Autonorama

The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving

Peter Norton

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781642832419
• Topic: Tecnología e ingeniería
• Subtopic: Transporte y navegación

"The foundation has been laid for fully autonomous, " Elon Musk announced in 2016, when he assured the world that Tesla would have a driverless fleet on the road in 2017. "It's twice as safe as a human, maybe better." Promises of technofuturistic driving utopias have been ubiquitous wherever tech companies and carmakers meet.In Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving, technology historian Peter Norton argues that driverless cars cannot be the safe, sustainable, and inclusive "mobility solutions" that tech companies and automakers are promising us. The salesmanship behind the driverless future is distracting us from investing in better ways to get around that we can implement now. Unlike autonomous vehicles, these alternatives are inexpensive, safe, sustainable, and inclusive.Norton takes the reader on an engaging ride —from the GM Futurama exhibit to "smart" highways and vehicles—to show how we are once again being sold car dependency in the guise of mobility. He argues that we cannot see what tech companies are selling us except in the light of history. With driverless cars, we're promised that new technology will solve the problems that car dependency gave us—zero crashes! zero emissions! zero congestion! But these are the same promises that have kept us on a treadmill of car dependency for 80 years. Autonorama is hopeful, advocating for wise, proven, humane mobility that we can invest in now, without waiting for technology that is forever just out of reach. Before intelligent systems, data, and technology can serve us, Norton suggests, we need wisdom. Rachel Carson warned us that when we seek technological solutions instead of ecological balance, we can make our problems worse. With this wisdom, Norton contends, we can meet our mobility needs with what we have right now.

CHAPTER 1

Futurama 1: New Horizons

There will always be new horizons.

—General Motors, Research Looks to New Horizons

In the early 1920s, American automobile manufacturers feared that demand for their vehicles was approaching saturation.¹ Most people who wanted and could afford a car already had one. Most sales would be replacements for worn-out cars. Unpaved rural roads were one limitation, though Ford’s Model T was equal to most of them. But in cities—despite their paved streets—sales were disappointing. Cities were unwelcoming environments for drivers. Parking was scarce and speed limits were low. Pedestrians, including children, felt entitled to walk in streets. Drivers had to drive slowly and watchfully. Traffic casualties were high, and in cities, most of those injured or killed were on foot. Many of the victims were children. The press, the law, and public opinion generally blamed drivers. In cities, drivers were easy to caricature as a privileged minority. Personal passenger cars were typically called pleasure cars, and extensive electric railways generally made driving unnecessary. The conventional wisdom was that passenger cars would never serve most urban transportation needs.

In the 1920s, American automobile manufacturers, auto clubs, and their allies organized to improve conditions for drivers. They learned to cooperate, sometimes even under a common name. As motordom, they backed gasoline taxes on condition that the revenues go to paved roads. They organized to win priority for drivers on city streets, discouraging jaywalking with publicity campaigns and city ordinances. They used press releases to shift blame for street casualties from drivers to pedestrians, and from speed to reckless driving. They also worked to influence developing standards of traffic and highway engineering in ways that were favorable to drivers.

Keep the consumer dissatisfied

General Motors emerged as a leader in this effort. GM saw no reason to wait until its customers’ cars had worn out to sell them a replacement. By redesigning each model every year, it induced some customers to come back to the showroom sooner. GM offered its customers opportunities to show off their success too. A Chevrolet owner who got a promotion and a raise need not be lost to another carmaker. GM could offer an Oakland or a Pontiac, then an Oldsmobile or a Buick. At the top of GM’s “ladder of success” was the Cadillac.

The genius behind these techniques was Charles Kettering. In 1929 Kettering distilled his advice into an article, written for Nation’s Business, with a memorable title: “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.” “If everyone were satisfied,” he explained, “no one would buy the new thing.”² To Kettering, transport sufficiency was a threat to motordom’s future. He advocated perpetual insufficiency, propelled by an ever-receding promise of future perfection. In short, Kettering was advocating not transport but transport consumerism. At GM the idea developed and acquired a name: futurama.

