It is difficult to understate the way in which a car-centric city deteriorates the quality of life for all of its inhabitants, and this deterioration cuts right across class lines, though as usual the disadvantages are more heavily stacked the lower class you occupy.
We could go on indefinitely describing the bubble-like qualities of the urban sprawl that accompanies the proliferation of the automobile, wherein soaring maintenance costs follow in the footsteps of short termist public/private development outwards, and disfavored races and classes of people are abandoned within chunks of "sacrifice zones" where business and industry have pulled out, and the destruction of the land through paving and strip-malling have rendered those vacated zones as basic deserts.
The traffic pollution settles alongside the freeways and into the basins, where the not-so-well-to-do are shunted into settled clouds of poisonous gas and gradually eaten by cancer, and those wealthy enough to take most advantage of the road system have the levity to hover above the smog on the high real estate hillsides.
But even those wealthy enough to own vehicles are entered into a grinding commute that wreaks spiritual devastation wherever it stretches. If you talk to a disgruntled person in Southern California, and you ask what it is they don't like about the place, it is more than likely you'll get something like, "I love the weather, but it is too expensive here, and the traffic..."
It is true, if you are driving in Los Angeles, at any time of day, you can find entire stretches of clogged freeway, with stopped vehicles and red brakelights curving far into the horizon. In a curious twist of language, the "freeway" has become an endless stream of constraint, and with every multi-million dollar widening project, on and off ramp project, or traffic lighting project, the volume and velocity of the flows are increased, and there emerges a faithful augmentation of car counts on the road until the new channels are once again filled and clogged.
Trapped in their glass and steel cages, separated by sight and sound from others, everyone is dehumanized in each others' eyes, and constantly poked and prodded by the stress of stop and start, and the fear of financial ruin or even death. Each vehicle like a soda can, repeatedly shaken and passed around, and you have this transportation system overlaying the workplaces and the schools, sites of daily humiliation and degradation.
Here is but one glimpse of the general environment we have built. And we sit back and wonder as all that built up pressure pops off, a regular pitter patter. It isn't a home we're collectively producing and reproducing, but a great thunder storm. Or some such.
