What’s the Amish community’s stance on cars?

“To the extent that you are mobile in an automated or motorized way with something like a car or motorcycle or fast moving tractor, you’ve increased your radius of contact with other human beings, but at the same time you dilute the quality of contact within that radius.

So you can have more contact with a lot more people, but the quality of your relationships with those people, especially the people who are your immediate neighbors, is diluted. You don’t rely on them as much. It really drastically undermines the community.

The Beachy Amish — that’s a sect within the Amish — they decided to adopt cars. Then most of the young people left the group because they got exposed to the rest of the society and — poof! — they’re gone.”

Read more: Despite horses and buggies, Amish aren’t necessarily ‘low-tech’.

Disneyland’s Magic Highway USA (1958)

Magic highway usa “As in the past, the highway will continue to play a vital role in the progress of civilization. It will be our magic carpet, to new hopes, new dreams, and a better way of life for the future.”

Watch the movie. Previously: Magic Motorways (1939) / London Traffic Improvements (1938) / Roadtown (1910).

Metropolis II by Chris Burden

Metroplis II “The California artist Chris Burden may be in his 60s, but he is still playing with toys. The thing is, the older he gets the more outrageously complicated the toys become. ‘Metropolis II’ includes 1,200 custom-designed cars and 18 lanes.”

Cars as they should be: toys. Metropolis II by Chris Burden.


Parts of 1909 Automobiles

Rambler price list rear axle Rambler price list steer wheeling
group

Why Bicycles are Faster than Cars

why bicycles are faster than cars

“The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it.”

“The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their society’s time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.”

“Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well. The bicycle lifted man’s auto-mobility into a new order, beyond which progress is theoretically not possible.”

“Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two systems.”

Quoted form “Energy and Equity“, Ivan Illich, 1978. The image was found on the website Old Woodies. Previously: Cars, out of the way. More bicycle posts.

London Traffic Improvements (the Bressey Report, 1938)

London traffic improvements

In 1935 Sir Charles Bressey was appointed by Hore-Belisha, Minister of Transport, to make a comprehensive and systematic survey of the roads of Greater London. It was clear that the infrastructure required radical improvement to keep up with the expansion of traffic and Belisha said that Bressey’s report “would stir the imagination of the whole country”.

The report was published three years later and laid out a reconstruction scheme for London based on a detailed 30-year plan for highway development. Bressey’s plan to deal with traffic involved tunnels, overhead roads, new arterial and circular highways and ‘parkways’ linking the city to the rest of the country. Before any of this could be implemented the plan was interrupted by war and aerial bombardment. Nevertheless, many of Bressey’s ideas would influence post-war reconstruction and subsequent schemes for the capital’s reorganisation.

Source (if you’re in a UK school or library, you can access a movie about it).

Via Ptak Science Books, where you can see more illustrations of the “traffic improvements” outlined in the “Bressey Report”. Check out this blog, by the way, there is much more to be found (about 900 posts on the history of ideas and technology, to be precise…). It is written and illustrated by John Ptak, an antiquarian science bookseller.

Related: Magic Motorways, a similar plan for US cities.

London traffic improvements