Did cars kill urban life?

You can’t have cities without civility

When motor vehicles were first invented it was widely assumed that, while they would be wonderful for travelling between cities, you obviously wouldn’t let people drive them inside cities. These great steel machines would be too dangerous and menacing for pedestrians, hence laws such as the hugely restrictive 1865 Red Flag Act which set the urban speed limit at 2 mph.

But the car industry was too powerful, drivers loved their new autonomous vehicles too much, and so a type of transport with massive negative externalities was allowed to dominate and, in many cases, destroy urban life. The heart of Birmingham, England’s second city, was ripped out to make it more convenient for drivers, but the devastation wrought on American cities by car-loving town planners was on another level, and put to shame the feeble efforts of the Luftwaffe in Britain.

There has since grown an increasing awareness of what was lost for the sake of the car, and the rise of a new urbanist movement. Walkable cities are incredibly good for your physical and mental health, and as some have pointed out, Americans spend vast amounts in order to enjoy three or four years where everything can be reached on foot or bike, and their friends are nearby, when this should just be normal human existence. Cars are often destructive of civic life, and even the counter arguments, that restrictions of vehicle use would damage small businesses, have mostly been proven incorrect.

However, enabled by the expansion of car ownership, Americans after the War fled to suburbs in huge numbers, exurbs which urban planners Andres Duány and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk described as the ‘last word in privatisation, perhaps even its lethal consummation and... the end of authentic civic life’. The growth of car-dependent suburbs drives loneliness and isolation, the underlying issue behind the greatest of American dramas, The Sopranos. David Chase’s epic is essentially about the misery of suburban loneliness (and if he objects, well, death of the author and all that). Tony Soprano has a huge mansion in the middle of nowhere where he spends his days looking at ducks and getting depressed and neurotic, while his parents in The Many Saints of Newark lived in modest homes within close reach of all their friends. Which of those two lifestyles is going to make you happier? (Admittedly the Soprano family were never models of contentment.)

So why did the Sopranos and extended clan move out of Newark? Crime, ironically. The film takes place during the Newark Riots of 1967 and over the course of that decade violence there and elsewhere in America exploded. In New York City murder rates quadrupled in just over a decade, in Chicago they trebled. The overall US homicide rate increased by 44% between 1960 and 1970, rape by 92% and robbery by 146% (and the latter tends to become underreported as crime rises). 

This decivilising process was concentrated in urban areas, so that Mrs Soprano was three times more likely to be a victim of crime in Newark than in the surrounding suburbs — so, like millions of urbanites, they moved out and became dependent on their cars. By the end of the 1960s, over 50,000 Americans were being killed by motor vehicles each year, while the homicide rate would break through the 20,000 mark in 1974, where it would remain for two decades.

Yet there remains a certain blindness among the urbanist movement about the overwhelming relationship between city life and civility. As an example, a CNN analysis from this week on urbanism and car domination doesn’t even mention crime. Citing the fictional Blank Panther homeland of Wakanda, architect Vishaan Chakrabarti, author of A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America, is quoted as saying ‘One of the things I love about Wakanda, if you notice, if you watch Black Panther carefully, there's the city, the city’s got all this mass transit and all this housing parks and all this stuff. The moment you leave the city, you're in farmland. And there’s this connection between rural life and urban life.’

I’m an urbanist, and I strongly support subsidised public transport at the expense of cars. I’d like to see road pricing as a way of severely limiting car use in cities; I’d like to see lots more streets closed off to traffic, either so that restaurants can use them in summer, or children can play in them. But you cannot blame urban Americans for sticking to their cars rather than using public transport.

Cities need to be civilised, and even after the great incarceration of the 1990s American urban homicide levels are very high. The murder rate in the country’s most violent city, Jackson, Mississippi, is 100 per 100,000; to put that in context, when Northern Ireland was at its worst, in 1972, when it looked like the province was sliding into full-scale civil war, its homicide rate was about 25 per 100,000, and for the rest of the Troubles it mostly hovered below 10. You could have the IRA and UVF operating at full capacity in some of America’s cities and no one would even notice. 

Urbanism tends to be centre-Left, because cities correlate with liberalism, while car use tracks conservative voting, being associated with lower density and higher rates of family formation. Urbanism’s liberal tilt unfortunately means both a large number of intelligent, highly-educated people involved in the conversation, but also a large number of intelligent, highly-educated people hugely sensitive to social approval and taboo-avoidance.

The problem of crime is getting worse: after George Floyd’s death and the subsequent protests, America’s murder rate rose by 30% in a year, in part because much of the media were encouraging the theory that systematic racism is the cause of racial disparity in police killing. That explanation isn’t really true, and a lot of them know it isn’t true, but taboos around race are so strong that people would sooner tolerate a big increase in violence, and the loss of much civic space, than suffer reputational damage. There is perhaps also the sense of guilt that America’s urban renaissance, the rise of its hipster culture, was only made possible by the incarceration of millions of (disproportionately black) felons.

So the conversation retreats to comic book fantasies. In fact there are cities which fit the Wakanda urbanist dream, and you don’t even need to look to fictional African ethno-states — you can find them in real-life Scandinavian ones. Copenhagen is probably the ideal urbanist environment, possessing a delightful metro system and pedestrian dominated streets, but the Danish capital’s homicide rate hovers between 1 and 1.5 per 100,000, which is lower than 49 US states, let alone cities. Chicago is twenty to thirty times as murderous as Copenhagen.

It’s a shame that so many urbanists are unable to face the existential problem that crime poses. I’d rather avoid taboo subjects, too, but I’m way too close to the nerd norm to value social harmony over truth; it almost pains me to read or hear people repeating comforting fictions. Urbanism needs a conservative voice, whereas many on the Right attach themselves to an almost sociopathic car-centred philosophy that ignores the huge negative externalities of driving, pollution and injury in particular.

Cars are amazing, wonderous machines for getting from A to B, but as with many things, our Victorian forebears were correct about their destructive influence on civic life. Cars are a problem, but they’re not the only problem facing cities.