AH Challenge: Preempt the rise of car-dependent urbanism

[Hendryk]

One cannot underestimate the massive societal changes induced by the decision to embrace car-dependent urbanism in the middle decades of the 20th century. In a short time it fundamentally transformed cities throughout the world. That disruption was most pronounced in the US and Canada but impacted many other countries as well. The paradigm is only now shifting back, in fits and starts, to a more balanced approach to personal mobility, but the legacy of car dependency will take a long time to overcome.

Although the process took off in a big way after WW2, the idea of centering urban life around the car was developed in the 1920s and 1930s, with thought experiments by architects and urbanists such as Le Corbusier's infamous Plan Voisin and Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City. But what kind of POD would be necessary to prevent their implementation? Would something as massive as removing WW2 be necessary, or could it be achieved with a smaller POD? Was the rise of informally segregated detached-housing suburbs an inevitable trend in the US? I'd like to know what you folks think.

Atlanta, before and after.

 

[OwenM]

The easiest thing in most countries is probably to introduce a Japanese style proof of parking law early on. I don't think that's ridiculous to happen if someone happens to push - the default assumption to begin with was that cars should be parked off street (as carts and carriages usually were), and it would probably help keep that the case.
But I'm not sure how easy it is for it to become the norm internationally - and it is only one element in North America (and for that matter Australia/New Zealand) in particular.

 

[Callan]

I think a way to not avert this but massively blunt this is simply no World War II. All the trends we're talking about were present before the conflict but the WWII turbocharged them. You have massive improvements to auto technology and road tech, European cities rebuilt to be much more favourable to cars and a postwar economic boom in the states that all went in the direction of cars; plus it left the pre-existing railways systems of both America and Europe in a shambles. Without the war a lot of this stuff probably still happens, but it happens much slower, the zeitgeist doesn't flip overnight, and the forces opposing it are in a much better state to respond to it.

 

[Hendryk]

The easiest thing in most countries is probably to introduce a Japanese style proof of parking law early on. I don't think that's ridiculous to happen if someone happens to push - the default assumption to begin with was that cars should be parked off street (as carts and carriages usually were), and it would probably help keep that the case.

I could see this being implemented as a form of hidden classism--it assumes that in order to own a car, you can afford a private garage.

Perhaps another thing that would help is less restrictive zoning laws, so that mixed-use neighborhoods remain the norm, instead of the kind of endless residential sprawl where something as simple as buying milk requires a car trip.

But so many factors came together to create car-dependent urbanism, I'm not sure where to introduce a critical divergence. There has to be a way short of massively altering world history by preempting WW2.

 

[Indicus]

The need for new housing that came up post-WWII made stuff like Levittowns in the US and Canada inevitable, and that necessitates a car-based urbanism which was already regarded as "the way of the future" thanks to stuff like the 1939 World Fair's iconic Futurama. With massive swathes of Europe needing to be reconstructed in the wake of World War II, it was also inevitable that would cross over. A POD in which WWII still happens is frankly quite hard to think of. Here's an idea - an earlier oil embargo, perhaps over a Suez Crisis gone quite bad. However, the US was energy-independent in this era, and so I suspect it wouldn't do much more than stem this existing trend.

 

[Talwar]

I reckon this is not easy. Cars offer an element of self-reliance and individual choice that people will jump on, given the chance.

So I reckon it's not a single thing but a lot of little nudges over time, with differing effectiveness in different places. But:

-Guys like Ford aren't as fast to innovate mass production and there make them more affordable/available, so it takes longer for cars to embed themselves in our culture.

-At the state/province level, early road legislation - assigning sole responsibility for car/horse incidents to cars - lasts longer, perhaps fueled by point one if there are fewer cars to "socialize" horse operators as well as perhaps a few high-profile accidents

-At the city level, a more effective process to remove mounds of horse shit from the roads. Maybe this is a more robust municipal service, maybe this is a pivot from prison to community service for certain offenders. So there's less enthusiasm in these areas for getting rid of horses in place of non-shit-making cars.

 

[Hendryk]

-At the city level, a more effective process to remove mounds of horse shit from the roads. Maybe this is a more robust municipal service, maybe this is a pivot from prison to community service for certain offenders. So there's less enthusiasm in these areas for getting rid of horses in place of non-shit-making cars.

It's worth noting though, that by the time private car ownership took off, modern public transit was already well-developed. "Streetcar suburbs" were a feature of early 20th-century North American cities, and those were electric-powered. Not only did they get rid of manure, they also didn't have the noise and pollution issues of petrol-powered cars.

 

[Wendell]

It's worth noting though, that by the time private car ownership took off, modern public transit was already well-developed. "Streetcar suburbs" were a feature of early 20th-century North American cities, and those were electric-powered. Not only did they get rid of manure, they also didn't have the noise and pollution issues of petrol-powered cars.

But they were useless in bad weather with power outages and downed power lines.

 

[Hendryk]

But they were useless in bad weather with power outages and downed power lines.

I don't think it's particularly relevant to apply 21st century standards of reliability to turn-of-the-20th century transit. No mode of transportation at the time met them--horses got sick or lame, internal combustion engines broke down, and in any case good luck driving in a rainstorm bad enough to down power lines in an open-top car. In relative terms, tramways were probably the most reliable available option, short of living in a major metropolis with a newfangled subway.

 

[Wendell]

I don't think it's particularly relevant to apply 21st century standards of reliability to turn-of-the-20th century transit. No mode of transportation at the time met them--horses got sick or lame, internal combustion engines broke down, and in any case good luck driving in a rainstorm bad enough to down power lines in an open-top car. In relative terms, tramways were probably the most reliable available option, short of living in a major metropolis with a newfangled subway.

