American Car Culture

Soaring gas prices this summer have angered people, but no one seems to be driving less. We can’t keep our foot off the accelerator¹.

We are crazy about our cars -- and always have been. “The American,” William Faulkner lamented in 1948, “really loves nothing but his automobile.” His sardonic² observation retains its force over a half-century later. There are now more than 200 million cars in the United States. In Los Angeles there evidently are more registered cars than people. Some families spend more on their monthly car payments than on their home mortgage³. We dream of cars as we dream of lovers. They express our fantasies; they fulfill our desires.

Americans have always cherished personal freedom and mobility, rugged individualism and masculine⁴ force. The advent⁵ of the horseless carriage combined all these qualities and more. The automobile traveled faster than the speed of reason; it promised to make everyone a pathfinder to a better life. It was the vehicle of personal democracy, acting as a social leveling force, granting more and more people a wide range of personal choices -- where to travel, where to work and live, where to seek personal pleasure and social recreation.

A century ago, automobiles were viewed as friends of the environment; they were much cleaner than horses. The car also offered a quantum⁶ leap in power. But it was one thing to rhapsodize⁷ about the individual freedom offered by the horseless carriage when there were a few thousand of them spread across the nation; it is quite another matter when there are 200 million of them. In 1911 a horse and buggy⁸ paced through Los Angeles at 11 miles per hour. In 2000, an automobile makes the rush hour trip averaging four miles per hour. American drivers are stuck in traffic for eight billion hours a year.

Yet despite congested traffic, polluted air, and rising gas prices, Americans have not changed their driving or car ownership patterns. Suburban commuters⁹ have resolutely stayed in their vehicles rather than join car pools or use public transportation. Teens continue to fill high-school parking lots with automobiles. America’s love affair with the car has matured into a marriage -- and an addiction.

The automobile retains its firm hold over our psyche because it continues to represent a metaphor for what Americans have always prized: the seductive¹⁰ ideal of private freedom, personal mobility, and empowered spontaneity¹¹.

Our solution to rush hour gridlock¹² is not to demand public transportation but to transform our immobile automobile into a temporary office, bank, restaurant, bathroom, and stereo system. We talk on the phone, eat meals, do makeup, cash checks and listen to music and audio books in them.

This is American car culture.