Nearly fifty years ago, a friend of mine named Ron Buel (who at the time was the chief of staff to Portland city commissioner Neil Goldschmidt) wrote a book titled Dead End: The Automobile in Mass Transportation. Buel argued that cars harmed cities and the people living in them, and at the time he and other critics of the automobile seemed to make a lot of sense.
Click image to download a four-page PDF of this brief.
After all, in 1965, Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed had shown that cars were death traps, killing almost as many Americans each year as ten years of the Viet Nam war. A look out a Portland window on a sunny day showed that cars were pollutomobiles, putting a grey layer of unhealthy smog over the city that was so thick people couldn’t see Mt. Hood, 50 miles away. In 1973, the OPEC oil embargo would make Americans painfully aware that their automobiles were also gas hogs. Continue reading