...Because utility poles and wires a century ago had twenty-first century standards of safety, reliability, insulation, and quality.

 

[Hendryk]

...Because utility poles and wires a century ago had twenty-first century standards of safety, reliability, insulation, and quality.

No, but that isn't what I said, and I still don't get why you apply a different standard to tramways compared to other contemporary modes of transportation.

 

[theflyingmgoose]

The world ends on December 17, 1888.

On a more serious note, I think that if FLW's Broadacre model was more heavily adopted instead of the current suburban model the US would be a lot less car dependent.

 

[Wendell]

No, but that isn't what I said, and I still don't get why you apply a different standard to tramways compared to other contemporary modes of transportation.

I don't think that I am. I think that you have not done enough to explain how or why this inhibits car culture, particularly in North America.

 

[Roger II]

I think we have to separate out US car culture from euro/elsewhere car culture. For the US I think the key points are

1) the Model T taking off in the 20s, creating a much longer lag between when car ownership starts becoming widespread and the Oil Embargo/first real shock to the oil supply and

2) urban highway construction.

The first point matters just because it meant that when planners and government agencies tried to switch away from auto dependency there was a lot more entrenched path-dependent decisions pressure to keep car culture going(car ownership, sprawly legacy development, weak or nonexistent urban transit, etc). So probably just narrowing that time gap would help. The second matters because it 1) destroyed a lot of legacy urban fabric that was less car-dependent, 2) isolated the areas that didn't get destroyed into less viable and more cut-off-from-the-core islands, 3) accelerated the collapse of urban cores in a way that was worse in the US than in other countries, and 4) pushed more suburban commuters onto highways and not transit and entrenched more and more distant suburbs that weren't tied to core towns the way streetcar or railway suburbs were. I don't think you avoid a highway construction program postwar totally under most circumstances, but interstates largely avoiding urban cores and tending to ring roads like is more common elsewhere seems like it would make a big difference.

 

[Roger II]

The need for new housing that came up post-WWII made stuff like Levittowns in the US and Canada inevitable, and that necessitates a car-based urbanism which was already regarded as "the way of the future" thanks to stuff like the 1939 World Fair's iconic Futurama. With massive swathes of Europe needing to be reconstructed in the wake of World War II, it was also inevitable that would cross over. A POD in which WWII still happens is frankly quite hard to think of. Here's an idea - an earlier oil embargo, perhaps over a Suez Crisis gone quite bad. However, the US was energy-independent in this era, and so I suspect it wouldn't do much more than stem this existing trend.

Yea, I think it's very hard to not have widespread car usage in any sort of industrial society barring a very specific kind of economic planning that nobody, soviets included, contemplated. What is a lot easier is to have something more like Scandinavian/Dutch levels of car ownership and attitudes thereof-it's a valuable middle-class convenience but it's not an effective requirement for participating in public life and undertaking a significant % of your day to day trips by transit, foot, or bike is normal and accepted even if you do own a car.

 

[Roger II]

Side note on streetcars: They were always mostly screwed with some exceptions once cars became widespread because at that point they were at the mercy of cars but couldn't weave around like a bus. IIRC pretty much all the places with widespread useful streetcars that survived the depression and WWII either converted them to subway-surface lines (Philly, euro stadtbahn systems), or gave them significant dedicated ROW with signal control (Toronto, modern euro tramways, the Edmonton LRT system). The better trajectory for keeping transit strong in streetcar cities is IMO more subway-surface lines and el buildouts (or retention, in the case of the Guildford Avenue El in Baltimore). That said, there's no reason that you couldn't work out a TL where part of the survival of more streetcar systems is that they get converted to modern tramways and LRT systems where appropriate and where higher capacity is necessary.

 

[Roger II]

-At the city level, a more effective process to remove mounds of horse shit from the roads. Maybe this is a more robust municipal service, maybe this is a pivot from prison to community service for certain offenders. So there's less enthusiasm in these areas for getting rid of horses in place of non-shit-making cars.

Meant to point this out but this was underway well before widespread car ownership; electric streetcars became popular as a replacement for horse-drawn omnibuses and streetcars for precisely this reason. I do think you're onto something about legal regimes shifting to be much more favorable to automobiles in the 20s; to this we can add I think US courts permitting Euclidean zoning and covenants banning multi-family housing construction since without those constraints the tendency will be towards core densification as land values go up.

 

[Charles EP M.]

I think we have to separate out US car culture from euro/elsewhere car culture.

Though I think changing US car culture will have a knock-on effect due to America's cultural power. Lot of films where cars are cool and everyone, especially cool teens, has them

 

[Roger II]

Though I think changing US car culture will have a knock-on effect due to America's cultural power. Lot of films where cars are cool and everyone, especially cool teens, has them

Yea, it's interesting to imagine a universe where a car is culturally shown as more of a Specific Life Stage Thing.

 

[Hendryk]

Though I think changing US car culture will have a knock-on effect due to America's cultural power. Lot of films where cars are cool and everyone, especially cool teens, has them

There's the related fact that, in the middle decades of the 20th century, Western European political decision makers wanted to do things "the American way", and if that meant setting up urban freeways, that was seen as the price of progress. For example, Louis Pradel, long-serving mayor of Lyon, decided to have a freeway run right into the city center because that's how the Americans do it.

Nothing like a freeway interchange to embellish a boring old medieval city center.