4 ms·

The Social Ideology of the Motorcar (1973)

26 points by nvr219 8y ago

opportune 8y ago
I like the article but this bothered me: "Everyone was going to depend for their daily needs on a commodity that a single industry held as a monopoly." Every "single industry" has a monopoly on that industry... it's a tautology.
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  Not really. In this case the commodity is transportation. What are modes of transportation? Walking, bikes, trains, buses, and personal automobiles (among some others). In New York City the automobile industry doesn't have a monopoly on daily transportation needs, millions of people take the subway every day. In Amsterdam transportation needs are partly met by people who ride their bikes a total of 2 million passenger-kilometers on an average day. Similarly, walking is a bigger share of daily travel needs in pedestrian friendly cities than it is in many automobile focused cities. That is an important point, especially in the 20th century, because the common nature of the automobile naturally leads all automakers towards sharing common cause on certain big issues (like road building and use; parking availability and cost; petroleum production, use, and taxation; land use; and so on), many of which differ strongly from the desires tied to other ways of meeting transportation needs or of the public at large. "Monopoly" is the wrong term, but oligopoly is accurate, and equally concerning.
schoen 8y ago
There's lots of interesting stuff there, and ideas that have become familiar to people who don't necessarily share the author's overall prescriptions (some related views were expressed in English in The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, 12 years earlier). There was one claim here that confused me: > Unlike the horse rider, the wagon driver, or the cyclist, the motorist was going to depend for the fuel supply, as well as for the smallest kind of repair, on dealers and specialists in engines, lubrication, and ignition, and on the interchangeability of parts. Unlike all previous owners of a means of locomotion, the motorist’s relationship to his or her vehicle was to be that of user and consumer-and not owner and master. This vehicle, in other words, would oblige the owner to consume and use a host of commercial services and industrial products that could only be provided by some third party. I wonder if this was different in France, but in the U.S. quite a lot of car owners have prided themselves on their ability to maintain and repair their own cars (which has certainly become more difficult over time in a host of intentional and unintentional ways). It's hard for me to think of American car owners of earlier decades too easily agreeing that they were "user and consumer-and not owner and master" of a car. Also, I thought that there was a fairly considerable period of time in which bicycle mechanics were commonly the same people as automobile and motorcycle mechanics. (In fact, there was a brief period of time in which airplane mechanics were the same people as bicycle mechanics!) They used related parts which were sometimes manufactured by the same firms and sometimes worked on the same principles. Even today, the Schraeder valve is used on both automobile tires and (many) bicycle tires, and cyclists can still fill their tires at gas stations (although it's not necessarily a good idea). I've seen some shops in Latin America that are both bicycle and motorcycle mechanics, although I'm sure the overlap in the specific parts and tools they use for each has decreased over time. I've also seen a near-continuum between bicycles, motorized bicycles, mopeds, scooters, motorcycles, and cars where it's quite possible for me to imagine the same person using related skills to work on any two of these. There's a trend in almost all of our technology away from ease of repair and away from user familiarity with repair and maintenance. I'm concerned and sad about that on a number of levels, but I don't quite understand how the automobile partakes of a kind of original sin in this respect which the bicycle doesn't. (Also, I have a bicycle now that has fancier and harder-to-make-from-scratch components in almost every way than the first cars did -- frame materials, tires, brakes, suspension, manufacturing quality of the gears, and probably a number of other things I'm forgetting. If Henry Ford could have used comparably good stuff on his cars, it would have been a big improvement.) Also, to belabor the point a little bit, most horse riders by 1900 or whatever probably didn't know how to make their own saddles, stirrups, reins, or horseshoes, and would have been in quite a bit of trouble if they didn't have an equestrian supply industry to turn to. Or horse breeders to sell them new horses when their old horses died!
- soperj 8y ago
  >It's hard for me to think of American car owners of earlier decades readily agreeing that they were "user and consumer-and not owner and master" of a car. Same thing has happened with computers.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  > but in the U.S. quite a lot of car owners have prided themselves on their ability to maintain and repair their own cars You're still dependent on a host of commercial services and industrial products in the form of oils and lubricants, replacement parts such as windscreen wipers, gaskets, seals, bushes, shock absorbers, tyres. I can't think, right now, of a single car part I can make by myself. Even if you have a lathe you're going to need stock material to spin down.
mberning 8y ago
This has to be the dumbest argument against the automobile that I have yet read, and there have been many posted on HN over the years. The idea that the value and utility of the automobile is diminished because everybody has one is absurd. I’m sure this argument has some appeal to people living in large, congested cities, but that is going to be a very small percentage of commuters in the nation. For the remainder which we seldom hear from they are presumably quite happy with the freedom and utility a personal automobile provides.
- schoen 8y ago
  It's a pretty avowedly city-centric account: > Maybe you are saying, “But at least in this way you can escape the hell of the city once the workday is over.” There we are, now we know: “the city,” the great city which for generations was considered a marvel, the only place worth living, is now considered to be a “hell.”
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  > "The idea that the value and utility of the automobile is diminished because everybody has one is absurd." You missed it entirely. The argument is that it is unreasonable and unsustainable to expect that everybody should own one. We have normalized many of the costs of near universal automobile ownership today, but in many ways it is unsustainable, particularly as urbanization increases and particularly as cities are the main economic drivers in the modern era. We're killing ourselves with the idea that everybody not only should own a beach house but has to own a beach house in order to function in society and the economy, and there just isn't enough beach front property for that to be realistic.
Karrot_Kream 8y ago
> "The typical American devotes more than 1500 hours a year (which is 30 hours a week, or 4 hours a day, including Sundays) to his [or her] car. This includes the time spent behind the wheel, both in motion and stopped, the hours of work to pay for it and to pay for gas, tires, tolls, insurance, tickets, and taxes .Thus it takes this American 1500 hours to go 6000 miles (in the course of a year). Three and a half miles take him (or her) one hour. In countries that do not have a transportation industry, people travel at exactly this speed on foot, with the added advantage that they can go wherever they want and aren’t restricted to asphalt roads." I'd love to see modern numbers for this.
temp-dude-87844 8y ago
This essay observes that the advantages conferred by cars were significantly dampened once the cityscape evolved to benefit from those advantages. At a time when cars weren't so widespread, they allowed freedom of movement, freedom of leisure travel, and a fast, personal commute from a leafy suburb instead of having to live in crowded cities. But the availability of cars allowed those suburbs to be worthwhile to develop and many moved (for complex reasons that include a mix of personal, economic, discretionary, aspirational, classist, and racist), and many years later enough people have cars in an area that not having one is a significant hindrance. When this is observed, some interpret it as a tragedy of the commons. But while noting a class struggle, it's this socialist essay that accidentally makes a surprisingly capitalistic point: that much of one's outcomes depends on comparative advantage, and this advantage can disappear when everyone else catches up. In parts of the world dominated by the car, living close to one's work and adjacent to serviceable public transit can become the comparative advantage in turn. This is a major factor in gentrification and center city housing prices, as landowners, landlords, and developers are eager to maximize their earnings on their inelastic holdings while renters are eager to outbid others until reaching their personal ceiling. As a society, we've once again externalized the costs of transportation to the people but at costs significantly higher than before motorization, we've turned housing into an auction, and we've (accidentally, or perhaps deliberately) made it significantly more difficult to live a life that's not dependent on continuous, recurring expenditures to landholders, resource extractors and processors, and middlemen.

