The Rise and Fall of Automobile Dependence

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, automobiles began to be used in cities as a convenient replacement for horse-drawn carriages. Henry Ford’s mass-produced Model T, the most influential automobile in history, was sold between 1908 and 1927. With the assistance of a rapidly growing and ever more powerful consortium of automobile interests such as General Motors and Firestone Tires, American cities as early as the 1920s began to tear out their streetcar (tram) systems, thus sowing the seeds for the automobile’s usurping of local transportation. Through this process, New York had lost most of its extensive surface streetcar system by 1926 (Klein & Olson 1996). However, car usage was never really central to city shaping in any urban area until after the 1940s, when major freeway and parking infrastructure began to be built entirely for the automobile. In American cities this process accelerated after 1956 with the establishment of the Highway Trust Fund, which used a dedicated gasoline tax to accumulate prodigious sums of money for freeway building in order to facilitate their vast car-dependent suburbs. A similar process occurred in those Australian cities that, in our data, have developed most closely to the American model.