."

The expansion that took place as soldiers returned to the scenic valley they had passed through and remembered during their tours of duty was a mixed blessing. It bootstrapped the valleys economic stability by diversifying its industries, thereby weaning businesses from dependence on crop sales and fluctuating prices. But for all the good that came from the valleys growth, its residents have paid a steep price. We have become slaves to the automobile-and unless we admit it to ourselves, our most beloved possession may drive the American dream into oblivion.

Death Becomes Us

America's ten leading causes of death for 1992 included seven diseases and health conditions-AIDS, cancer, stroke, diabetes, and heart and lung disease. Homicide and suicide also made the top ten. But one category stands alone, not simply because it kills more people under 25 than any other cause of death, nor because it kills nearly as many Americans each year as were killed in Vietnam, and not because its a major contributor to some of the health conditions on the Grim Reapers top ten list.

Automobiles are the anomaly on the death list because we tolerate the hazards they pose to human and animal life, health and quality of living. In fact, we handsomely subsidize a system that makes us auto-dependent. We do so at the expense of other modes of transportation and, to some degree, at the expense of our humanity.

"Somehow we have allowed cars-in principle, our servants-to gain the upper hand," lament Steve Nadis and James MacKenzie in their 1993 book, Car Trouble, which explores potential solutions to the problems associated with our reliance on gas-powered cars. "We have designed our cities and towns around them, often with seemingly little regard for other considerations. Large tracts of urban areas have been converted into a dense web of underpasses, overpasses, ramps and interchanges-a nightmare for pedestrians, cyclists, and even for motorists."

Houses for Cars

For many years during its development, the automobile was merely a plaything for the rich. But since Henry Ford brought the motor car within reach of the middle class, our nations infrastructure has increasingly been designed more for cars than people. And now-surprise!-our mechanical dream world is coming back to haunt us.

The auto toll on life and health is substantial. In Santa Clara County between 1984 and 1993, an average of 146 people were killed and more than 15,500 were injured each year in auto accidents, according to the California Highway Patrol. Animals certainly aren't safe either. Thousands of wild animals are killed on county roads annually, and the Santa Clara Valley Humane Society reports 1,589 dogs and 4,072 cats dead on arrival during the past year-most victims of speeding cars. "We pick up dozens of dead cats and dogs each day on the road," says an Animal Services dispatcher.

Public transportation was another casualty of car-mania. During the 1920s, the U.S. had about 45,000 miles of trolley tracks and buses used by more than 20 billion riders a year. But during the '30s and '40s, a company called National City Lines-with backing from General Motors, Firestone, Standard Oil, Phillips Petroleum, Mack Truck and others profiting from the sale of motor vehiclespurchased and then shut down more than 100 electric trolley systems in 45 U.S. cities, including lines in the Bay Area and Southern California. In the late 40s, a federal jury acquitted the collected companies of conspiracy to control transportation, and the players escaped with $5,000 each in fines.

The auto, tire and oil interests had planned to replace the disemboweled streetcars with buses. "The substitution of buses for streetcars in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s was a sign of progress," wrote former GM attorney Robert Nitschke in a letter to now-retired company Vice President John McNulty in 1988, responding to a 60 Minutes televison hit piece on the alleged conspiracy.

But "progress" often brings unforeseen problems. With local rails dismantled and affordable cars on the market, workers ultimately turned their backs on public transportation. In the years following World War II, 40 percent of the work force commuted by public transit. Now only 5 percent commutes that way, with most people driving to work alone.

A new study from Rides for Bay Area Commuters indicates that 70.5 percent of Santa Clara County commuters drive solo, though one-third live within five miles of work. Even among those living close to their jobs, nearly 68 percent drive alone. Still, these numbers have improved from five years ago, when almost 80 percent drove solo.

During postwar years, transportation and city planners, businesses, architects, and developers put nearly all their eggs in the automotive basket, adding to America's reliance on the motorcar. A suburban building boom spurred by massive roadbuilding gave birth to the long-distance commute, and car-dependent businesses became the norm. Motels, shopping malls, and drive-in movies, pharmacies, banks, restaurants, liquor stores, mail drops and even funeral homes are a few persistent symbols of the auto pop-culture born in the '50s. Drive-by shootings are the latest auto fad.

Signs of our dependence on cars are everywhere. Our very homes have been designed to nurse our auto addiction, constructed so that a motorist need not even leave the house to hop behind the wheel. "You cant even see the front doors of a lot of houses anymore-you just see a big driveway and a big garage. Its like a house for cars," complains Santa Cruz resident Jessica Denevan, who, with husband Jim, founded the bicycle advocacy group People Power in 1991.

