Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Motorizing America
Naturally, the US oil industry had an interest in pushing the expansion of the
car industry. The advent of the car was unreservedly welcomed in America's
sparsely populated rural areas, where it was genuinely liberating for people.
But according to the account in Ian Rutledge's book,
Addicted to Oil: America's
Relentless Drive for Energy Security
, by the 1930s US car manufacturers were fret-
ting at the sales resistance they were meeting in US cities where public trans-
port-systems already existed in the form of electric streetcars. The president of
the Studebaker Corporation admitted in 1934 that many well-to-do people did
not own cars, not because they could not afford them, but because “as they
will tell you, the ownership lacks advantage. They can use mass transportation
more conveniently for many of their movements.”
Coincidentally or not, some car and oil companies, notably General Motors,
Chevron and Phillips Petroleum, started in the mid 1930s to buy up some
streetcar and trolleybus companies, especially in California, and to convert
them to the motor buses they were building or fuelling. Rutledge says: “It has
been convincingly argued by a number of US transportation historians that the
real intention was to clear the way for the mass introduction of the automobile
in urban areas.”
The reasoning for this claim is that operating a motor-bus service was less
profitable and less reliable than the existing electric trolleybus and streetcar
services. But, the argument goes, the unsatisfactory nature of the new motor-
bus services actually suited the car and oil companies' purpose, because as the
quality of urban public transport fell, so demand for private cars rose. Whether
you buy this theory or not, the fact is that in the US of 1922 there were only
1370 miles of urban motor-bus routes in service compared to 28,906 miles
of streetcar railway track. But by 1940 there were 78,900 miles of motor-bus
routes, and operational streetcar track had fallen to 15,163 miles.
However, the federal authorities did play a direct role in motorizing America
with the passage of the 1956 Federal Highway Act. This appropriated $21bn,
a huge amount of money at the time, to build 41,000 miles of interstate high-
ways over a 20-year period. Since then, this road network has been expanded
and maintained from the proceeds of the federal gasoline tax. This federal tax is
only 18.4 cents per gallon there are usually state gasoline taxes that are slightly
higher, but most of its proceeds are dedicated to the Federal Highway Trust
Fund, which finances the interstate road network.
What is unusual about the US is not the decrease during the twentieth century
of electric public-transport systems - this happened in many European cit-
ies (though the disappearance of surface electric transport was more often
compensated by subway systems in Europe than in the US). Nor has the US
been unique in building such a national road network - think of the autobahns
Germany built in the 1930s or the autoroutes France built more recently. What
is unusual about the US is that it has devoted so much of so small a gasoline tax
to subsidize the infrastructure, and thus encourage more driving.
