Strangling the Golden Goose

I have a partially written blog post that I may never finish about the 1964 children's novel The Pushcart War and Jane Jacobs, which seem linked to me in more ways than time and place.

In the meantime, I came across a quote from Jacobs' book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). It was written by the journalist Harrison Salisbury for Time magazine, and Jacobs used it in a chapter called "Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles":

The drawback is that as more and more space is allotted to the automobile, the goose that lays the golden eggs is strangled. Enormous areas go from the tax rolls and are rendered unsuitable for productive economic purposes. The community's ability to foot the ever-multiplying costs of freeways dwindles... At the same time traffic movement becomes more and more random... It is from Los Angeles that the most anguished cries are heard for rescue from the rubber-tired incubi. It is Los Angeles that threatens to prohibit new cars unless they are fitted with devices to prevent the discharge of smog-creating hydrocarbon fractions... It is in Los Angeles that serious officials say that the system is exhausting the elements necessary for human life—land, air and water (page 355).

Salisbury, like Jacobs, has been proven correct in ways that were barely imaginable at the time.

Transportation is land use. And too often, bad land use.