The couple abandoned their car in 1987 and now rely on bicycles for everything, despite the demands of a 3-year-old son. "You go from the box garage in the house to the box car, driving down the street, not touching anything or being part of your environment," says Jessica, explaining the family's choice not to drive. I think we've lost a sense of belonging.

Indeed, American cities, once tailored to pedestrians' needs, have been expanded with the automobile so much in mind that its often difficult to safely or conveniently travel by any other means. Nearly half of the land in a typical city is paved (two-thirds in Los Angeles).

"We are at a point where I think most highways are built to capacity and now we have to look at transit as an integral part of our transportation system," acknowledges Rajeev Batra, head of the Transportation Division of Public Works for the city of San José. "We are a big city and, generally, congestion does cause productivity losses and air pollution, and overall it does deteriorate the quality of life a bit."

The paving of America has taken a toll, not only on the human psyche, but on local resources. Land dedicated to auto use is, in effect, a double draw on local government coffers-its removed from the tax base and it requires big bucks to maintain. In a 1988 Worldwatch paper, "Rethinking the Role of the Automobile", author Michael Renner reported that America had already paved over 2 percent of its total land area, including about 10 percent of arable land.

"It is only now beginning to dawn on us that an American city with its immense freeway and parking infrastructure resembles not so much a city of the 21st century as a city which has suffered saturation bombing," wrote author Wolfgang Zuckerman in his 1991 book, End of the Road. "And we are only now begining to realize that neither the typical suburb, nor the urban sprawl, nor the freeway city is a true assembly of people."

To make things more frustrating, our collective enthusiasm for road-building has brought us to a point where challenging the status quo seems impossible or self-defeating. Misguided public policies have made driving a virtual necessity. "You cannot get people out of cars because they need them to meet their basic needs because of the way weve built our cities," says James MacKenzie, a senior associate at World Resources Institute in Washington.

The Big Playback

Anyone who commutes by car has an inkling of how fast our love for the automobile is catching up with us. In the late 1980s, automobile congestion was already being cited as among the worst problems in the Bay Area. A recent study by the Texas Transportation Institute estimates that auto congestion costs California residents and businesses $12.4 billion each year in lost productivity. The study forecasts annual losses of up to $20 billion in the future.

Despite continued highway expansion and massive strides by regulators and auto designers since the 1970s in reducing automobile emissions, the auto-related problems of congestion and air and water pollution have only worsened. The reason? More cars on the road, and fewer passengers.

Astute observers have pointed out that with the enormous number of privately owned vehicles in the U.S., we could put every American man, woman and child in one and nobody would have to ride in the back seat.

The number of motor vehicles in the U.S. has more than doubled over the past three decades, to nearly 189.5 million vehicles in 1993, according to American Automobile Manufacturers Association statistics. In that year alone, 1.4 million new passenger cars and trucks hit California highways, and American drivers logged in an estimated 2.3 trillion miles, up from the previous year and nearly three times the 1963 figure.

Got room in your back yard for 2 million tons of rubber? Thats the amount used to make cars and tires in 1992. How about 950,000 tons of lead, 3.4 million tons of scrap iron or 11 million tons of steel? That's just one year's worth of a few auto-making materials.

More than 240 million cars and trucks have been scrapped in the U.S. since 1957, and using the AAMA's figure that 76 percent of the average auto is recycled, it's easy to calculate that the equivalent of 57.5 million motor vehicles have been strewn in junkyards and hazardous waste dumps around the country since '57.

The Conservation Law Foundation reports that American tire dumps hold 2 to 3 billion scrapped tires. What's more, the amount of oil dumped improperly by home mechanics in the U.S. each year is the equivalent of 11 Exxon Valdez spills.

Driving is a messy business.

A Cry of Rebellion

The clock towers over San Francisco's Justin Herman Plaza strike five, chiming in the end of the work week as workers in business attire emerge from their office suites. They walk through the plaza paying scant attention to a group of baggy-clothed teens practicing skateboard tricks along a low concrete wall and the bicyclists who trickle into the plaza in twos and threes.

But before long, the cyclists have become too numerous to ignore. The growing crowd comprises every conceivable ilk: athletic types on expensive mountain bikes, old hippies on banana seats with baskets, a skinhead on a homemade three-wheeler, kids on low-riders, a gaggle of bike messengers passing a pipe, women in red lipstick and faux-cheetah on antique three-speeds, men in kilts, babies riding in backpacks. They schmooze and tell war stories, discuss politics, distribute fliers and circulate petitions-and they wait.

By quarter to six, the crowd of free-wheelers has grown to more than 500, plus a couple TV camera crews. Excitement ripples through the pack. A few isolated war whoops crescendo into a massive cry. Hundreds of handlebar bells and squeeze-horns join the chorus. And they're off! In an instant, these individuals become a single organism, a liberating force against the dark dominion of the automobile.

