Interstate Infinity
If you live in an area without any form of public transport, riding another vehicle to get to your destination can feel like a novelty, a vestige of the time before cars took over. Riding a train, a ferry, a bike, a trolley, comes off more like a cultural experience rather than a sensible mode of transit, as if they’re only there because they didn’t manage to put up a bridge or a highway somewhere. But when cars slip into their usual disappointments like traffic jams or noise pollution, we’re quick to offer up more space for them, rather then questioning why we adopted them in the first place.
What other options do we have? The whole country is hooked on cars, it’s part of the world that we’re born into. If you ask a child to draw a city, chances are they’ll start out with some sort of street grid pattern. Teenagers idolize reaching driving age, as they finally have the freedom to travel wherever they please. We naturally place value on cars because normally they’re the only option we’re given for transportation. This is a direct result from the longtime advances the auto industry has made to promote their products, resulting in 92% of Americans own cars, more than any other country.
But these advancements aren’t just issues of the past, and in fact, are still gaining new ground every day. I’d like to take a dive into the state of American transportation, how we got to this point, and why it’s a problem. Through spacing apart our buildings and aggressive lobbying tactics, the automotive industry has essentially created their own monopoly on transportation.
To better understand how cars have a monopoly on transportation, we have to look at how cars came to congest our cities. It’s become common knowledge that before cars, streets were shared between carriages and walkers. This changed after Queens’ World’s Fair in 1939, where GM showcased a mockup “future city” plan comprised of highways and skyscrapers at the popular planning convention. What the public didn’t know when they were viewing the model, was the auto industry had been lobbying to cut federal funding from public transit systems, and had bought up and dismantled many trolley lines. The New Yorkers weren’t viewing a proposal on an improvement they could decide on, they were viewing the fate of many great American neighborhoods.
Environmentalist Spencer R. Scott explains this in his Medium article, “A Grand Theft: Auto Industry Stole Our Streets and Our Future.” He quotes Peter Norton’s book, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. “When there were no more streetcars to ride and cities were replanned around motor transportation, city people rode buses or bought cars. Mass preferences were relatively unimportant.” Norton’s claim denounces the narrative that citizens came to a consensus on allowing car infrastructure to burrow around their homes. This makes sense considering some of the devastating effects the auto industry has had on peoples livelihoods. One horrifying example of this comes from the 1949 Highway Plan, where neighborhoods inhabited mainly by racial minorities were demolished to make room for highways without their consent.
Thanks to the automotive industry’s past pressures on the local and federal government has, we are feeling their inefficiency every day we spend stuck in traffic. Nowadays, the governments general response to traffic seems to be widening lanes, under the false pretense that it will reduce congestion. However, it is becoming more apparent that over time, our roads are staying clogged up. New York Times author Eden Weingart explains this in her article, “Widening Highways Doesn’t Fix Traffic. So Why Do We Keep Doing It?” by breaking down an NBER study on traffic: “In a metropolitan area, when road capacity increases by 1 percent, the number of cars on the road after a few years also increases by 1 percent.” While it’s proven that widening highways can lead to short term drops in congestion, in the long run it becomes a cluttered mess again after people learn they can save time. These expansion projects are often marketed as an economic investment, which will bring prosperity to an area. However the only thing these projects ensure is a continued state of building and repairing.
As infrastructure grows exponentially, maintenance quickly grows faster. More areas need to be repaired more frequently, which is financed by constructing new highways. Similar to congestion, the economic motives behind constructing new highways provide short-term benefits, before quickly returning to the dangerous, chaotic state it was before. This leads to an industry focused on constantly growing and expanding, neglecting any need to challenge cars by reconfiguring any of our transport systems.
Limiting the expansion of our roads is a serious issue, as it leads to unnatural flooding, degradation in our water and soil. Paved roads water-resistant properties make them great for quickly drying after a storm. Their lack of permeability comes at a cost however, they prevent water from being absorbed into the soil. We should look at waters relationship with the Earth similar to how we look at our respiratory relationship with trees. Rainwater deposits chemicals in the soil, cleaning the water and feeding the soil. Roads prevent this from occurring, as well as contributing their own eroded asphalt, motor oil, or anything else that falls off cars to the soil and out waterways, causing many indirect impacts on human health.
