Why EVs too kill social life

While it would be nice to have a quick fix, the car problem won't be solved by EVs

I have been working on the new version of The Great Good Place, the book that introduced the term “third place,¹ and I am surrounded by books and notes about zoning and town planning, and about the influence of automobiles. (Recent press - I’ve been interviewed by Bloomberg and BBC and Fast Company - is at www.greatgoodplace.org.)

As I read about the consequences of designing cities and towns for automobiles, I was reminded of what I wrote in Home Ecology when I was 30:

Cars are inherently dangerous: they are large, heavy objects which travel at high speeds in close proximity to pedestrians and cyclists.  Only careful road and town planning, with restrictions on cars in residential and shopping areas, and an overall reduction in traffic volume, can alleviate this problem.

In addition, they take up huge amounts of space, dominating us by their size and the territory they take up. Architects at the Center for Environmental Structure in Berkeley, California, suggest that cars may 'cause the breakdown of society, simply because of their geometry'. This is an important, and neglected, aspect of car use and requires some explanation.

It indeed requires explanation, and reflection, and led me back to the source of that quotation. I found my battered copy of A Pattern Language and want to share more of the text from that 1977 classic (known to all architects and planners but not referred to often enough). It is more timely than ever. Too many people think that EVs (electric vehicles) are the solution to our climate problems. Yet we keep hearing about social isolation, the rising incidence of depression, and loneliness.

Cars give people wonderful freedom and increase their opportunities. But they also destroy the environment, to an extent so drastic that they kill all social life.

The value and power of the car have proved so great that it seems impossible to imagine a future without some form of private, high-speed vehicle. Who will willingly give up the degree of freedom provided by cars? At the same time, it is undeniably true that cars turn towns to mincemeat. . . .

Let us start with a list of the obvious social problems created by the car:

• Air pollution

• Noise

• Danger

• Ill health

• Congestion

• Parking problem

• Eyesore

The first two are very serious, but are not inherent in the car; they could both be solved, for instance, by an electric car. They are, in that sense, temporary problems. Danger will be a persistent feature of the car so long as we go on using high-speed vehicles for local trips. The widespread lack of exercise and consequent ill health created by the use of motor-driven vehicles will persist unless offset by an amount of daily exercise at least equal to a 20-minute walk per day. And finally, the problems of congestion and loss of speed, difficulty and cost of parking, and eyesore are all direct results of the fact that the car is a very large vehicle which consumes a great deal of space.

The fact that cars are large is, in the end, the most serious aspect of a transportatiton system based on the use of cars, since it is inherent in the very nature of cars. Let us state this problem in its pungent form. A man occupies about 5 square feet of space when he is standing still, and perhaps 10 square feet when he is walking. A car occupies about 350 square feet when it is standing still (if we include access), and at 30 miles an hour, when cars are 3 car lengths apart, it occupies about 1000 square feet. As we know, most of the time cars have a single occupant. This means that when people use cars, each person occupies almost 100 times as much space as he does when he is a pedestrian.

If each person driving occupies an area 100 times as large as he when he is on his feet, this means that people are 10 times as far apart. In other words, the use of cars has the overall effect of spreading people out, and keeping them apart.

The effect of this particular feature of cars on the social fabric clear. People are drawn away from each other; densities and corresponding frequencies of interaction decrease substantially. Contacts become fragmented and specialized, since they are localized by the nature of the interaction into well-defined indoor places—the home, the workplace, and maybe the homes of a few isolated friends.

It is quite possible that the collective cohesion people need to form a viable society just cannot develop when the vehicles which people use force them to be 10 times father apart, on the average, than they have to be. This states the possible social cost of cars in its strongest form. It may be that cars cause the breakdown of society, simply because of their geometry.

A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al., Oxford University Press 1977, was first recommended to me by an architecture student, long before I became interested in environmental or social issues. I was an English literature major, but I fell in love with the book - you can see how battered my copy is.

This adds to my concern about government focus on EVs - an economic and short-term political focus that is understandable but also dangerous. And that’s not even bringing in the question of how we source rare minerals, or the right to repair. (In A Pattern Language, the authors imagined a future in which sustainable vehicles could be repaired by their owners, not a world in which we need Right to Repair laws just to be able to let car shops that aren’t owned by the manufacturers work on our sophisticated machines.)

This newsletter from last summer tells the rest of the story.

In Bowling Alone, sociologist Robert Putnam proposed that television caused the breakdown of society. Plenty of people put the blame on social media. We need to add cars to that list of technologies that have contributed to loneliness and political polarization. This means systems analysis, not the usual quick-fix, plug the dike approach. And it’s good news in a way. I like to think that we can find solutions that will help solve social and environmental problems at the same time.

Thanks to neighbor Dale Abrams for this photo taken on Lake Mansfield.

1. Howard Schultz talked about creating a “third place” when he founded Starbucks, but he did not coin the term. More recently, he’s had the effrontery to describe online pick-up purchasing as a “virtual third place.”