Why is the U.S. so dependent on cars?

were in the best move today? It's Monday morning. Yeah, compared to Friday afternoons when usually record, there's a like change. But hey, I'm part up. You sound like it's the first week of the rest of our lives. Yeah, sadly enough. Um, Chuck, how did you get to work this morning? I drove to the subway, then took the subway to work. You took the subway, terrible. I drove to work, so let's go with me. Good for you. I'm like the vast

majority of at Lantin's driving to work. Yeah. Um, I remember there's the there was this huge This is ultra local, but I'm sure it happens all over the United States. There's this proposed rail line from love Joy way down south in this in the southern suburbs of Atlanta that was gonna come up to Atlanta proper city. Uh. And the people who came out against this came out against it like it was a proposal to murder every one

of everybody's kids, people who live in love Joy. No, it wasn't just a love Joy people in every county that this rail line was going to go through. I mean they were elected representatives that were coming out against it, like everybody was arguing against this public transportation. And simultaneously they were throwing their support between because there's horrible congestion

below the city. It's probably the worst in Atlanta. Yeah, they fought the Marty going too far north to I know, and and always the the and by the way, everyone Martha is our public rail system are sad. Sad public rail system it forms in in Atlanta is one of the major cities in the country. We have a cross we have a plus sign for a transit system. There's a couple of little UH lines that spur off of it now, but not much. I've never seen them. Yeah, yeah,

but yeah, north northeast and then straight north. And I should say in my defense. There's I could drive, I guess to you know, Art Center stop or something like that, and then hit the railness to right. Exactly. It's great for me though, it is, Chuck, you are well served by our transit system. But yeah, generally the argument against transit is, um that you know, the poor will use it to go No, No, they'll use it to go rob houses in the suburbs. Oh I thought they thought

they'd start living along the line. No. The argument I've always heard is that it will increase crime. So can't you just see people, you know, laden with flat screen t vs and you know all sorts of others. You know, they have the the burglar mask on and that money sack with the dollar sign on it. That they just came from some wealthy suburbanites house and now they're using public transit to make their getaway. Right. Um. So yeah,

that's one reason that it's stalled. But as I was saying this, to solve this congestion problem down south, the proposal is to make seventy five by seventy five, I think from five lanes to eleven lanes in each direction. You know, I I wish I had a stat to back this up. But I've always heard that making roads wider does not do much to East congestion. No, I've heard that as well. Cars will fill it. Yeah, it's kind of like, um, if you build it, they will

come right. It's like giving condoms to teenagers. They wouldn't have sex if you didn't give them condoms, but once you do, they're just like rabbits, you know. Ridiculous. Um, so chuck the the The debate continues, and I'm actually surprised after reading this article we're about to talk about, written by our esteem colleague, John Fuller of Stuff from the B Side. Yeah, very hip, young, soft spoken man. Um, that rail is even alive these days. Yeah. Have you

ever taken a train ride at like an Amtrak I have. Yeah, it's awesome. I think I went. I don't remember where I went. I was kind of young, but it was pretty cool. It's really cool. Yeah, I wish it were a little more comprehensive and cheaper and expensive. It is, and you also realize it's federally subsidized. Oh yeah, Amtrak is is subsidized by federal money, so you can pay for Amtrak pal. Yeah, I should take a do I get free tickets? Or anything catch on that you can't.

But let's talk about it. Man. If you look around, we take for granted just how much we rely on the car. Yeah. Like Fuller points out in this article, the very designs of our cities, of our shopping malls, and everything is made with the car and mine. It's hard to imagine a life without parking lots. And what if everything were street cars and subways and you know,

trains and things. I can't even conceive it. What if parking lots were green space, like you still had your shopping mall right, but it was just surrounded by like a park. That'd be awesome. It would be awesome. But it's too late. Not necessarily. There's a movement from mixed use development in walkable cities Atlanta. We have our own thing going yeah with the uh yeah, the belt line proposal, yes, which I got really excited about when I first started

hearing it, and then I read the finer points. It is great, but it's going to be finished when I'm like seventy. Yeah, it's like cool, Maybe I can have kids and grandkids will enjoy it. Hopefully it'll be wheelchair accessible for you. Yeah. Um, so well, let's do. Let's give a little background, right, okay, eighteen thirty two, New York. Okay, let's do it. We're in New York in eighteen thirties. There's newses everywhere. Um, there's the Irish are fighting one another.

