Automotive city

An automotive city or auto city is a city that facilitates and encourages the movement of people via private transportation, through 'physical planning', e.g., built environment innovations (street networks, parking spaces, automobile/pedestrian interface technologies and low density urbanised areas containing detached dwellings with driveways or garages) and 'soft programming' e.g., social policy surrounding city street usage (traffic safety/automobile campaigns, automobile laws and the social reconstruction of streets as reserved public spaces for the automobile). "The old common law that every person, whether on foot or driving, has equal rights in all parts of the roadway must give way before the requirements of modern transportation" – McClintock, a Consultant for Los Angeles Traffic Commission in 1924. (Norton, 2008, p. 164) Multiple competing views have attempted to explain the rapid dominance of automobile use over alternative modes of transportation in North America in the early 20th century. Two compelling arguments are: That the automobile was selected by city dwellers, as the liberated and preferred mode of transportation. That the automobile was deliberately promoted, at the expense of mass transit systems, by the corporate or professional elites, guided by interests in the automotive industry (see General Motors streetcar conspiracy). While both arguments are nuanced, the basic principles behind each – advocacy of private transportation and advocacy of automobile production and consumption – informed the American automobile manufacturing boom of the early 1900s. By the late 1920s, the automobile industry was producing millions of cars each year, its surging growth due in part to the sociology of industrial phenomena related to Fordism. The creation of the automotive city may be due, in part, to an attack on old customs by the good roads movement, seeking to pave the way for the rapidly expanding automobile market—and to the triumph of individual liberties, associated with consumption and the free market, over restrictive governance of the built environment and its use.