California’s Car Culture

In response to The Times’ series on “Car Culture: How Automobiles Shaped Southern California, front page, Oct. 1-4:

Frank Clifford has done an excellent job (“A Driving Passion for Life Style”, Oct. 1). But he’s left out the juicier parts--where our automobiles are not exactly the objects of our love (except for the adolescents among us). The relationship is more like that between john, prostitute and pimp where both we and our automobiles play all the roles.

The truth is that we have no choice. We are absolutely dependent on our cars as the result of the bankruptcy of our transit systems. There is no mystery; the huge subsidies enjoyed by the motorist and by the trucking industry have effectively killed all alternatives.

Clifford has identified Southern California as the scene of the worst absurdities. He’s mostly wrong; we’re only the worst by a small margin. Southern California is the prototype for the whole nation in this and other respects.

The freeway system is a grotesque and costly failure. And our bus system is no great shakes. Congestion and air pollution are not the only egregious effects. Hasn’t anyone yet made the connection between automobile dependency and the ghetto syndrome?

And has anyone yet recognized the correlation between our expenditures on automobiles, trucks and highways on the one hand, and our very low household savings rate (as compared to the Japanese and the Germans, for instance) on the other? And the connection of our lack of savings to our fading ability to compete in world markets (as well as in our own)?

The truth is our “love affair” with the automobile has identified causes; causes that can be corrected. Unless these subsidies are removed and marketplace constraints are applied, more of our adolescents will go down the tubes, more criminals will be generated in our slums, more carbon dioxide will be added to the planet’s atmosphere. And more Exxon Valdezes will wind up on reefs.

STANLEY HART

Altadena