Remember the neighborhoods from earlier that were destroyed for highway development? Well the neighborhoods that were spared from mass eviction were left with highways surrounding their homes, leading to asthma and lung cancer development for future generations, and has been criticized for environmental racism due to disproportionate health effects people of color feel to this day.
Despite these injustices towards human health and the environment, the American auto industry has managed to dodge paying reparations for those affected. Their political power in our government cannot be overlooked, as they have both physically and metaphorically burrowed into our nations functionality by ridding themselves of the responsibility decades in the past.
While it may seem like the auto industry has sealed out fate by taking control of our transportation, there are ways we can fight it. Some proposed solutions to fighting development, such as seeking federal funding for public transport, encouraging mixed-used development to make cities more walkable, or flexible bus routes. California recently canceled the expansion of Route 710, and are considering transitioning some of their freight lines to passenger rail. While cars will always be hanging around, are dependance on them doesn’t have to be.
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Counterintuitive Spring 2023 
I would like feedback on the paragraph structure, and the clarity of my talking points.
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Thanks for the guidance, Tristan. I will restrict myself, with effort, to recommendations on paragraph structure and the strength of your main ideas.
P1. If you live in an area without any form of public transport, riding another vehicle to get to your destination can feel like a novelty, a vestige of the time before cars took over. Riding a train, a ferry, a bike, a trolley, comes off more like a cultural experience rather than a sensible mode of transit, as if they’re only there because they didn’t manage to put up a bridge or a highway somewhere. But when cars slip into their usual disappointments like traffic jams or noise pollution, we’re quick to offer up more space for them, rather then questioning why we adopted them in the first place.
—This is a gentle and forgiving method of introducing a topic that we should probably all feel responsible for, but don’t. You’re giving everybody a lot of slack to “explain” why they’re still driving cars when alternatives exist, when they know the environmental damage cars do, etc.
—But you really confuse readers with your pronouns.
—It’s never a good idea to use 2nd person. Ever. Even to let readers off the hook. Substitute “For those of us who live in an area . . . .” That keeps you and the reader in the same argument group.
—”another vehicle” is completely unclear. The only thing to contrast it to so far is “public transport.” I thought you meant “your own car” when you suggested another vehicle. I guess you mean “a vehicle other than your own car.”
—You could easily erase the confusion by combining sentences 1 and 2: “For those of us who live in an area not served by public transportation, riding a train, a ferry, or a trolley [I left out bike, because it’s not public transportation] can feel like a novelty, a vestige of the time before cars took over. Riding than the most sensible mode of travel, public transportation comes off more like a cultural experience from the days before there was a bridge everywhere a car might want to cross a river.”
—Notice I got rid of the THEY phrases: THEY’RE only there because THEY didn’t manage to put up a bridge or a highway somewhere. [Here you seemed to say that trolleys exist because trolleys forgot to put up a bridge.]
—But when cars slip into their usual disappointments like traffic jams or noise pollution, we’re quick to offer up more space for them, rather then questioning why we adopted them in the first place. [Here, because of your vague THEY, we don’t know what we’re offering space to, the cars or the pollution.]
—Does that help? Too much? I’ll back off a little in the following paragraphs, but you might wonder what I’m NOT saying when I limit my comments to ideas/paragraph structure. 🙂
P2. What other options do we have? The whole country is hooked on cars, it’s part of the world that we’re born into. If you ask a child to draw a city, chances are they’ll start out with some sort of street grid pattern. Teenagers idolize reaching driving age, as they finally have the freedom to travel wherever they please. We naturally place value on cars because normally they’re the only option we’re given for transportation. This is a direct result from the longtime advances the auto industry has made to promote their products, resulting in 92% of Americans own cars, more than any other country.
—Your evidence that we’re hooked on cars is enjoyable and comforting. We start to understand that we’re not to blame. We have adopted the only rational solution to the problem we didn’t create: our culture is designed to serve cars and reward car drivers with convenience and freedom, both essential parts of the American Dream.
—So, don’t waste that goodness by opening with a Rhetorical Question. Make a clear claim of the sort I have just made to open your paragraph. We’ve been manipulated by carmakers. City planners have opted for the quick and cheap option of inviting cars first, never as the last alternative. Etc.
P3. But these advancements aren’t just issues of the past, and in fact, are still gaining new ground every day. I’d like to take a dive into the state of American transportation, how we got to this point, and why it’s a problem. Through spacing apart our buildings and aggressive lobbying tactics, the automotive industry has essentially created their own monopoly on transportation.
