the van of destiny (pt. 2)

I drove back from Huffle’s in my new used van more numb than excited. I was satisfied with the price; unbeknownst to Mr Huffle, I had stopped at an AAA office on the way back from the mechanic to crosscheck the price with their notary. Her estimate of the van’s model, mileage, features and service record came in at some three thousand dollars above the sticker. So I felt good. Of course, good is just what Ol’ Bill intended to make me to feel upon leaving his lot, so that’s partly a testament to his abilities as a salesman. But I also felt good about our bargaining, In the United States, price haggling is a dying art; I had to go to China and Africa to learn the basics. At the end of the day, I’m acquiring a fairly ideal vehicle for about $3.500 below its estimated value, so I feel I have little to be ashamed of.

And what a magnificent vehicle it is! I had at last moved out of Harrisburg, waving goodbye to Mrs. Rodriguez and the hedgehogs and Allison Hill to stay with my parents in Hershey while I made my preparations. This process – outfitting the van, buying supplies, making plans – was more than a little daunting. There’s little precedent for my project. While the roadtrip is of course a time-honored American tradition, there are few Americans who move into a cargo van and roadtrip non-stop for a whole year. There are, however, plenty of Americans out on the road. Driving back and forth between home and Kmart to get supplies, I peer curiously down into windows, wondering who these people are and where they are going.

What, I reflect, could be more American than the car? Every morning, this country steps into its 207.8 million passenger vehicles and drives to work, to drop the kids off for school, to have a good time, whatever. We zip along a thin black streak, each of us enclosed within our little air-conditioned bubble of designer metal. In our cars, we buy ourselves complete individualism in motion; the comfort of choosing our own seat position, music, and atmosphere, each passively reveling in the luxury of not having to interact with anyone else except through turn signals. We are at liberty to drive just as fast we want within a law that we break and that the state expects us to break. We cruise high over the speed limit, jockeying for position, and then slow down when we see the cop, and just enough of us get busted to fill the local police department’s monthly quota.

We all in some part define others and ourselves by our cars, making public statements about our own identity and priorities, and regarding those of others. We pick our cars carefully, weighing what we want and what we can afford, choosing our identity from a palette of options supplied by Toyata. I’m in a Hummer, don’t fuck with me. I’m a socially and environmentally conscious citizen, observe my Hybrid. We cannot see each other except in a brief, moving flash obscured by windshield, but we can easily recognize and understand the declarations of our vehicles.

The real status distinctions made by cars, however, are much more unconscious, threads worked so widely and deeply into the fabric of lives that we see them every day and do not recognize them. We build our society around cars. A fifth of America’s gross domestic product is reliant on the auto industry. 2.3 million Americans are employed by either General Motors, Chrysler or Ford. One out of every six American workers makes a living in an auto-related industry. Our biggest corporations are Auto and Oil companies, and the latter largely decides our country’s foreign policy.

In this car-ruled society, those who cannot drive lose. We shovel our old into nursing homes, set safely away from the violence of the highway and from participation in communities, spending the golden years playing bingo and begging for a visit from the grandchildren. Similarly, Americans under 16 are reduced to total dependency, relying on their parents to ferry them to soccer practice and piano lessons and the mall, hamstringing their own developing independence and self-reliance – until, of course, they get a car of their own.
Besides the young and the old, many are kept from participation in the modern car society by – you guessed it – money. As the example of Harrisburg shows, we give choice jobs to those who can already drive to work, sequestering those too poor into ghettos hedged by rail or highway and accessible only by bridge. These people may even be able to afford buying a vehicle, but to drive one each day is wildly expensive, some 9,000 to 11,000 dollars each year in internal and external costs like insurance, maintenance, gas, parking, and depreciation. Meanwhile, We concentrate our products in huge department stores on the edge of town, accompanied by massive parking lots and connected by separate highway exits, accessible only by car, leaving those who cannot reach them to fend for themselves with inner city groceries and minimarts on streets sometimes too dangerous to walk by night. Having limiting road access to those wealthy enough to afford riding those roads, we then spend all our government revenue on expansion and upkeep of this gated resource, tacitly subsidizing the driver. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that 1.2 to 1.6 trillion is spent annually on passenger ground transportation, numbers far “greater than our total national expenditure on either education or health.” Everyone pays equally for these resources, though only some can use them. In any ratio of utility, a poor single mother riding home on a bus pays far more than the governor to surface the road he rides on his BMW. A welfare state indeed, but who is subsidizing whom?

