The liberation and autonomy promoted by the private car also played an important role in the civil rights struggle, as Paul Gilroy describes. Initially, automobiles had been exclusively presented to white consumers and some companies expressly stipulated that their machines not be sold to blacks. However, when they could aford to buy them, African Americans bought cars at least as readily as their economic circumstances permitted. At one level, they were an absolute necessity for finding and maintaining employment. But the car also acquired additional significance in that “for African American populations seeking ways out of the lingering shadows of slavery, owning and using automobiles supplied one significant means to measure the distance traveled towards political freedom and public respect.”41 No wonder that feelings of rapture and kinesthetic pleasure, of being in control of so much power and speed, would feature so strongly in black music and culture. That the car was frequently linked to the female body and driving to sex is another aspect of its gendered politics.
The popular promise of automobile speed was to be short lived as more and more cars hit the road. One billion cars were manufactured over the course of the twentieth century, and there are currently over seven hundred million cars moving around the world’s roads.42 The automobile and its infrastructure dominate most North American cities in the literal sense that vast tracts of land are required to accommodate it. Not only for the roads, but also for bridges, service stations, and parking spaces—at home, work, the supermarket, and everywhere that people congregate. Small wonder that in American cities, close to half of all urban space is dedicated to the automobile; in Los Angeles, the figure reaches two-thirds.
For the individual, the mobility and convenience that the private car bestows are unparalleled by any other means of transportation. However, what appears to be an ideal solution to individual needs is increasingly illusory as more and more people choose, or are forced to make, similar decisions. In terms of individual mobility, the utility of the motor vehicle is diminishing as the number of cars on the road escalates. The prosperous 1950s and early 1960s were characterized by booming car ownership and, at least in the United States, the car was expected to be the future of urban transport. The land use/transport planning procedures of that period pioneered the building of elaborate highway and freeway systems. But freeways themselves spawned more and more trafic, until very soon after their completion they were already badly congested. The obvious response to trafic congestion was to build more roads, leading to a vicious cycle of congestion, road building, sprawl, congestion, and more road building. The drive to save time proved somewhat counterproductive.
Chapter two
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