—If you call them advancements gaining ground, readers will have a hard time seeing them as devious and harmful manipulations.
—Your Thesis Sentence should NEVER be vague in any way.
—The “state of transportation” is vague.
—”how we got to this point” is vague.
—”why it’s a problem” is vague.
—Your paragraph structure is all over the place. 3 sentences (1. says the past is still with us in the present) (2. says you want to examine the present, by explaining the past, and why the present is flawed) (3. you want to explain how we got here, and what it means today). If the overlap is real, probably one sentence can tell the whole story.
P4. To better understand how cars have a monopoly on transportation, we have to look at how cars came to congest our cities. It’s become common knowledge that before cars, streets were shared between carriages and walkers. This changed after Queens’ World’s Fair in 1939, where GM showcased a mockup “future city” plan comprised of highways and skyscrapers at the popular planning convention. What the public didn’t know when they were viewing the model, was the auto industry had been lobbying to cut federal funding from public transit systems, and had bought up and dismantled many trolley lines. The New Yorkers weren’t viewing a proposal on an improvement they could decide on, they were viewing the fate of many great American neighborhoods.
—This anecdote is wonderful and powerful. It has the ring of truth. It plays nicely with your plan to show GM and others a masterminds of their own success. The “lobbying to cut funding for public transit” is a brilliant stroke.
—But too much of the story disappears on second thought. Quick readers will not miss the chance to question your evidence.
—”Streets were shared between carriages and walkers [I assume you mean pedestrians].” But, if they were already laid out, did anything change to accommodate cars? Do you mean sidewalks had to be invented to segregate people from vehicles? Did the new arrangement somehow favor cars AHEAD OF PEDESTRIANS?
—”had bought up and dismantled many trolley lines.” This is gold. But it doesn’t need the “highways and skyscrapers” model as an illustration. In those two words, you ignore city streets, which readers assume is the focus of your observation.
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P4. Environmentalist Spencer R. Scott explains this in his Medium article, “A Grand Theft: Auto Industry Stole Our Streets and Our Future.” He quotes Peter Norton’s book, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. “When there were no more streetcars to ride and cities were replanned around motor transportation, city people rode buses or bought cars. Mass preferences were relatively unimportant.” Norton’s claim denounces the narrative that citizens came to a consensus on allowing car infrastructure to burrow around their homes. This makes sense considering some of the devastating effects the auto industry has had on peoples livelihoods. One horrifying example of this comes from the 1949 Highway Plan, where neighborhoods inhabited mainly by racial minorities were demolished to make room for highways without their consent.
—This evidence depends SO HEAVILY on the single claim that the “auto industry bought and demolished trolley lines” that a careful reader will start to question how compelling that claim actually is.
—A careful reader of my age will notice the date: just post-World War II, when the GI Bill gave returning veterans massive assistance to buy homes, most of which were built in brand new communities just outside of cities. Every new home had a driveway and most had a garage, were built on new streets that fed into highways that went into town where the jobs were. HOMEBUILDERS conspired, too, to promote the car as the OTHER marker of the American Dream.
P5. Thanks to the automotive industry’s past pressures on the local and federal government has, we are feeling their inefficiency every day we spend stuck in traffic. Nowadays, the governments general response to traffic seems to be widening lanes, under the false pretense that it will reduce congestion. However, it is becoming more apparent that over time, our roads are staying clogged up. New York Times author Eden Weingart explains this in her article, “Widening Highways Doesn’t Fix Traffic. So Why Do We Keep Doing It?” by breaking down an NBER study on traffic: “In a metropolitan area, when road capacity increases by 1 percent, the number of cars on the road after a few years also increases by 1 percent.” While it’s proven that widening highways can lead to short term drops in congestion, in the long run it becomes a cluttered mess again after people learn they can save time. These expansion projects are often marketed as an economic investment, which will bring prosperity to an area. However the only thing these projects ensure is a continued state of building and repairing.
—If there isn’t one already, you should coin a phrase to explain this phenomenon, Tristan. It’s true not just for highways, right?
—When the government subsidizes college tuition with grants, colleges don’t respond with fiscal responsibility. They raise tuition to match the “new money” limits. Right?
—Limit, high cost, inconvenience, all of them reduce traffic to an option. When the limit is eliminated, traffic to the option increases.
—The new highway, or the widened highway, just induce development along the newly “convenient” route until it’s no longer uncongested and convenient.
