Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You
General Motor's bankruptcy filing this Monday is all over the news – one element that's been widely reported locally is the closure of 40% of the company's dealership franchises throughout the U.S., including many in Oregon. I don't know why I never stopped to think about it before, but it was news to me that car dealerships are often franchises, rather than fully independent local businesses. So of course, I turned to the library's amazing collection to see if I could learn more about the history of selling cars in the U.S., and I found a great book that got me started on a trajectory of reading about the automobile industry, the impact of cars on cities, and more. Read on if you'd like to share this journey with me!
I started with the pictorial celebration and history of the American way of selling cars in Robert Genat's The American Car Dealership. Genat starts out with a brief history of the automobile business, explaining the rise and fall of the many small car manufacturers in the early 20th century, the eventual rise of the "Big Three," and the methods all of them used to get their product from the assembly line into the hands of American drivers. He also discusses the architecture of car dealerships, promotional strategies they employed, the art of car salesmanship, the used car business, and the role of dealers' parts and service departments. There are fascinating historic photos to illustrate this narrative on every single page.
Obviously cars themselves have completely changed the American landscape. The next book I turned to was Down the Asphalt Path, Clay McShane's history of the rise of the automobile and the development of 20th century cities and suburbs. In a way, it's more a history of roads than it is a history of cars – McShane sets the stage with a history of urban travel before the arrival of streetcars, then discusses the development of large streetcar networks and their attendant streetcar suburbs, then examines various uses of urban streets in recent history. After providing all this context, he examines how the technology for building smoother roads developed, and explains how Americans began to view streets as arteries for transport rather than open public spaces for socializing and providing fresh air and light in crowded cities. Down the Asphalt Path is a serious intellectual work, but it's also an engaging story tracing the changes in American streets (which, after all, cover a pretty significant portion of the land in our cities!).
My personal experience has been that the different kinds of cars on the road is part of what makes different places special. For example, I lived on the east coast for a few years, and it really made me nostalgic for Oregon, where classic cars are fairly common – because in the east, all you see is late model stuff. Another thing we've got a lot of here on the west coast is art cars. You've probably seen one or two around town, but if you want a real eyeful, take a peek at Harrod Blank's photo book Art Cars. It's a hundred and forty pages of amazing, one-of-a-kind cars. Seriously, these cars are incredible! One is completely covered in beer cans, another in cigarette butts, another in Pez dispensers. World-famous telekinetic Uri Geller is pictured with his car, which is, you guessed it, covered in bent spoons and forks. There's no way I could describe all the fabulous cars in this book, you'll have to check it out yourself!
But perhaps you want to create your own auto-related tangent? More power to you! If you want to leaf through some beautiful pictures of classic cars, learn about how cars have influenced and shaped society, or read about the history of car design or of the the auto industry, the library can totally help you out with that too! Or, of course, you can always ask a friendly librarian to help steer you towards the car book, article, DVD, or website that's just right for you.
Posted by Emily-Jane
There are many changes afoot in our local public transportation system. Citing revenue problems, TriMet is planning cuts to bus service on many neighborhood routes. But, at the same time, plans are shaping up for the new pedestrian/bicycle/transit bridge, and TriMet has decided to use $1 million in federal stimulus money to create new bicycle parking. The newly re-designed downtown Portland bus mall is nearly done and is open to car traffic, but drivers are having trouble understanding and following the new traffic rules on SW 5th and 6th streets. And, what about the rest of the country? The American Association for Public Transportation released a survey this week reporting that transit ridership saw a 4% increase between 2007 and 2008.
I ride the bus every day (I've never owned a car) and people sometimes ask me what it's like to use the bus as my primary mode of transport. Well, you have to be prepared for some inconveniences – buses can be a little slow, sometimes they're too warm or too hot or kinda stinky, and occasionally I have to stand in the aisle instead of getting a seat – but on the whole, I love being a bus rider. I never have to parallel park. I am familiar with people in my neighborhood who I'd never meet if I didn't ride the bus. There are lots of advantages! Portlander Kate Lopresti is another avid bus rider, and her zine The Constant Rider chronicles her experiences commuting by bus, and her travels using other forms of public transit. Lopresti's observations are astute, her instructions for fellow riders are sound, and her wit is very dry indeed. The Constant Rider Omnibus collects numbers 1-7, and covers subjects as diverse as fellow passengers who are drunk, “celebrity” sightings of bus drivers going about their lives, and “I saw you” personal ads from folks who spotted someone hot on the bus. Issue number 8 is also worth reading; it is billed as an “Industry Insider” and presents the public transit employee's perspective on things. Lopresti read from her work at the library last year; if you missed it be sure to listen to the podcast!
Before the bus was the urban public transportation workhorse, streetcars were the stars of the show. Portland's first streetcars were horse-drawn, and they went into service on SW 1st Ave. in 1872. The first electric streetcars arrived in 1889, and they were a major element of the city's transportation system until the Great Depression in the 1930s. If you're ready to read about the whole saga, I can heartily recommend Fares Please!: Those Portland Trolley Years. Author John T. Labbe provides a truly comprehensive history of the companies that built and ran the streetcar lines and the impact the streetcars had on life in the city. The book is richly illustrated with historic photographs, and maps of the different trolley lines.