There are no leaders. No rules. No planned route. Anarchy. For the next 90 minutes, the streets of San Francisco will be theirs, and neither car, nor truck, nor cop is going to tell them otherwise.

San Francisco resident Chris Carlsson hadnt planned on starting a political movement in the fall of 1992, but the 35-year-old graphic artist and bicycle commuter was sick of being a solitary target. His daily trips to and from work involved a frightening tangle of carelessly opened car doors, rush-hour delivery trucks, swerving taxicabs, and impatient, overzealous motorists from whom a small tap can mean a broken neck.

Carlsson's idea was simply to unite the city's scattered bike commuters for a once-a-month ride home. He posted fliers and pitched the event-which he called "commute clot"-to passing bicyclists. The first ride was a modest success, attracting about 50 riders.

From that apolitical seed, the anarchic monthly ride now known as "Critical Mass" (a moniker borrowed from bicycle cult film Return of the Scorcher) has spread to Santa Cruz, Berkeley, San Luis Obispo, Portland, Eugene, Sacramento, Boston, New York, Montreal and even Poznan, Poland. It has become a rallying event for bicycle activists looking to exert influence on transportation policy.

Charles Higgins, founder and director of Bicycle Transportation Center, a San Francisco bike advocacy group, says public involvement in the city's transportation planning process has increased dramatically because of the ride. "Critical Mass is the most powerful public relations marketing experiment that's come along in the bike world in 100 years," he says. "It sends the very important message to people that the bicycle has a place on the road."

The Price of Freedom

Most people would think it too expensive to take a cab to work, but driving solo is far more expensive than most people realize. It seems cheap because motorists pay only a fraction of their true cost to society. Drivers may get mad as hell when slapped with a parking ticket, but really they're just beginning to cover what they cost their own localities.

So how much does it really cost to operate a car? The East Coast-based Conservation Law Foundation addressed this question in a study of drivers in Boston and Portland, Maine. The driver's costs included auto purchase, parts and maintenance, depreciation, registration, title and licensing fees, motor vehicle taxes, insurance, paid parking, accidents (health costs and lost wages), road tolls, and gas and oil.

"Altogether, putting aside the value of the time we waste sitting in traffic, motorists themselves pay 40-64 cents for each mile they drive alone," states the May 1994 report, titled "Road Kill."

Sound expensive? Have a seat. The foundation went further, taking into account huge investments of tax revenues by federal, state and local governments. It considered investment in transportation infrastructure, traffic-related police, fire and court costs, energy subsidies, tax breaks to businesses for "free" parking provided to employees, health costs and economic losses related to air pollution, effects of noise and sprawl on housing values, and economic impacts of importing foreign oil. The cost verdict? Between 79 and 94 cents per mile for a solo driver in the Boston area.

In an October 1993 report by the National Resources Defense Council, authors Peter Miller and John Moffet used some of the same criteria and calculated a national average of 38-52 cents per mile.

Miller and Moffet conclude that automobile use costs Americans nearly $1.2 trillion each year-about $4,000 per man, woman and child. In contrast, they conclude, we are paying about $31 billion, or $100 per person, for public transit. The authors estimate that costs of driving not covered by drivers themselves total between $380 and $660 billion annually, "equivalent to an incremental cost of $3.70 to $6.50 per gallon of gasoline."

Per-mile costs for bus and rail travel were in a similar range, but the big difference is that mass transit is subsidized directly by government, while society at large pays for driving through productivity losses, trade impacts, accidents, pollution and health costs. "The subsidies that transit receives are easily scrutinized, while the subsidies that automobiles receive are hidden, not easily quantified, and widely dispersed," Miller and Moffet conclude. Public transit also becomes much cheaper when widely utilized.

While neither study focused on the relative benefits of automobiles, they both left many difficult-to-quantify impacts of motor vehicles out of the equation. It's hard to price deterioration in quality of life due to sprawl, loss of agricultural land and open space, water pollution from oil spills, runoff and leaking underground tanks, destruction of the protective ozone layer by CFCs from auto air conditioners, the contribution of cars to global warning, plus blight and health hazards posed by massive mining operations, smoking factories and refineries, and millions of trashed tires and auto bodies scattered from here to Detroit.

Wheels Shall Overcome

As the automobile-freedom myth continues to clash more and more with reality, some commuters are waking up to the realization that a faster life doesn't necessarily mean a better one. The veneer protecting Americas much-hyped love affair with the automobile is showing signs of fatigue, and some government officials are looking for solutions.

