3 Takeaways From Ivan Illich’s Critique of Cars

West Lake Hills, TX, as seen from Austin. (Source: Flickr/Matthew Rutledge.)

For three weeks out of the month of July, my husband and I worked as dog sitters in West Lake Hills, a small suburban city six miles from downtown Austin, Texas. Established in 1953, it’s a small city (four square miles) with fewer than 5,000 residents; 40 miles of city roads; and its own school district, fire department, and police force. Based on my frequent siting of grand, cliff-hanging homes and plenty of Teslas, it seems there are plenty of resources to keep West Lake Hills’s 200 business going. 

Once we unpacked and set up in our guestroom, we set out to find the nearest grocery store and were pleasantly surprised to discover it was less than a mile away in the same shopping center as my husband’s temporary gym. Over the next few days, a similar pattern would emerge: we would need to run an errand and I would be pleased to find the shop in a relatively short radius. 

Need to go to FedEx and the UPS store? They were just a few blocks from each other! Whole Foods? Barely five minutes away, not far from a great coffee shop. The mall to pick up new shirts and socks? Ten minutes and, by the way, the parking lot for JCPenney also hosts the farmer’s market on Saturdays and is located on the same route as the grocery store. The coffee shop I frequented the most was less than five minutes away, next door to a drug store and sandwich shop. In short: most of our day-to-day errands could be executed within less than three miles of our home. 

The one downside? None of these places were accessible by foot or bus. I exclude biking because…look at the name of the town: Westlake Hills. Getting around on my trusty French racer just wouldn’t have been an option. It was clear that this little neighborhood, despite its heavy reliance on chain stores, was the exact kind of pattern conducive to e-biking. It was a snapshot of the kind of design that more neighborhoods could benefit from and that echoes the historic streetcar suburbs that once dominated American cities.

That’s the upside. The downside is that we did not have an e-bike at our disposal, which meant we were captive to our trusty Honda Pilot for every single errand. The experience of making multiple “tiny trips” a week in our car to destinations less than three miles away reminded me of an Ivan Illich essay I read recently containing some of his critique of cars and their accompanying design patterns and culture. 

The critique of car dependence is nothing new for Strong Towns readers. Most of us are probably well-versed in the implications of car dependence on our environment, land use, and pocketbooks. What I appreciate about Illich’s critique is how he draws attention to the bigger picture, making me think more deeply about the tradeoffs and illusions baked into North America’s transportation industry. Here are three interesting takeaways.

1. Cars, like all technology, reshape our perception of ourselves and our expectations of the world. 

From Illich:

The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role. To "gather" for him means to be brought together by vehicles. He takes freedom of movement to be the same as one's claim on propulsion.

Here, Illich proposes that our use of technological tools is not one way. Part of what makes various technologies and tools so powerful is the mutual relationship between tools and their users. All tools “work on us” by influencing our view of the world, of ourselves, of the various contexts that we inhabit, and of time. All tools shape our expectations. We can see this principle at play when considering technologies at use in our everyday lives: the air conditioner, the microwave, the Internet, the smartphone. 

And yes, we can see this with the automobile. Most people, myself included, subconsciously expect our movements around cities to be speedy, convenient, and efficient…desires that are not bad in themselves, yet which emerge so naturally that we hardly notice. We inherit such values from being born into a car-centric world, but no matter how natural such expectations may feel, they are not beyond debate. When considering all the tools that fill our lives: are we happy with the values they embody and the way they shape our expectations? Do the expectations they “bake into” our minds lead to more meaningful lives, or more meaningful presence in our communities?

(Source: Unsplash/Ryan Searle.)

2. When it comes to the car-centric transportation industry, the driver is the product, not the customer.

Illich:

The transportation industry has … reduced equality, restricted mobility to a system of industrially defined routes, and created time scarcity of unprecedented severity. As the speed of their vehicles crosses a threshold, citizens become transportation consumers…

Watching your average car commercial, you could be easily forgiven for thinking drivers are the customer. Across the screen flash sexy images of sparkling cars accompanied by husky voices assuring us that this machine will liberate us, expand our freedom, and position us to lead more beautiful, easy, enviable lives of self-determination. But dig a little deeper into car ownership, and you’ll start to understand Illich’s suspicion. 

Americans now have to spend $10,000–12,000 on a car every year. Car-oriented design routinely exempts children, teens, and seniors from safe, self-directed movement around the city. Meanwhile, the poor are left to configure their lives around uncomfortable and unreliable public transit, and our cities are forced into unbelievable levels of wastefulness to accommodate them. Rather than adding value to the consumer by improving their freedom, time efficiency, ability to explore, and connectedness to their city, our car-centric transportation industry does the opposite. 

Drivers are not the customer, they are the product. Our participation in the game of car centricity is essential to keep countless industries going. Why else do you think alternative modes of transit are not heartily integrated into our local transit plans? In order to run our errands, we have to spend much more time and money using a car than we would if we could hop on a bus or a bike. And that is the point. Auto-oriented transit is organized to extract as much from the user as possible. How exactly is this liberating?   

3. When evaluating the helpfulness of local transit options, we should measure helpfulness by time utility instead of speed or distance traveled.

Illich:

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 percent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 percent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of lifetime for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.

With these numbers, Illich presents a new way of looking at the tradeoffs we accept with a car-dominant transit system. He looks at the ratio of time invested to not just miles, but the utility we extract from that investment. If driving around for three hours allows me to travel 15 miles at 30–45 mph and accomplish three errands, Illich would focus less on the mileage and speed and more on the utility: should it really have cost me three hours (not to mention the gas) to accomplish these three errands, or is there a scenario in which I could have accomplished them in one half or one third of that time? 

Auto-oriented thinking would focus on the mileage and speed: look at how much faster I can travel! Look at how far I can go! But if that mileage is mostly just a product of land use laws that spread destinations apart, then it’s a deceptive metric and one that traps cities into thinking that adding more car infrastructure is the only solution to any mobility-related challenges. This would be an example of what Illich calls a radical monopoly: a system in which a tool is presented as the solution to a problem that it causes in the first place. In our cities, cars are presented as the solution to sprawl, dangerous roads, and disconnected neighborhoods. But these design patterns exist because they are necessary to mandate the purchase and use of cars. 

Real transit innovation would require setting different goals and setting out to solve real problems, not problems created to ensure the purchase of a machine. The goal for local transit systems shouldn't be to cover more speed at a faster distance. That’s suitable for traveling the world, not for running errands. When thinking about local transit systems, the goal should be to give people back their time and empower them to get more done in less of it. 

The Takeaways

For too long, cars and auto-centric design have reigned with unquestioned supremacy in our cities and towns. It’s beyond time to rethink that. If we really want our cities to be financially strong, equitable, and beautiful containers for human life, we should seriously question this status quo. And we can start that process by examining the values and expectations embedded in cars as tools, by thinking more deeply about who the car-centric transportation system is really serving, and by evaluating the promises made in terms of benefits. If our system is operating more like a radical monopoly, this is not a win for us, for our cities, or for future generations.

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