A New Look at the Left Wing

Can Americans’ Car Dependence Be Changed?

The American relationship to cars is a fascinating and complex web of economic, political, social, and psychological factors that combine to shape the identity of our nation, not to mention fuel multi-billion dollar industries. But just where did we get all our notions about cars, from “station wagons are the middle-class mommy staple” to “I need a car to maintain my independence”? In their book Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives, Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez examine every aspect of our relationships to and with automobiles, and how we can change them in the face of diminishing fossil fuels, increasing traffic, and ever-rising costs.

Catherine Lutz kindly agreed to answer our questions about the book.

Catherine Lutz seems like a pretty cool anthropologist. I got the chance to read a bit of her book Homefront (winner of the 2002 Anthony Leeds Prize in urban anthropology) while working at the Rutgers bookstore. I’ve always been less than enthusiastic about cars and car culture, fueled somewhat by the fact that I still don’t have a driver’s license. The interview really makes me want to pick up the book.

Earlier this month, both Harvard economist Edward Glaeser and Next American City’s very own Yonah Freemark wrote about the anti-urban bias embedded in the way that the federal government dispenses transportation money.Glaeser brings up one particularly horrifying statistic: that a federally-funded “highway passing through a central city reduces its population by about 18 percent,” and explains how federally-funded roads, subsidized homeownership and the peculiarities of our school system have made urban America less attractive over the decades, and how the government could help right that wrong.

Yonah, on the other hand, points out how state DOTs have far too much power in allocating funds, and a tendency to do so in short-sighted ways. Also, he points out, our leaders in Washington kow-tow to the powerful AASHTO (American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials) lobby when working on reauthorizing the transportation spending bill, and that has the obvious result of maintaining the status quo.

Since then, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood announced a “sea change” in the US DOT’s transportation spending. As he put it on his blog: “This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized. We are integrating the needs of bicyclists in federally-funded road projects. We are discouraging transportation investments that negatively affect cyclists and pedestrians.”

What, exactly, this means has been the subject of a bit of debate.