Opinion

The Superhighway

By DOUGLAS LUMMIS

Adolf Hitler once wrote, "All strategic roads were built by tyrants. . . . They go straight across the country. All other roads wind like processions and waste everybody's time."

The first superhighways were built by two supertyrants: the Italian Autostrades under Benito Mussolini and the German Autobahn under Hitler himself. But the drive to build superhighways soon spread worldwide. After World War II there was a freeway construction boom in all the countries of the world that could afford it, and in some that could not.

This explosion in highway construction was not a result of the operation of the free market. To cite an example that has become legendary, in 1938 Los Angeles had the world's largest streetcar system. General Motors, in combination with Standard Oil and Firestone Tire, bought the company, shut it down, and tore out the tracks. Los Angeles was reconstructed as the world's premier automobile metropolis.

It was there that the drive-in restaurant, the drive-in movie, the three-car garage, the 17-car accident, the traffic jam and smog were invented. And all were broadcast lovingly to the world via Hollywood.

Today two-thirds of the land space in Los Angeles is devoted to the operation and storage of automobiles. GM and its associates went on to buy up streetcar lines all over the United States and close them down to make way for their own products.

But while the automobile manufacturers destroyed the rail and streetcar lines, they did not build the highways to replace them. Imagine how expensive automobiles would be if the manufacturers had to build and maintain the roads on which their commodity operates. But, with the exception of a few toll roads, it is taxpayers who pay.

To take another example from the United States: In 1956 the U.S. Congress authorized the construction of the National System of Interstate Highways, initially funded at $25 billion (¥2.65 trillion) and eventually costing twice that. It was the largest public works project ever undertaken.

(Part of this project was carried out in the area where I lived then. The crooked road leading east from San Francisco was replaced by a perfectly straight one, by cutting off the tops of a row of mountains in the Pacific Coast Range and shoving the dirt into the valleys between. This project involved more earth-moving than the Panama Canal.)

The result was a 40,000-plus mile (64,000 km) environmental catastrophe. Vast amounts of wilderness land were bulldozed under by it. Where it is guarded by wire fences it interdicts the migration routes of wild animals; where it is not, it is an animal slaughterhouse. Wherever it goes, the air is gray.

If you built a 48-lane highway around the Earth at the equator and put the world's 350 million automobiles on it, they would be jammed together bumper to bumper. For those cars to move would require at least four times as much space: a 192-lane highway.

If the automobile manufacturers have their way, in 50 years everybody in the world will be in their car going someplace. But will there be any "place" left to go?

Shukan ST: Feb. 11, 2000

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