Our Cars Are Driving Us to Dystopia

It takes many different ingredients to mix up a proper dystopia; the only requirements, really, are a ruined landscape, an eroding society, and a yawning chasm between the remaining haves and have-nots. The dystopias we typically imagine result from epidemics, environmental degradation, overpopulation, war, and, as in the most recent example Elysium, income inequality.

Here in the US, there's another, more banal force driving us to dystopia: our own cars. Building a suburb-centric civilization to accomodate our cars has, in many ways, left us on the brink--socially, economically, and environmentally. That suburban sprawl that seemed so safe and luxurious in the mid-twentieth century is proving to have disastrous consequences here in the beginning of the 21st.

We already know that if current trends towards higher oil prices continue, the suburbs may turn into slums. The poverty rate in suburban areas is rising twice as fast as in urban locales, and without alternative transportation many communities will end up cut-off and stuck. And a new study by Harvard and Berkely sociologists recently found that neighborhoods that develop around cars actually limit upward economic mobility, too.

The cities where the poor residents are least likely to climb out of poverty are also often the most sprawling ones, the report finds. Spread-out Atlanta is dead last, for instance: Someone born in the bottom fifth income strata there has only a 4 percent chance of reaching the top.

Bankrupt Detroit, the beleaguered birthplace of the modern automobile industry, is also home to sprawling neighborhoods that are only accessible by car. Someone born poor in the Motor City has only a 5 percent chance of joining the more affluent reaches of society. The researchers have mapped all the results across the country, for their Equality of Opportunity Project.

Why is this happening? There are a number of reasons behind the phenomenon. Paul Krugman argues that neighborhoods that demand cars for transportation strand the poor, rendering employment opportunities elsewhere in the city out of reach. To hear the economist tell it, without cars or good public transportation—which is lacking in places like Detroit and Atlanta—your suburban-style neighborhood becomes an island.

Yves Englar, meanwhile, takes the argument a step further, noting that cars are "chaining would-be political actors to their jobs with debt, reducing intermixing between different social groups while in transit and atomizing communities into suburbs."

This is the sort of trend that Bill Bishop details in his book The Big Sort—cars allow the middle class to move into suburbs of their choosing, segregating themselves not only in less diverse communities, but ideologically and economically homogenous ones. Meanwhile, studies have shown that people who live in suburban neighborhoods are less likely to be social--to talk to their neighbors, participate in local politics, and otherwise be socially engaged.

Cars have, in other words, served as vessels of alienation; not only when we're on the road, insulated from our fellow citizens in wheeled steel cages, but in our homes and neighborhoods, too. Next come exurbs, gated communities, and more insulation. Which might not seem like a big deal now, but pervasive exclusionary attitudes can have severe implications when combined with other social pressures. Riots don't happen by accident.

That arbitrary barrier between humanity is a major seed of dystopia; there's a reason that, say, Margaret Atwood's classic dystopias, from Oryx and Crake to the Handmaid's Tale, find the rich living in blockaded compounds. Spoiler alert: Neither ends well for anyone.

Finally, we can't talk about cars in the context of dystopia without mentioning their environmental impact—cars both contribute to air pollution and climate change. According to the EPA, cars "caused over half of the carbon monoxide, over a third of the nitrogen oxides, and almost a quarter of the hydrocarbons in our atmosphere in 2006." They're a leading cause of smoggy skies, asthmatic lungs, and respiratory illnesses, including cancer, across the nation. This pollution particularly impacts the poor, who are more likely to live near highways and congested areas, and who don't have access to good health care.

Automobiles are also the second-largest cause of climate change, second only to coal. According to the Department of Transportation, 28 percent of the nation's obscene greenhouse emissions (we're still the No. 1 per-capita contributor to global warming) come from the transit sector. Of that, a whopping 84 percent comes from cars, SUVs, and commercial trucks. It goes without saying that rising seas and temperatures, falling crop yields, and more intense hurricanes are the stuff of dystopia—and cars are pulling that catastrophic trailer along, too.

So, to recap: cars and car ownership have continue to stoke some pretty worrisome pre-dystopian trends. Cars have isolated the poor, and deprived citizens of that vaunted upward mobility that lays at the heart of the American dream. Cars have saddled the middle class in debt, further straining that mobility. Cars have consolidated like-minded middle class residents into alcoves, quelling diversity of thought and diversity in general. Cars have polluted our cities and residential areas, causing illness, even death among residents subjected to their exhaust. Cars are driving global warming, which will magnify just about all of the adverse impacts listed above.

Thankfully, the tide seems to be turning against the power of the automobile , a dominance that has marked the last 60 years or so. Young driver rates are down for the first time, as more youth turn to cities instead of the suburbs. The rise of social media seems to be slowing the interest in cars, too. Evidence suggests that we may even have hit 'peak car' eight years ago, as ownership has declined since then. New transportation paradigms are on the horizon, too—California may finally build the nation's first real high-speed rail. Electric cars, with their limited range, may help curb the 'suburb effect'. And wild new projects like Elon Musk's Hyperloop have sparked an interest few thought existed for new transportation ideas.

There is, in other words, still ample time to spare the nation from certain dystopian automotive disaster.