The Superhighway
By DOUGLAS LUMMIS
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高速道路
高速道路
イタリアやドイツで始まった高速道路の建設は
世界でブームとなり、環境に大きな被害を与えた。
このままいくと地球はどうなるのだろうか。
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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
(C) All rights reserved
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