So far, the biggest success has been the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, passed by Congress in 1991. The act provides money for mass transit and gives state and local governments more flexibility in solving transportation problems as they see fit, allowing them to use federal highway funds for highway beautification, bicycle and pedestrian projects, mitigation of auto-related environmental problems and damage to historic sites.

On the local level, its up to cities and counties to discourage driving while making other choices more attractive. County Measure A, passed in 1984, provided money for construction and improvements to Highways 101, 85 and 237, including the addition of carpool lanes. Though the expanded roads-credited by Caltrans for a 32 percent decrease in congestion over the past year-make driving more attractive, at least they give carpooling a boost. A second Measure A-passed in 1992 but tied up in court until at least November-provides $3.5 billion over 20 years, mostly for rail improvements.

Some communities, such as Palo Alto and Sunnyvale, have devoted considerable resources to bicycles and pedestrians. San Jose has a less enviable record. Of $122.5 million slated in the city's public works budget for traffic-related construction and maintenance over the next five years, only about $3 million is dedicated to bike and pedestrian facilities (though some additional bike projects are funded through the Parks budget).

"The focus has been on automobiles as the primary source of transportation," admits Hans Larsen, a senior civil engineer for the city, but that is being rethought as a policy standpoint.

The San Jose City Council passed a bicycle master plan a few years back, identifying 210 miles of roadways as future bike routes or bike lanes. Of course, as any rider knows, a bike route is merely a street posted with a green sign. And as for the striped bike lanes, they've been dubbed "car-door lanes" by one local bike activist-a reference to the hazards riders face when motorists abruptly open the doors of their parked vehicles.

But San Jose also is working on several coveted bike paths, which separate riders and walkers from traffic. The Los Gatos Creek Trail runs from the Lexington Reservoir through downtown Los Gatos, Campbell and Willow Glen, and will eventually reach downtown San Jose.

The Guadalupe Corridor is also slated for bike paths, and Larsen says the city has become active recently in securing funding for alternatives through ISTEA and Bay Area Clean Air Grants. "There has been a very directed effort to develop this as a serious form of transportation," he says.

Only radical environmentalists would publicly suggest we give up cars completely, but the emerging consensus is that we simply have to use them less. But many businesses are resistant, and with most locals still driving alone to work, its going to be a long haul. Even with increased carpooling, congestion will be a growing problem here as the population grows.

The Bay Area Air Quality Management District requires Santa Clara County businesses with more than 100 employees to have "commute alternative programs," but business interests say the mandate is useless without proper transportation options available-efficient transit, carpool lanes, and bike- and pedestrian-friendly infrastructure. "You can beg employees to get out of their cars, but its not going to be effective unless there are other options," says Carl Guardino, vice president of the Santa Clara Valley Manufacturing Group and a key supporter of both Measures A.

Until recently, the solution to congestion seemed simple: Build more roads. But that "solution" has clearly backfired. New roads bring new drivers. They also bring new construction and maintenance costs, and we dont have the cash. Author Wolfgang Zuckerman suggests planners get tough on motorists by "creating obstructions instead of removing them."

But planners in most American cities still give little consideration to auto alternatives. "I don't think weve made a whole lot of progress yet," says James MacKenzie of the World Resources Institute. "The vast majority of new development is what I would call traditional sprawl, where people are locked into the use of cars."

Several authors suggest that alternatives would be cheaper and more popular if drivers felt the full cost of driving at the pump. As it stands, gas taxes and prices in the U.S. are among the lowest in the world, and its probably no coincidence that our nation-with less than 5 percent of the worlds population-has 31 percent of the worlds motor vehicles.

"You've got to send people the right signals," MacKenzie says. "If the price of fuel started to rise, people would drive less. The more they pay, the fewer miles people drive per year, but none of that happens when gas is a buck and a quarter."

In fact, if the federal government were to enact a gasoline tax of $1.50 per gallon, it would generate more than enough revenue to balance the federal budget.

About 90 percent of workers receive free parking from employers, and this, too, is a big incentive to drive. UCLA Urban Planning Professor Don Shoup has shown that when businesses give employees extra money in lieu of "free" parking, and instead make the employees pay for parking, as many as 89 percent of the employees will voluntarily switch to carpooling or other modes of transportation.

To help reduce congestion, MacKenzie also suggests congestion pricing, where drivers are charged to use roads at rush hours, encouraging them to shift to off-peak times. As far as city design, he suggests redevelopment of unattractive urban areas with mixed zoning of residences, shops and businesses to reduce reliance on cars for simple errands.

But clearly the biggest problem, says MacKenzie, is growth. "I'm not terribly optimistic, absent some major forces to change the way we do development," he says. "There's going to be another 120 million people driving by 2050, and you just can't make that problem go away with nice planning."

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