26 points by nvr219 8y ago

I like the article but this bothered me: "Everyone was going to depend for their daily needs on a commodity that a single industry held as a monopoly." Every "single industry" has a monopoly on that industry... it's a tautology.

InclinedPlane 8y ago
Not really. In this case the commodity is transportation. What are modes of transportation? Walking, bikes, trains, buses, and personal automobiles (among some others). In New York City the automobile industry doesn't have a monopoly on daily transportation needs, millions of people take the subway every day. In Amsterdam transportation needs are partly met by people who ride their bikes a total of 2 million passenger-kilometers on an average day. Similarly, walking is a bigger share of daily travel needs in pedestrian friendly cities than it is in many automobile focused cities. That is an important point, especially in the 20th century, because the common nature of the automobile naturally leads all automakers towards sharing common cause on certain big issues (like road building and use; parking availability and cost; petroleum production, use, and taxation; land use; and so on), many of which differ strongly from the desires tied to other ways of meeting transportation needs or of the public at large. "Monopoly" is the wrong term, but oligopoly is accurate, and equally concerning.

schoen 8y ago

There's lots of interesting stuff there, and ideas that have become familiar to people who don't necessarily share the author's overall prescriptions (some related views were expressed in English in The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, 12 years earlier). There was one claim here that confused me: > Unlike the horse rider, the wagon driver, or the cyclist, the motorist was going to depend for the fuel supply, as well as for the smallest kind of repair, on dealers and specialists in engines, lubrication, and ignition, and on the interchangeability of parts. Unlike all previous owners of a means of locomotion, the motorist’s relationship to his or her vehicle was to be that of user and consumer-and not owner and master. This vehicle, in other words, would oblige the owner to consume and use a host of commercial services and industrial products that could only be provided by some third party. I wonder if this was different in France, but in the U.S. quite a lot of car owners have prided themselves on their ability to maintain and repair their own cars (which has certainly become more difficult over time in a host of intentional and unintentional ways). It's hard for me to think of American car owners of earlier decades too easily agreeing that they were "user and consumer-and not owner and master" of a car. Also, I thought that there was a fairly considerable period of time in which bicycle mechanics were commonly the same people as automobile and motorcycle mechanics. (In fact, there was a brief period of time in which airplane mechanics were the same people as bicycle mechanics!) They used related parts which were sometimes manufactured by the same firms and sometimes worked on the same principles. Even today, the Schraeder valve is used on both automobile tires and (many) bicycle tires, and cyclists can still fill their tires at gas stations (although it's not necessarily a good idea). I've seen some shops in Latin America that are both bicycle and motorcycle mechanics, although I'm sure the overlap in the specific parts and tools they use for each has decreased over time. I've also seen a near-continuum between bicycles, motorized bicycles, mopeds, scooters, motorcycles, and cars where it's quite possible for me to imagine the same person using related skills to work on any two of these. There's a trend in almost all of our technology away from ease of repair and away from user familiarity with repair and maintenance. I'm concerned and sad about that on a number of levels, but I don't quite understand how the automobile partakes of a kind of original sin in this respect which the bicycle doesn't. (Also, I have a bicycle now that has fancier and harder-to-make-from-scratch components in almost every way than the first cars did -- frame materials, tires, brakes, suspension, manufacturing quality of the gears, and probably a number of other things I'm forgetting. If Henry Ford could have used comparably good stuff on his cars, it would have been a big improvement.) Also, to belabor the point a little bit, most horse riders by 1900 or whatever probably didn't know how to make their own saddles, stirrups, reins, or horseshoes, and would have been in quite a bit of trouble if they didn't have an equestrian supply industry to turn to. Or horse breeders to sell them new horses when their old horses died!

