How the Car Destroyed America: Episode 1

This is The Red Line Podcast's very first episode, a history of cars and how they destroyed the American city. We cover the development of cars from Henry Ford's assembly line to the boom of the motor industry. Listen in agony as car infrastructure and the suburb-to-big-city commute ruin whole communities and take our downtown from a bustling hub of life to a parking-lot-riddled desert punctuated by massive highway systems. We explain the rise of the American suburb, how it's a radical type of housing development, and the long shadow it has cast on society as we know it. Learn about the fundamental and unsolvable inefficiencies of cars, the peril of induced demand, and take a smooth segue to what The Red Line Podcast is all about: public transportation! Links and stuffs Merch:https://shop.trlpod.com/ Twitter:@TheRedLine_pod YouTube channel:The Red Line Podcast Spotify:The Red Line Podcast Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/theredlinepodcasters Email:[email protected] Website:https://www.trlpod.com/ Timestamps 00:00 The great American way of getting around 00:43 Theme song jam 01:13 The development of cars [2] [3] [5] 03:00 Cars today & negative side effects 03:57 Urban "renewal" [9] [10] 05:26 Detroit 06:01 Racism & poverty 07:05 The destruction of downtown [1] 07:47 Detroit again 08:31 Motor industry lobby 08:54 Downtown is made for commuters 09:57 Parking 11:21 More commuters; office buildings 12:31 The American suburb 13:05 A radical experiment 14:00 Commuters in cars getting coffee 14:32 The planned community 15:47 It's weird 17:07 Car requirement 18:13 People are completely atomized 19:09 Suburbs haven't stopped 19:58 Car-centric infrastructure [4] [6] 20:42 Pavement statistics 21:30 Parking spaces 22:53 Downtown should be a center of LIFE 23:55 Cars are horribly inefficient [7] [8] [11] 25:09 Car bad 25:20 Traffic 26:26 Driving alone 27:20 Induced demand 28:53 Recap; gadget-bon solutions 30:27 Solutions: public transportation! 30:50 The Red Line Podcast 31:27 Social, YouTube, and Patreon plugs 32:22 Outro References [1]Financial Times: The road to ruin — how the car drove US cities to the brink (archive.ph) [2]Rails and Trails: Facts and Figures of the Automobile Industry, 1920-1930 [3]Classic Car History: Cars of the Fifties [4]Grist: Pavement is replacing the world's croplands [5]FinancesOnline: The Number of Cars in the US in 2021/2022: Market Share, Distribution, and Trends [6]The National Academies Press: Assessing and Managing the Ecological Impacts of Paved Roads, p. 41 [7]Engineering World: The myth of the efficient car [8]Bloomberg CityLab University: Induced Demand [9]Wikipedia: Urban renewal [10]Bloomberg CityLab University: The Who’s Who of Urbanism (Robert A. Moses) [11]Vox: Cars take up way too much space in cities. New technology could change that. Further reading The Atlantic: Why Everything Is Getting Louder