It's crazy, so let's not spend too much time here. It's eighteen thirty two, and New York has just installed the first street rail line and it's horse drawn. So we see the little horsey right there, can you hear it? Yeah? Alright, let's get out of here. Chuck, Yeah, I see Daniel deay Lewis is come. Okay, So now my friend were in New Orleans only slightly less dangerous eighty five? What

do you mean slightly? And New Orleans has just opened its first street rail line, and Chuck, if you want to go ahead and flash forward with me to two thousand nine, take my hand. Okay, all right, here we are. The same rail line is still in use in New Orleans and it's just as dangerous here. Let's go back to the studio. So rail line have been around a

little while, a long while actually, and longer than the car. Um. Apparently there was a what is it called zeitgeist when a bunch of people come up with the same idea at the same time. That happened with the automobile Germans mainly well, yeah, and a guy named Gottlieb Daimler was the first. He is widely viewed as the first to come up with the real functioning automobile. Right, the kild gets you from point A to point b uh. And he named the car after his daughter, named Mercedes. Yep.

He hooked up with a guy named Carl Carl Benz and hold on, I've got to say, Chuck, hats off to you for your extra dedication to throwing that little German exci what was Yes, I thought it was interesting to think if it would end up being called the Daimler Benz said of the Mercedes Benz good name, Yeah, but certainly not now it's the iconic Mercedes ben so uh. They were the first ones, like you said, to come

up with a working car four right, uh huh. And years later they looked to America because we kind of perfected that that scene and started building highway. So they looked at us in there, how to build an auto bonn super highway. Yeah, And there was a guy who, again by historians is widely considered the man who did perfect that scene. As you put it, a guy named Henry Ford, industrialist, fascist, eugenicist, well at the very least supporter of eugenics, dentist. Why not. Probably in his fare

time he was something of a renaissance man um. And the reason he's credited is perfecting the automobiles because he applied the principle of the assembly line. A lot of people needed that term. Actually he did. He didn't come up with the assembly line itself. He did coin the term, but he applied that to car manufacturing and all of a sudden, you know, making one car by hand by one person, which took forever. They just popped it on a line and each person had their own job, and

he cranked out I think fourteen million cars. Yeah, between nineteen thirteen and nineteen twenty seven they built fourteen million Model Ts, which is a huge jump because just in uh, nineteen fifteen, there were only two million cars, and that was when there were about a hundred million people in the United States. Yeah, that's that's a lot of cars. Yeah, that's a that's especially for it having been considered um

kind of like a plaything of the rich. Yeah, it was almost like a toy and like a personal submarine is today. Sure, maybe so. And they weren't even uh that well liked at first because they were clunky and they smell bad. I know. John said that one of the early names nicknames for a car was a stink chariot, which I thought was pretty funny. Yeah, couldn't stink worse than horse manure? Or could it could? I guess it's a different kind of thing. I kind of like the

smell of horse manure. Yeah, but what if it was coming out like that was the emissions of the time, I'd be in heaven. How do you control the emissions? I wonder? With the corks right or like, don't do like a Kramer did in Seinfeldwani and Ernie fed the horse rabby all the years. Um, that was a tangent u Chuck. Let's talk about rail lines. Yes, we can't forget about rail and say actually opened up the country. You know, back before then, John Candy was in a

covered wagon and that's how you really got around. You ended up devolving into cannibalism. It was nothing but hardship. There were no roads. Really, basically, you had to have a murder rap on your back east to take a covered wagon. Uh out west. Well, there were no inner states and freeways, there were no local roads. You were literally a trailblazer, which is why Portland has that name Trailblazer. Interesting. Yeah,

well that's an assumption of mine of facts. So, um, the railways open this up and actually they're wildly successful. They actually are are are considered to have created the modern and austrial state of the United States that we view it totally right. Um, they opened up the continent and uh, I think one point two billion people were using rail lines every year by and that was at its peak, peaked in and that's what that's about a hundred and six million people living in the United States

then carrying one point two billion. So it's pretty clear that you know, every American was probably traveling by rail several times a year or maybe several times a week or day, who knows. And it also opened up the rest of the country too, ordinary everyday people. Um, they before it was pretty much horse drawn carriage, maybe a Model T but with with the absence of roads in between towns, not very comfortable now no, and they were bumpy, Um,

people just kind of stuck around their town. Yeah, people didn't even leave it where they were born their entire life. There are people who do that still today, which is just weird. Yeah. I remember when I took my grandmother, who lived to be a hundred and one and passed away a couple of years ago, when we took her to the ocean for the first time. Dude, she was like in her seventies, Yeah, what do you think of it?