soperj 8y ago
>It's hard for me to think of American car owners of earlier decades readily agreeing that they were "user and consumer-and not owner and master" of a car. Same thing has happened with computers.
TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
> but in the U.S. quite a lot of car owners have prided themselves on their ability to maintain and repair their own cars You're still dependent on a host of commercial services and industrial products in the form of oils and lubricants, replacement parts such as windscreen wipers, gaskets, seals, bushes, shock absorbers, tyres. I can't think, right now, of a single car part I can make by myself. Even if you have a lathe you're going to need stock material to spin down.

mberning 8y ago

This has to be the dumbest argument against the automobile that I have yet read, and there have been many posted on HN over the years. The idea that the value and utility of the automobile is diminished because everybody has one is absurd. I’m sure this argument has some appeal to people living in large, congested cities, but that is going to be a very small percentage of commuters in the nation. For the remainder which we seldom hear from they are presumably quite happy with the freedom and utility a personal automobile provides.

schoen 8y ago
It's a pretty avowedly city-centric account: > Maybe you are saying, “But at least in this way you can escape the hell of the city once the workday is over.” There we are, now we know: “the city,” the great city which for generations was considered a marvel, the only place worth living, is now considered to be a “hell.”
InclinedPlane 8y ago
> "The idea that the value and utility of the automobile is diminished because everybody has one is absurd." You missed it entirely. The argument is that it is unreasonable and unsustainable to expect that everybody should own one. We have normalized many of the costs of near universal automobile ownership today, but in many ways it is unsustainable, particularly as urbanization increases and particularly as cities are the main economic drivers in the modern era. We're killing ourselves with the idea that everybody not only should own a beach house but has to own a beach house in order to function in society and the economy, and there just isn't enough beach front property for that to be realistic.

Karrot_Kream 8y ago

> "The typical American devotes more than 1500 hours a year (which is 30 hours a week, or 4 hours a day, including Sundays) to his [or her] car. This includes the time spent behind the wheel, both in motion and stopped, the hours of work to pay for it and to pay for gas, tires, tolls, insurance, tickets, and taxes .Thus it takes this American 1500 hours to go 6000 miles (in the course of a year). Three and a half miles take him (or her) one hour. In countries that do not have a transportation industry, people travel at exactly this speed on foot, with the added advantage that they can go wherever they want and aren’t restricted to asphalt roads." I'd love to see modern numbers for this.

temp-dude-87844 8y ago

This essay observes that the advantages conferred by cars were significantly dampened once the cityscape evolved to benefit from those advantages. At a time when cars weren't so widespread, they allowed freedom of movement, freedom of leisure travel, and a fast, personal commute from a leafy suburb instead of having to live in crowded cities. But the availability of cars allowed those suburbs to be worthwhile to develop and many moved (for complex reasons that include a mix of personal, economic, discretionary, aspirational, classist, and racist), and many years later enough people have cars in an area that not having one is a significant hindrance. When this is observed, some interpret it as a tragedy of the commons. But while noting a class struggle, it's this socialist essay that accidentally makes a surprisingly capitalistic point: that much of one's outcomes depends on comparative advantage, and this advantage can disappear when everyone else catches up. In parts of the world dominated by the car, living close to one's work and adjacent to serviceable public transit can become the comparative advantage in turn. This is a major factor in gentrification and center city housing prices, as landowners, landlords, and developers are eager to maximize their earnings on their inelastic holdings while renters are eager to outbid others until reaching their personal ceiling. As a society, we've once again externalized the costs of transportation to the people but at costs significantly higher than before motorization, we've turned housing into an auction, and we've (accidentally, or perhaps deliberately) made it significantly more difficult to live a life that's not dependent on continuous, recurring expenditures to landholders, resource extractors and processors, and middlemen.