Motordom applied the technique to sell not only cars but driving too. Its leaders learned that in order to sell cars where sales resistance was high—particularly in cities, where cars were blamed for congestion and casualties—driving had to be reframed as the solution instead of the problem. By the standards of the early 1920s, motor vehicles clogged traffic and made streets dangerous. In the 1930s, motordom guided the development of highway engineering to redefine traffic congestion and traffic safety in ways that exonerated motor vehicles. In the 1920s, automobiles were the worst offenders in traffic congestion because of their high spatial demands per passenger. In the new field of highway engineering, funded by gasoline tax revenues and guided by its promoters in motordom, vehicles’ capacity for speed made them potential congestion relievers, provided highway capacity was sufficient to permit speed. Conversely, wherever motor vehicles slowed one another down below the road’s designed speed limit, this was to be defined as “delay,” and though delay was caused by the vehicles themselves, it was to be regarded as an economic burden on the public measurable in terms of the value of vehicle occupants’ time. Wherever traffic slowed vehicles down, the consequent delay was therefore grounds for building new road capacity.³

With motordom’s help, a similar transformation redefined traffic safety.⁴ In the 1920s, speed made motor vehicles dangerous. But highway engineering promised to make speed safe, and to redirect blame for crashes to deficient highway design. A leading proponent of motor-age highway engineering, Miller McClintock, developed the idea and gave it expert standing. In 1934 McClintock described “the fool-proof highway of the future,” where collisions would be practically impossible. Writing for Safety Engineering, McClintock asked: “Are fool-proof highways possible?” He had a straight answer: yes.

McClintock characterized “education of drivers and the punishment of offenders” as necessary but insufficient efforts that tended to distract safety experts from the key: foolproof road design. “The highway, itself, must be built in such a way that accident will be impossible.” Such roads offered drivers “safe speeds up to fifty miles per hour to the very centers of congested cities.” The essential design features? “Traffic streams moving in opposite directions are physically separated. All intersections are eliminated.” There is “no connection with any abutting property and entrances and exits . . . are arranged at convenient intervals by specially designed structures.”

McClintock could cite no actual performance data, but he confidently resorted to commonsense reasoning: “In 1933 nine hundred people were killed in the City of Chicago in traffic accidents. An examination of the cause of each of these accidents reveals that only seventeen of them would have been possible if all traffic had been moving on limited ways.” For example, “about half our fatalities are the result of collisions between motor cars and pedestrians. There are no pedestrians on limited ways and, hence, no pedestrians can be killed on such a structure.” McClintock did not speculate about how the hoped-for speed of limited ways might make the rarer collisions more deadly. He nevertheless assured readers that such roads promised “permanent safety.”⁵

According to McClintock, vehicular hazards were due to four kinds of “friction”: medial friction (between opposing traffic streams), intersectional friction (where streets crossed each other); marginal friction (along the roadside); and internal stream friction (between vehicles in the same lane traveling at different speeds). Well-designed motor highways would practically eliminate the first three frictions. To reporters, McClintock promised that with such highways, “we could eliminate 98 per cent of all accidents and practically all congestion.”⁶

The urban highway projects of the 1930s and 1940s were, in theory, responses to a growing demand for driving. But especially after the Great Depression reduced driving substantially, the projects were sold as ways to stimulate demand for cars. For example, to Harry Hollingshead, a Nash car dealer and president of the Chicago Automobile Trade Association, building elevated highways was a way to sell more cars, plain and simple. In 1938 Hollingshead told his colleagues that with a network of elevated highways in Chicagoland, residents would spend 21.8 percent more money each year buying new cars and maintaining them.⁷

“It is obvious,” Hollingshead said, “that with elevated highways for safe and rapid travel there would be more inducement for a person to own an automobile.” Congestion limits “the sale of automobiles and supplies. Many Chicagoans and suburbanites now using other forms of transportation would prefer to use the more convenient automobile were it not for the congestion encountered within city limits. It is simple mathematics to estimate that a man who uses his car going to business six days a week will buy more automobiles and will buy more parts than the one who uses it only on Sunday.” He concluded: “Every one interested in the growth of the automobile industry will want elevated highways built as speedily as possible.”⁸

To sell cars where cars were a poor fit, motordom learned to sell driving. But selling driving is hard. A dealer can sell a paying customer a good car in an hour, but promises of congestion-free driving, in safety and convenience, cannot be fulfilled quickly. Meanwhile traffic jams, casualty lists, parking tickets, and other woes make driving unattractive, even in a fine new car. Motordom could not sell driving as most people knew it. It had to sell a vision of driving, one that appeared credible while being attractive enough to persuade people to accept short-term dissatisfaction in the hope of future contentment. In the 1930s, motordom learned to depict attractive, car-dependent futures and to sell them.

The drive-everywhere, drive-only city

The promises of safe and congestion-free driving remained elusive. In the United States, though the Great Depression diminished both congestion and crashes, these maladies returned with economic recovery. In 1935, as traffic casualties rose, Reader’s Digest published a vivid exposé of the horrific effect of road crashes on the people they maimed and killed.⁹ In terms of risk of death per vehicle mile driven, the worst year in US history was 1937, when thirty-eight thousand Americans were killed on roads and streets. And though motordom was convinced of the merits of its new models of congestion and safety, older attitudes persisted in the press, in legislatures, and among the public.