P6. As infrastructure grows exponentially, maintenance quickly grows faster. More areas need to be repaired more frequently, which is financed by constructing new highways. Similar to congestion, the economic motives behind constructing new highways provide short-term benefits, before quickly returning to the dangerous, chaotic state it was before. This leads to an industry focused on constantly growing and expanding, neglecting any need to challenge cars by reconfiguring any of our transport systems.
—This sounds reasonable but needs evidence. If you were writing an editorial, you could get away with sweeping generalities like “More areas need to be repaired more frequently, which is financed by constructing new highways.”
—That logical chain is far from obvious. How does building new highways help finance anything?
P7. Limiting the expansion of our roads is a serious issue, as it leads to unnatural flooding, degradation in our water and soil. Paved roads water-resistant properties make them great for quickly drying after a storm. Their lack of permeability comes at a cost however, they prevent water from being absorbed into the soil. We should look at waters relationship with the Earth similar to how we look at our respiratory relationship with trees. Rainwater deposits chemicals in the soil, cleaning the water and feeding the soil. Roads prevent this from occurring, as well as contributing their own eroded asphalt, motor oil, or anything else that falls off cars to the soil and out waterways, causing many indirect impacts on human health.
—Without transition, you’ve transitioned from “look how autos came to dominate our cities” to “look how highways have come to dominate our landscapes.” It’s uncomfortable for readers to be led without warning.
—Several of your sentences create confusion.
—”Limiting expansion” “leads to flooding and degradation”? Not what you meant to say.
—”rainwater deposits chemicals in the soil” sounds ominous. Did you mean it as a warning? If so, we should celebrate that “roads prevent this from occurring.”
P8. Remember the neighborhoods from earlier that were destroyed for highway development? Well the neighborhoods that were spared from mass eviction were left with highways surrounding their homes, leading to asthma and lung cancer development for future generations, and has been criticized for environmental racism due to disproportionate health effects people of color feel to this day.
—You’re in rhetorical trouble when you have to ask you readers if they remember where the journey started. 🙂
—The time to make this point was when you made this point. Bad structure.
P9. Despite these injustices towards human health and the environment, the American auto industry has managed to dodge paying reparations for those affected. Their political power in our government cannot be overlooked, as they have both physically and metaphorically burrowed into our nations functionality by ridding themselves of the responsibility decades in the past.
—Wordiness deprives your work of its power here.
—How about: The auto industry has dodged responsibility for the deaths, illnesses, and shortened lives they’ve caused by enslaving us to our cars. (too strong?) by making us the servants of our cars. That sort of thing.
P10. While it may seem like the auto industry has sealed out fate by taking control of our transportation, there are ways we can fight it. Some proposed solutions to fighting development, such as seeking federal funding for public transport, encouraging mixed-used development to make cities more walkable, or flexible bus routes. California recently canceled the expansion of Route 710, and are considering transitioning some of their freight lines to passenger rail. While cars will always be hanging around, are dependence on them doesn’t have to be.
—Sad that the solutions are so wimpy. “proposed solutions,” “fighting development” good luck with that, “encouraging walkability,” “considering transitioning.” Add up the qualifiers and it sounds like a lost cause. Do you mean for it to?
I hope that was helpful, Tristan. I certainly enjoyed being invited to be part of the process. Always reply to feedback, please. It’s the primary value of the course, and I love the conversations, but they’re only truly useful when they’re two-directional. I quickly tire of providing feedback when I get no responses, or when it doesn’t result in revision. Thanks!
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Graded. Always available for a Regrade following substantial revision.
Will absolutely require a References section to pass ultimately.
No penalty assessed for lack of a References section on this first grading.
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This is extremely helpful. Thank you so much.
Was our rewrite due already, or is that something we work on in our portfolio?
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I’m glad you asked, Tristan. You’re not the only student who hasn’t quite grasped the procedure yet. Post your Definition and your Definition Rewrite on the same day, at which point they’ll be identical except for the name. Then place your Feedback Please request on the REWRITE. Revise the rewrite. Make another request, further revisions, etc., always to the Rewrite. Then export BOTH the original and the improved versions into your Portfolio.
I’ve changed the Name and the Category of this post. You need to copy the contents into a new post called Definition—TristanB so you’ll have a “virgin version” when you need it. Got it?
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Got it, thanks for clarifying
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