Author Jane Holtz Kay notes “70% of all state and local law enforcement activities are expended on traffic management issues.” Another man was shot several weeks ago on the exact same intersection at which Jonas Strunk died. The police, presumably paged by a gunshot sensor, arrived quickly, stringing off his little balloon-and-flower makeshift memorial with crime scene tape. The investigation continues, but so will the violence. Simply slowing the volume of shootings– leaving aside any inquiry into their root causes – would require a much heavier round-the-clock police presence. Currently, the police are too busy managing traffic into and out of the suburbs to be able to do more than zip in and put up tape. This suburban traffic, however, generates revenue for a poor city; revenue that will subsequently be spent on building more parking garages in downtown Harrisburg to attract more drivers.

This is a municipal cycle of generating revenue and then spending it to generate more, all within a system that only privileges a certain class of people. This vortex is replicated on the personal level, and the poor are not the only victims. The car does not quite translate into the rich man’s gun, but cars kill as many kids in the suburbs as guns do in the city. The cost of car ownership is high even for those who can afford it. Ivan Illich, writing in Energy and Equity some 30 years ago, reports “the typical American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car…. He sits in it while it goes and while it is idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for petrol, tolls, insurance, taxes, and traffic tickets. He spends four out of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it.” If anything, Illich’s estimates are conservative, since they do not take into account time “consumed by other activities dictated by transport; time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages: time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer meetings to improve the quality of the next buy.”

The vast freedom the automobile appears to offer is misleading. We are free to define ourselves in any form car companies decide for us. The powerful speed of the automobile offers to dramatically increase our efficiency and leisure time. However, we will spend 8 billion hours each year stuck in traffic, costing us between 43 and 168 billion dollars of lost productivity. We are free to come and go at high speeds whenever we want, although our days will mainly be structured by work time spent financing our cars. As Illich, points out “the model American puts in 16,000 hours to get 7500 miles; less than 5 miles an hour.” We drive to work and then work to drive.

Given all this, the Manchester Guardian determined “the private car is an environmental, fiscal and social disaster which would not pass any value-for-money test.” The total impact of the car from production to disposal, “is a state subsidy equivalent to giving each car user a free pass for the whole year for all public transport, a new bike every five years and 15,000 kilometers of first-class rail travel.” Nevertheless, the car is not going anywhere. We are, as I mentioned, a society built on cars, and to substantively address the problem would be to substantively change the very structure of our society. Our economy and our nation is reliant on the automobile, but as the above article suggests, they are also probably dying under its weight. One half of the oil and one third of the automobiles sold in the United States are imported. We spend 50 billion dollars combating the health effects of air pollution, and lose 176.5 billion to motor vehicle fatalities. Equally devastatingly, we destroy our environment for the car. We funnel our creativity and productivity into paying for the car. We sequester the poor to riding on the bus in Allison Hill. We put the northernmost point of Confederate progress during the Civil War under pavement. We cannot resist the car. From Steinbeck to Kerouac, from On the Road Again to Road Runner, from Lost Highway to Highway One Revisited, from the journals of Louis and Clark to Thelma and Loise, our culture is steeped in travel, in roads, and in cars. The roadtrip – that most American adventure that entered me into this inquiry – is most often a journey to “find oneself,” that other American project. Either that, or to “find America.” And what, after all, am I doing this year?

I think of that strange moment when Ol’ Bill softened just after agreeing to sell me the van. That nostalgic, almost fatherly look. Maybe he knew what he was doing. He clearly knew, in his excitement, his vociferous involvement, and most of all, that last, bittersweet softness, that he was officiating over one of the great rituals of our contemporary society. The moment when a young man gets his first car. The debate over the cost, as if it was something that could be tabulated on a sticker. The transfer of the check, and then of the keys, from the salesman to the new driver; the two shake hands, and the father is left at the desk, looking on silently, inscrutably. I think he knew, on some level, that he was handing me the keys to America, or rather the keys to find America, a nation scored by highways too wide to ever cross, filled with riders like me, driving into a long sunset from a Western to find a proud, desperate frontier country. They rode over it by the thousands on half a ton of metal each, mile by burning mile.


Materials on America's car culture is from:

Illich, Ivan. Energy and Equity. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.

Kay, Jane Holtz. Asphalt Nation. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1997.

and the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics at:
http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/