She walked out and forget it was like twelve. She walked out to the ocean and stood there and went, well, it's big, I swear to God, that's all she said. Granny Bryant's famous quote, and that we actually called her Granny brand That's funny, did you? And she pretty much turned around and was like, all right, let's let's go home. That was it, go back to Tennessee. Yeah. Yeah. And

once you've seen one ocean, you've seen them all pure Yeah. Um. So rail lines are really making a huge impact, but they kind of fell to the wayside, even though cities like New York and Boston um started offering commuter stops, but it was still it was a train. It wasn't all that convenient. It was really good for long distances. But with the some some refinement of the automobile and some huge marketing campaigns and lobbying and some unholy alliances. Yeah,

we'll get into that. Um, the automobile started to take on more play, more and more and more of a role streamline into the manufacturing they of course, like any manufacturing process, I got a little cheaper too. That's huge consumer once prices started coming. Ultimately, no matter how played upon your brain is by by pr firms, UM, no matter how little of a choice you're given by huge monopolies, Ultimately it comes down to the consumer's choice. It's something

that's really easily forgotten. Yeah. We talked about that in our econ audio. Yeah, definitely. Um. And when consumers are given a choice, they almost invariably choose the cheaper options. So when cars started to become competitive price wise with maybe rail service that kind of thing, Uh, people started buying more and more cars, right, And you didn't have

to depend on the rail services schedule. Of course, all of a sudden you were in control of when you went somewhere and how far you traveled, and you didn't have to worry about what the rail line said about it, yeah, which is still a criticism today of public transit. Cars offer freedom. It's as simple as that. They also offer more privacy, to which I think a lot of people value, right, and an ability to h engage in road rage, a national pastime here in the United States, which is a

little more removed than subway rage. If you remember, what was that girl's named soldier girl? Yeah, who went off again on Marta or beloved Marta. Yeah, you can find that on YouTube. Still ensure what what would they type in chuck Soldia girl? I think s O U L j A if you want to watch a nice subway rant.

Nothing like road rage though. Um so, rail lines is kind of fading into the background as far as public transportation goes and taking on more and more of a role as um, you know, goods, good transportation, commodities, transportation right right. But there's also those street rail lines that we were talking about. They were actually most cities, whether huge or not, had public transportation in the form of trolley's.

L A Dude was one of the big I had one of the biggest trolley and street car lines, the red cars and the yellow cars what they were called, and man they connected and This is way back then. They connected like five counties and it was really vast and they were pretty much squashed. But that's what we're getting to now. This is arguably the death the death blow of public transportation. National city Lines, National city Lines. This is where I think it really comes down to.

Let's go ahead and say that we found in our research, um two views of this. There. I read an article by a guy who says that this this the scandal is so not everybody is is on board that this actually happened the way that it's said, but that we

do have some facts. Let's do it, chuck. National city Lines. Yes, National city Lines was a group that formed made up of I think it was about eight companies, but that included General Motors, Firestone, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, so clearly the big hitters and what would be the burgeoning auto business. And they basically what they wanted to do was buy up the street car systems and replace them with busses. They did, and they did it quietly.

What they did was, um, it wasn't just busses, but like all the tires on these buses were Firestone, all of the gas put into these buses with standard oil and all the busses were manufactured by GM. Yes, so basically all of a sudden automobiles, whether it was a bus or a model TS, that was the way to get around. Yeah, the trolley line was dead and it's called is referred to as the Great American street car Scandal. Right. And also if that sounds vaguely familiar, Um, you may

have seen who framed Roger Rabbit. I was going to mention that that informed one of the sub plots loosely, loosely masked, but definitely based on that that whole scene. So back in seven there was a guy um who was actually a trolley enthusiast. I guess he was a wealthy He was from a wealthy family. His name was E. J. Quinby. Uh. He was a naval officer. He sounds wealthy. He was, but he bucked the family trend of just being wealthy uh and took a job managing trolley lines in New

Jersey after as his first job after college. Right. I guess. Then he went into the navy after the war or during the war, um, and he noticed what National City Lines was doing because he was right there, he'd been there while you know, they were buying up all these

trolley services. So he figured out what was going on, and he wrote, um this letter with all this detailed evidence to every person he could think of had anything to do with federal, state, municipal elected officials and transportation. Anybody who had any kind of thing it got a letter from this guy across the country. He started this whole thing for people to start paying attention to this. Yeah. Really,

I didn't know that. Yeah, a lot of people say that he would have it may not have ever been noticed that he not brought it to everyone's attention, and he wasn't. Remember he was from a wealthy family. But um he he did such a thorough job that National City Lines was indicted by the federal government or the Justice Department for um anti trust for breaking anti trust laws. Yeah, the Sherman Anti Trust Act, right, So okay, now we've got him by the short and curlies. Obviously National City