Under these pressures, motordom developed a new strategy. No matter what the expenditure on roads and highways, in no given year could it deliver marked improvement. What was needed was a clear vision of a more distant and idealized future toward which motordom was striving. The promise of future perfection can buy tolerance of present affliction. And if the promise is both visually convincing and far into the future, it can even win confidence. Beginning separately in the mid-1930s, sources within motordom began to conceive of and present the drive-everywhere city of the future. By 1939 they were showing it to millions at a monumental scale.

In 1936 General Motors launched its first Parade of Progress: a traveling exhibition of eight bus-sized vehicles called Streamliners that toured the country, visiting fairgrounds and displaying visions of transportation to the public. Exhibits portrayed the past, present, and future of transportation as a progress story culminating in universal driving.¹⁰ Also in 1936, the Shell Union Oil Corporation (later Shell Oil Company) was looking for a way to expand its small US market share. Gasoline was just nineteen cents a gallon at the pump, and a future of greater demand for gasoline was naturally of interest. Shell turned to legendary advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, a pioneer of subtle advertising that attracted readers.

Thompson executives saw an opportunity to use McClintock’s “fool-proof highways” concept in an ad campaign to promote driving. To depict a future city, where everyone drove but there were no delays and no hazards, Thompson hired Norman Bel Geddes. A former stage designer, Bel Geddes had reinvented himself as a versatile practitioner of modern design; he had recently designed interiors and furnishings for Thompson’s offices.¹¹ Thompson teamed him with Miller McClintock, with a notion of developing a series of advertisements illustrating the City of Tomorrow—a place where everyone drove everywhere (thanks to Shell gasoline)—and at 50 miles per hour with no traffic lights. For use in Shell ads, Bel Geddes built an elaborate model of the future drive-everywhere city. McClintock offered advice and, above all, the value of his endorsement as the nation’s leading traffic authority.¹²

Shell’s model was built for an ad campaign, but on June 1, 1937, weeks before the first ad appeared, Miller McClintock presented it in a photographic slide show to the National Planning Conference in Detroit. The conference was a joint meeting of the American City Planning Institute, the American Planning and Civic Association, the American Society of Planning Officials, and the National Economic and Social Planning Association. McClintock called his address “Of Things to Come.”¹³ “The city of tomorrow,” he told his audience, “will be an automotive city.”¹⁴ As he showed the audience photographs of the City of Tomorrow, McClintock never mentioned Shell’s sponsorship. In his address, the model was all city planning, not marketing.

At the conference, McClintock made an eloquent plea for a city worthy of the “automotive revolution.” He invoked the “vision, initiative, and boldness of American planners.” He appealed to them above all on the grounds of public health, referencing the “annual toll of 36,000 lives and more than a million injuries.” But he also contended that the automobile’s practical benefits were hampered. Liberating them safely would require correcting “basic maladjustments in automotive transportation which will never yield to palliatives but can be cured only by major surgery.” McClintock called for an alternative to “‘stop-and-go’ traffic” through the separation of opposing traffic streams, generous road shoulders, and grade separation at intersections. Such “limited ways” would eliminate the “frictions” between traffic streams “from which all accidents and all congestion arose.”¹⁵

The City of Tomorrow still had no estimated date of arrival. The model included Manhattan’s 1913 Woolworth Tower as an indication of how the new would pervade the old. McClintock, projecting himself into the future, described the building as “a monument to man’s architectural daring a hundred years ago,” suggesting that the model was set in the early twenty-first century. Beneath a network of limited ways lie streets “not unlike those of the old city except that there is no pedestrian traffic, as this is raised to an upper level along the streets and bridging the intersections.” Parking garages “are a natural, integral part of every building.” Pedestrians would thrive in the City of Tomorrow. “All of the land uses are so arranged and interconnected” so that a pedestrian can walk “with some degree of security and dignity. No longer is he required to fight his way across roadways filled with uncongenial vehicles. He moves on his own level raised above the flow of vehicular traffic.” McClintock closed by asking his audience, “Are we to have an opportunity to utilize the full efficiencies of the automotive revolution or are we to continue to suffer the inconveniences and hazards of the present day? The answer to these questions lies largely in the hands of the planning profession.”¹⁶

The model toured the country; elsewhere, where it was not on display, McClintock presented the slideshow of it. It was a sensation at the Milwaukee auto show that November, where it was described as a model of Milwaukee in 1960—“when traffic problems will be a thing of the past.”¹⁷ Now tiny cars traveled in slots along the highwa...