Annals of Motordom – 5

An occasional update on items from Motordom – the world of auto dominance.

WHAT WE SPEND

From Wired:

The average American household spent $5,477 on gasoline and other automotive expenses last year. That was 14.5 percent of our daily spending, which was more than we spent on groceries or utilities.

The average American household spent $2,208 on gasoline last year and $3,269 on other auto-related expenses. …   Young adults — aged 18 to 25 — allocated 18 percent of their daily spending to driving, more than any other group.

Check out the Bundle report here and download a cool info-graphic here.

Canadians, according to the Canadian Automobile Association, spend anywhere from $6,300 to $7,300, depending, of course, on what kind of car you drive and for how long.   

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1956: THE APEX OF MOTORDOM

Why 1956?  Well, it was the year that the US Congress passed the Federal-Aid Highway Act (better known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act), and so launched the world’s greatest public works project – the American Interstate freeway system – that would transform the world’s greatest democracy, and change everything in its concrete-and-asphalt path.

But most people wouldn’t have been aware of that at the time.  What they would have seen instead were the designs of the cars for the 1956 model year that would soon be driven on those freeways.  Designs like these:

These images, by the way, are taken from a rather fascinating article – Modern Architecture for the “American Century” – on the work of Eero Saarinen, who designed the GM Technical Centre and the even-more-famous TWA Terminal.

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DESIGN OF STREETS

I’ve used 1942 as the marker year for the beginning of ‘Motordom’ – auto-dependent urban design – since that was the year that saw the publication of the ITE “Transportation Planning Handbook”, dedicated to the ‘efficient, free and rapid flow of traffic.’   Municipalities adopted the standards developed by these professionals, and gave them the authority and resources to trump all other considerations in the design of streets and highways.

It’s taken decades, but at last we’re seeing another generation of manuals that offer alternative standards. 

I came across this one yesterday when I met Jessica Donaldson, a new planner in town, who worked previously in the Auckland region for North Shore City.   One of her projects was “a reference manual for high-quality streets,” and she did a fine job on a complex topic, also using images she took from other places. 

Click here for a pdf of this well-illustrated document – Design of Streets – and see if you can spot the shots from Vancouver.