Lines is going to go under. These people are going to all be taken out behind the wood shed and shot in the back of the head for trying to One of the charges was monopolized ground transportation in the United States, which is pretty huge very huge. They were actually acquitted of that charge, Yes they were, and they were found guilty of a lesser charge of guilty of monopolizing the sale of buses, which which, let me come on, Yeah, they were found guilty. What happened, Chuck? They were fined

five thousand dollars. The whole thing, the National City Lines was just owned by GM. This firestone in standard oil was find five thousand dollars, which in seven even wasn't that much for corporate, not for all these corporations at all. The executives surely had to pay, right, Chuck, they did, dude,

how much? One dollar? One dollar piece a symbolic fine of one dollar, and from an outsider looking in, you would see this lesser charge quote unquote, it's pretty much the charge, and they just I don't know how they got around it. I don't know if there was some nefarious bribes or anything like that. I know so that some conspiracy folks think so, but it's still hasn't been found out. Really, So the the fact that that case was, you know, tried and convicted in ninety seven, it's still

it didn't catch the public eye all that much. It was actually a district attorney or federal attorney I think named Bradford Snell, who in nineteen seventy four testified before the Senate and really drummed up public ire about this occurrence. That it happened, uh, you know, a couple of decades before, so that it wasn't really considered a scandal or a huge nefariest plot until Bradford Snell came about, right, and again still not everybody's on the same page about whether

this was a nefariest plot. No one actually disputes that GM and in National City Lines were trying to sell busses across the country. But they're saying monopolized ground transportation prove it. Uh, you can't really prove motivation like that, or clearly the federal prosecutors couldn't. But as as one guy pointed out in a Mountain Express, which is a paper out of Asheville, and I read a cool article in there about this um, the result was still the

same for the trolley car. So whether that was the intent or not, that was still the result. And I think one of the reasons why this became such a point of or source of irritation among the public when Snell came out because that was nineteen seventy four, which was kind of right in the middle of the energy crisis, wasn't it. Well, that was part of it, but also it was around the birth of the the environmental protection movement we have like the Nasson e p A. And

people are starting to think about that kind of thing. Yeah, and I think also faith in corporations that had been lost time and time again. People were kind of getting fed up with it. Right, Yeah, it's a good point. So, Chuck, we were talking about public transportation and cars being in a horse race, uh, to see who was going to serve or which was going to serve the United States. Right, there's also another sub race going on between what exactly

would fuel those cars. Yeah, oil or gasoline or ethanol? Right. Henry Ford design in the Model T to run on either one, which is pretty interesting to think back, this country could have gone in a whole different direction. Man, it totally could have. Ford was actually a huge proponent of ethanol. He called it the fuel of the future. Uh, and it was, which was kind of weird because it

had been around for several decades already. It used to power all sorts of equipment I think Ford also said that, um, one one year's yield of an acre of potatoes can be used to fuel the machinery to cultivate that acre for the next century. But we went with gas. We did go with gas. And do you know why, I'm not sure. I know that gas was just kind of a dirty byproduct at the time of oil crew to oil production. Yeah, they were looking for kerosene because they

wanted kerosene to light things. Um, and no one really had any use for gas right right at the time. But once some oil fields opened up. You ever heard of a little movie called There Will Be Blood. Once some oil fields opened up in Texas around that time, Uh, oil suddenly became cheaper, Gas became cheaper, advances in the refining process became cheaper, and ethanol was more expensive. It was as simple as that. And Daniel day Lewis once

again drinks our milkshake, yes, which we've mentioned before. I will eat your a long time ago, so chuck the I guess with the National city Line scandal going on, there was one real last nail in the coffin that came from a president, right. Yeah, that was you know, the cars weren't in full swing. People were digging it and what we needed now was major interstates to connect

everyone together. And in President Dwight Eisenhower, he signed the Interstate Highway Act, which created about forty two miles of highway from coast to coast and the rest is history, literally the history. UM also that that one act really changed the American economy a lot too. Either way we spend our money, not just that, I mean think about um, fast food is one sure roadside attractions through food billboards. Johnald talking about billboards in the article, which I thought

was pretty uh pretty cool. Yeah, I came across the study by these two guys named the Shapiro and Hassett, and they they reckon. I guess you could put it that every year cars in the highway system, just automobile use generates three and fourteen points seven billion dollars for businesses in the United States. That's direct. Like you've drive up to a McDonald's, um, you drive to you know, the mall. This is the fact that automobiles exist generates

that you know what. You know what else happened to help this along? They started, Uh, new zoning laws were created and when businesses were built and for the first time parking spaces were required, and uh, you know a certain amount of parking spaces per business which still exist today.

