Watching the Traffic Go By: Transportation and Isolation in Urban America (review)

The U.S. auto-freeway system, Paul Mason Fotsch argues, isolates classes from each other, and in the eyes of the country's elites this is one of its virtues. Fotsch does not claim that elites designed the auto-freeway system to achieve class isolation. Rather, he argues that they embraced the system as its putative isolative attributes became apparent.

Fotsch builds his analysis on a critical examination of texts treating important turning points in the evolution of the transportation system, beginning with the development of streetcars in the 1880s. He refutes the common argument that the automobile-based transportation system arose from democratic choice for personal mobility, and he cites numerous instances where major public decisions were made to invest in automobile infrastructure at the expense of transit when the auto was used only by a small but influential proportion of the population. He further argues that the widely held value of escaping from crowded, unhealthful cities to segregated suburbs did not dictate widespread adoption of the auto; the streetcar had already demonstrated its utility in this regard. After first embracing it, elites turned against the streetcar, however, because the streetcar was a place where people of different classes were forced to rub shoulders. The auto's superiority was not the mobility that it offered, but rather its ability to encapsulate its users, isolating them from contact with other travelers.

Each succeeding chapter of Watching the Traffic Go By brings another textual analysis. Fotsch elaborates on his concepts of the auto as alienating its users from larger society with reference to two films noir set in Los Angeles in the 1930s. He further elaborates on elites foisting freeway systems on cities with chapters on the townless highway of Lewis Mumford and Benton MacKaye, and on the General Motors Futurama designed by Norman Bel Geddes for the 1939 World's Fair in New York. Into these arguments he weaves strands of German social theory from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, two émigrés to Los Angeles who commented on its culture in the late 1930s.

Despite the degree to which people of color are isolated by the system, they still manage to make their voices heard. Fotsch's chapter on the New York subway and bus revival of the 1990s applauds graffiti as a legitimate statement of those otherwise denied voice. The white elite determined that the most important measure for getting middle-class people to use the subway again was to remove graffiti. But Fotsch argues that because graffiti was never entirely removed, and because it also appeared in other public areas, the taggers triumphed in maintaining their voice. Fotsch also cites the televised O. J. Simpson chase and the reaction of people of color to it as further evidence that the masses are capable of thwarting even the social barriers of the urban freeway system to make their views known in spite of the repression of the white elites.

Fotsch exhibits a strong command of the literature, frequently citing (I think fairly) important historians of the auto's impact on American society. His arguments generally are nuanced and well-informed, discounting for example the widely embraced explanation for the auto's rise to prominence known as the General Motors conspiracy theory. I applaud him for discounting the new urbanism, a panacea uncritically embraced by legions of auto critics as a possible solution to the isolation inherent in the system. Fotsch correctly points to biases in the mortgage insurance system as well as to the development of urban interstates as the principal policies that have led U.S. society to a greater degree of decentralization and reliance on the auto than pure market and democratic forces would have caused.

Watching the Traffic Go By has several shortcomings, however. First, its segmentation of society into white elites, women, and people of color is overly simplistic. Second, it fails to recognize that...