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297 notes Prologue: a Car oF one’s oWn 1 Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City (New York: Mentor Books, 1964), 246. 2 This last obligation was remarkably affordable, though it felt onerous at the time. In the second half of 1989, when I first got the truck, the national average price for a gallon of regular unleaded actually fell from $1.09 to $0.98, and with the exception of a short spike in late 1990, when prices briefly soared to $1.37, prices seldom exceeded $1.10 per gallon. See Energy Information Administration , “May 2008 Monthly Energy Review,” Table 9.4: Motor Gasoline Retail Prices, U.S. City Average, http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/merquery/mer_data. asp?table=T09.04 (accessed June 16, 2008). 3 On Atlanta’s development policies after 1975, which heavily favored low-density , automobile-oriented growth over an extensive area, see Carlton Basmajian, “Projecting Sprawl? The Atlanta Regional Commission and the 1975 Regional Development Plan of Metropolitan Atlanta,” Journal of Planning History 9, 2 (2010): 95–121. 4 Frank Coffey and Joseph Layden, America on Wheels: The First 100 Years, 1896– 1996 (Los Angeles: General Publishing Group, 1996), 9. 5 Peter Norton has traced the origins of the love-affair thesis, which has been popular in both popular and scholarly histories of the automobile in the United States, to the DuPont Show of the Week episode called “Merrily We Roll Along,” first broadcast on NBC on 22 October 1961. See Norton, “Americans’ Affair of Hate with the Automobile: What the ‘Love Affair’ Fiction Concealed,” in Automobile : Les cartes du désamour, ed. Mathieu Flonneau (Paris: Descartes and Cie, 2009), 93–104. Among the popular works that explicitly invoke the love affair, including those that believe that the romance has faded and the relationship should be dissolved, see Frank Donovan, Wheels for a Nation: How America Fell in Love with the Automobile and Lived Happily Ever After . . . Well, Almost (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1965) ; Leon Mandel, Driven: The American FourWheeled Love Affair (New York: Stein and Day, 1977); David K. Wright, America ’s 100 Year Love Affair with the Automobile: And the Snap-On Tools That Keep Them Running (Osceola, Wisc.: Motorbooks International, 1995); Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back (New York: Crown Publishers, 1997); Katie Alvord, Divorce Your Car! Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile (Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society Publishers, 2000); and Tim Falconer, Drive: A Road Trip through Our Complicated Affair with the Automobile (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2008). Although scholars have attacked the love-affair thesis directly—see especially Norton, 298 || notes to Pages xxii–xxiii “Americans’ Affair of Hate with the Automobile,” and Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008)—serious scholars continue to invoke it in their work. For recent examples , see David Blanke, Hell on Wheels: The Promise and Peril of America’s Car Culture, 1900–1940 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007); Tom McCarthy , Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007); John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, Motoring: The Highway Experience in America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008); and John Heitmann, The Automobile and American Life (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2009). 6 A. Q. Mowbray, Road to Ruin: A Critical View of the Federal Highway Program (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1968); Helen Leavitt, Superhighway—Superhoax (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970); Albert Kelley, The Pavers and the Paved (New York: D. W. Brown, 1971); Bradford Snell, American Ground Transport: A Proposal for Restructuring the Automobile, Truck, Bus, and Rail Industries (Washington , D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1974); David Saint Clair, The Motorization of American Cities (New York: Praeger, 1986); James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993); Jack Doyle, Taken for a Ride: Detroit’s Big Three and the Politics of Pollution (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000). A number of historians have eschewed the conspiracy thesis in favor of systematically tracing the political processes and events that produced a wide range of policies heavily favoring automobiles and highways over other forms of transportation . For notable examples, see Paul Barrett, The Automobile and Urban Transit: The Formation of Public Policy in Chicago, 1900–1930 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983); Bruce E. Seely, Building the American Highway...

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