And what that what happened was they some cities like abandoned sidewalks altogether at this point, and they pushed businesses back further from the road in favor of parking lots, obviously, and uh, places that were pretty easily accessible by foot or by whatever, you know, bicycle, all of a sudden they were a little further away and they weren't as accessible and the the only way he'd get there it was

by your car. So thanks a lot for that too. Yeah, it looks like, uh, I don't know public transit does it have a choice chance. Uh, Well, it's making a comeback now, obviously because gas prices are so so high now and the car car production has reached I think a tenure low last year, John said, dropped eight percent last year, but that was because gas was five bucks a gallon. And everybody you remember Martyr Ridership went up through the roof that like double or tripled, and then

gas goes back down. Everybody's like, what the heck is Marta? Yeah, but I think people are starting to realize a little more a couple with the environmental impact than public transports coming back a little bit, but it'll it'll never overtake car. Consider this the the Cash for Clunkers program right in and of itself, supports automobiles. The recently defunct as of today. I think, actually, did they go through all three billion

dollars already? I don't know. It was hugely successful. I know they sold the an estimated quarter of a million cars with just the first one billion dollars. That's a lot of cars. And I mean, yeah, you say four four miles per gallon? I think was the requisite? Was it? Yeah? Weird? But yeah, So the American obsession with cars continues, and answer this question, why are we so dependent on it?

How did it become the dominant form of transportation? Because it was cheaper at the right time and that's what consumers want. So if you want to know more about this, there's all sorts of cool links on the l on my page on this article. Type in automobile dominant form of transportation in a handy search bar at how stuff works dot com. And Chuck, let's plug real quick too. What are we plugging? This time's plug? The blogs in the webcast. Josh and I have a shared blog called

stuff you should Know. You can access it on the right side of the home page or website. Yes, and we write about interesting things and newsy items and people getting a little scrappy debates. It's good. It's what we do then. Yeah, and social media, my friend. Yeah. And the Friday blog recap is getting a lot of traffic now. People, we welcome you. If you want to say something about the show to to log on on Friday, it's in Uh tell us what you think? Yeah. Uh. And the

webcast is live at one pm Eastern Time every Wednesday. Video. Yeah, you can find that on your blog post at that day. It's also on new stream and Facebook. Right, So there's the plugging. Plugging is over, which means it's time for listener mail. Listener mail, Josh, I'm just gonna call this uh. We shall use all powers for good. We have a regular kind of a email buddy, Christopher that writes in a lot and he's a really cool guy. And he wrote in and asked us to give a little shout

out to blood platelet donation. He is a He and his family have been donating platelets for years and he says beginning at the end of August, it's a very critical time when blood and platelets are needed the most. And people know a lot about blood donations and how important that is, but few people know about platelet donation and other forms of donation that the Red Cross and State Blood Services take and what they're used for. Platelets,

for example, are used for chemotherapy and leukemia patients. These treatments destroyed platelets, which are essential for the clouding of blood, which is very big deal, and patients frequently require platelet transfusions to allow their blood to clot if they get injured. Platelets are needed all the time, especially with the increase of cancer and leukemia cases in recent years. Blood Services also accepts red blood cells and plasma to help other

patients and people we need. So his family has a freakishly high platelet count and when they donate one single donation goes to help three or four people in need. Cool, pretty cool, and most people single donation goes to help at least two patients. So he said, it takes a little longer, about an hour and forty five minutes, which is one reason why they don't get as many donations. And uh, that's just the process though, and they really need it. So we just want to encourage folks to

uh he actually wanted just the podcast about it. So maybe we'll do that one day. But go give blood platelets people. Did you know that my girlfriend's blood saves infants? Really? She lacks the type of her pies that most people get by age five. Um so, but you're not supposed to get it before age five. Very few people, um are without this type of herpes. She's one of them. So her blood is used directly to save infants. How

crazy is that? Did you know that a gaze from my wife saves baby puppies all from all over the world that she looks upon them. That's very cool. She should exercise, should beat that UNI? Okay, um yeah, you me, I want to see a UNI and Emily saved down right, let's do that. So donate blood platelets and blood and plasma and import and Josh and and puppies and Josh

and are gonna go do that today? All right? If you have an email about what you can save, send it to Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot Com. Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the house. Stuff works dot Com home page brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you