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 rela

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!