And if it's street car pictures you're really after, don't miss Portland's Streetcars by Richard Thompson. This slim volume is all pictures all the time – from the Rose City's first streetcars in the 1870s to today's MAX light rail. Each photograph is accompanied by a brief caption, but essentially Portland's Streetcars is a visual history. It's actually part of a series of books of historic photographs of trains called Images of Rail – one of the other volumes in the series focuses on railroads in the Columbia River Gorge.
Posted by Emily-Jane
Walking at Home and in History
Like many of you, dear readers, I live in Portland, where the city has an entire office devoted to facilitating a wide array of transportation options, including walking. They're serious about this – they promote walking for pleasure, but also for more mundane tasks like going to the grocery store and commuting to work. So maybe the Portland area is ahead of the curve when it comes to walking more. But I think you'll find that there's lots of fascinating reading on the topic of walking, even to those of us who are already avid promoters of walking as a part of everyday life. Here are a few suggestions:
First off, let's consider how walking has affected people and communities throughout history. Rebecca Solnit's eloquent Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Solnit considers different kinds of walking-related activities that people engage in (e.g., political marches, religious pilgrimages, and backcountry hikes), and examines depictions and uses of walking in literature, science, and the arts. All in all, the book is a fascinating exploration of why we walk, and how walking has shaped human cultures.
Portland has many hills, and if you're up for it, they make great places to walk. Laura O. Foster's Portland Hill Walks: Twenty Explorations in Parks and Neighborhoods makes a great guide. When I took the Alameda Ridge Loop walk with a friend we were blown away by how many nearly-invisible public stairways we got to walk up and down – seriously, we would never have noticed many of them without Foster's instructions! She provides a fascinating array of neighborhood historical information for each of her recommended walks, as well as practical tips like the location of bathrooms, drinking fountains, and restaurants likely to provide a good lunch. If you like Foster's style, you might want to check out her more recent effort, too: Portland City Walks: Twenty Explorations In and Around Town. Or, you could look at one of the dozen or so other guidebooks of walks around Portland.
Like its title indicates, Car Sick: Solutions for Our Car-addicted Culture is an instruction book for how to reduce traffic congestion, the stress of commuting by car, and air and water pollution by decreasing usage of private cars for transport. Author Lynn Sloman devotes a chapter to "Soft solutions to de-motorize the rush hour" (pages 61-75), which includes creative ideas like the "walking bus" – a group of kids walking to school together, with a pull-trolley to carry their backpacks. The book is more than just practical ideas, though – it's full of success stories from cities around the world meant to inspire individuals and neighborhoods to take baby steps to reduce their car use.
Posted by Emily-Jane
Cars. . . And the Trouble With Them
Cars. Boy do we Americans love them! Personally, I'm not a big fan of driving. To me, being stuck in traffic is like taking crazy pills and parallel parking makes me break out in a sweat. But on long stretches of road, say out in Eastern Oregon - with the wind in my hair and my favorite tunes on the radio - well there is definitely an appeal. But like many things that give us that warm fuzzy feeling, driving isn't very good for us or our planet. And though folks have been telling us for decades that our addiction to cars and oil would be our undoing, the love affair was too strong. Now we are starting to get it, and because of this, an entire industry is hurting big time. In July 2008, Automotive News reported that sales for the first half of 2008 were the worst the U.S. auto industry had seen since 1993. Sales totaled $7,414,295, down 10.1 percent from 2007.* So, the big tree (Ford, GM and Chrysler) went to Washington asking for help back in November and again on Tuesday, this time offering to sell their corporate jets and take a pay cut from what was millions in 2007 to just $1 a year, if Congress was willing to help out. How will this all play out? Will U.S. automakers start to make the fuel-efficient cars we need? What happens when the oil runs out? We've got years of these issues ahead of us, and I can't help but wonder what kind of vehicles our children's children will be driving someday.
But in the meantime, there is a lot of great work out there on the auto industry, the environment, and the future of cars. One excellent example is the book Zoom, written by Iain Carson and Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran. Carson and Vaitheeswaran are both correspondents for The Economist, and they have written this surprisingly enjoyable and ultimately timely book arguing for U.S. energy independence by weaning cars off oil. Their book is far from the doom and gloom outlook we've been hearing about from the auto industry, instead it's very optimistic about the future of cars. In fact, they contend it isn't the cars at all that are at fault, it's the oil that's the problem and more drilling is not the answer. And with the great minds out there in the world, they believe there are many viable, earth-friendly solutions available for our crazy, car-loving culture!
In Auto Mania, Tom McCarthy discusses the history of the automotive industry and specifically the connection between the car, the consumer, and the environment. McCarthy's book is well researched (with 65 pages of notes!) and looks deep into the seedy underbelly of the auto industry. He goes into detail about the automobiles immense draw on the earth's natural resources, including the ill-effects on air and water, not to mention the junkyards. He also talks about the reasons behind the industry's resistance to change and basically about what got us into this mess! Plus, it's got some fun pictures and photographs.
And there is a fascinating (and honestly, pretty upsetting) documentary titled Who Killed the Electric Car? written and directed by Chris Paine. To get you interested, here is the tagline from the film, "In 1996, electric cars began to appear on roads all over California. They were quiet and fast, produced no exhaust and ran without gasoline...........Ten years later, these cars were destroyed." Interested? Definitely check it out. Though prepare yourself, I found myself getting pretty angry!
*Article found in the library's ABI/INFORM Trade & Industry database available from anywhere with a valid Multnomah County Library card. You can read the entire article by clicking here - from outside the library, you will need your library card number and PIN.
Posted by Jennifer
