On the rare occasions that I drive, I drive a 2002 Saturn, which I bought used for a few grand from the surviving wife of a dead, distant relative. With the exception of the time it was stolen by the City of Pittsburgh for a couple of days, it's been a fine car, and as I average no more than a couple thousand miles a year, a large portion of those from weekend visits to my folks out in the country, I expect it to last me beyond the twilight of the Saturn brand in the appropriately apocalyptic year of 2012. As for GM in general:
The bankruptcy of a once-proud auto giant that helped to define the nation’s car culture and played a part in creating the American middle class immediately rippled across the country, part of a process that the president said would take “a painful toll on many Americans” but lead ultimately to a strong company ready to compete in the 21st century.I would write a moderately less panegyrical obituary, given GM's dastardly influence in the destruction of Pittsburgh's street cars--and plenty of other cities' trams and trolleys besides. America's "car culture" was the root of the current intersecting crises in our economy, and it should never escape our attention that the auto industry in this sense catalyzed its own ultimate destruction. In reshaping the lived geography of America, the car turned the neighborhood into the subdivision and the downtown into the highway-accessed surface-level parking lot. People blame the car for the decline of the American city, but to my mind it is even more responsible for the more severe and irreversible decline of the American town. In my own state, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, for their problems, are nevertheless doing okay, and it doesn't require undue optimism to see them both thriving and prospering in the future. But a tour of the towns in between, from the bombed-out remains of the Monongahela Valley through the industry-less slums of Scyulkilll reveals communities in irreversible and terminal decline.
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I see "GM destroyed my city's streetcars" factoid trotted out all over the place, but is it any more true than "google killed the newspaper"? Sure, both true on some level, but they also obscure the fact that people, even before those streetcars were gone, were THRILLED to pay large sums to buy an unreliable car just so they didn't have to share a seat with a phlegmatic negro widow.
I suspect GM was just giving us what we wanted, right up until those sexy Asian tigers showed what real skill could provide.
Perhaps if Google had set up a shell company to purchase and intentionally undermine newspapers, then maybe.
I dunno....The background of the story seems less dramatic: a failing industry, beaten down by antitrust battles, was picked up cheap by a young upstart.
Maybe it won't be Google then. It'll be Amazon, buying up local newspapers, kill their paper editions, and sell digital subscriptions. If only they had a device you could download it on to...
The river and its namesake valley are actually spelled as they are sounded: "Skoogle."
You know, it's fun to make fun of the idea that Google as a corporate entity is literally responsible for the decline and possible demise of American newspapers, and it is likewise easy to hew to the other standard line of criticism, that their death will be the result of a decline in quality and readership that is correlatively but not causally linked to both new models of information distribution and declining revenues, but let me put it to you and ask: do you really disagree that Google, taken as a metonym for the advent of the internet as a mass medium, killed newspapers by making their models for both generating income and distributing information obsolete? Because I, for one, do not.
Of course I agree. But just as people seem happy to trade the classifieds for craigslist, people were trading in crowded, slow streetcars long before GM tried to monopolize selling bus tires.
I don't like eating my cereal in front of my laptop any more than I like having to get in my car just to buy a half gallon of 1% milk, but neither one is reasonably blamed on a huge conspiracy.
But your original conclusion was spot on: once people could reasonably drive out of their crappy little towns, most people never came back. And once that happened, globalization followed, and with it cheap imports and air conditioning and yay.
And so, you see, when GM et al formed a shell company, then bought up and destroyed the trolly lines, it was all for our own good and we wanted them to do it anyway. And that's why I always vote Democrat.
Could it possibly be that the decline of crappy little towns is because they are crappy little towns?
Would the author prefer to be walking out to the country to visit his "folks?" Or maybe taking a reliable horse-and-buggy?
The car as technology is not the problem, nor the car companies. Poor public policy and non-existent urban-planning, plus lack of investment into basic services like housing, and education on the micro level and economic hubris on the macro level contributed to the decline of your precious mon valley towns. But the car? Please. It's the most amazing, beautiful invention of the last century.
Anonymous 10:40...How can "urban planning" make up for the fact that cars take an awful lot of room, and that public-provided infrastructure will encourage people to use said infrastructure ('cause it's effectively "free," unlike the streetcar tracks).
How in the world can you say there has not been "investment" in housing? Perhaps misinvestment, but come on...no investment in housing?
Your beautiful invention is beautiful, but it imposes severe and growing costs.
Would the author prefer to be walking out to the country to visit his "folks?" Or maybe taking a reliable horse-and-buggy?Or, perhaps, he could have taken the interurban. Electric rail! 100 years ago!
I'm certain we'll dream up another fucked up situation to get ourselves into. always have, always will. I try not to take it so hard any more.
"It's the most amazing, beautiful invention of the last century."
Or, even, the century before last.
"a tour of the towns in between, from the bombed-out remains of the Monongahela Valley"
Elimination of any and all restrictions on the mining and use of coal as a fuel would bring the Mon Valley back in a hurry, if not an instant.
"America's "car culture" was the root of the current intersecting crises in our economy"
If America, whatever it's problems, wasn't in exponentially better shape than most (maybe all) places without a "car culture", we might be at risk of buying nonsense like this.
"the auto industry in this sense catalyzed its own ultimate destruction"
The auto industry catalyzed it's own destruction by assuming massive legacy costs. As a union member (albeit not in that industry), I can tell you I will never, ever vote in favor of a contract that includes a defined benefit retirement in lieu of higher pay, having learned the hard way that it can vanish in an instant (and no, what I'll get from the PBGC, while greatly appreciated, will not even approach replacing what I had).
"the car turned the neighborhood into the subdivision"
What's the difference?
Whatever you might think about his other views, Half Sigma is right on this one: A safe, walkable urban neighborhood with sufficient commercial development to make car ownership unnecessary is a luxury good very few people (and even fewer families) can afford.
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