Over the centry that followed, the automobile has become a leading cause of death, disease and disability.

Another casualty of the rapid conversion to the automobile was the liveable, walkable city and town. Henry Ford, who invented the mass production of the automobile, was so concerned about this change that he preserved an entire town to show what life was like before the automobile. Ford was concerned that the towns he had loved and grown up in as a child would be forever lost. And they have been.

Not long ago, the majority of schoolchildren rode bicycles or walked to school. Now that number is less than 10%.

The reality is that the automobile is the leading cause of death amongst children, and a suburban child is more likely to be killed by automobile than an inner city child is to be killed by gunfire.

The terrible irony here is that the suburbs have grown up around the automobile as people attempted to escape cities which had been made unliveable by the automobile itself.*

A recent, national real estate poll showed that the number one concern of new home buyers is that their street have minimal automobile traffic.

Yet in attempting to escape the harmful effects of cars, we have instead engineered colossal automobile dependency. We have destroyed our destinations in our efforts to get to them.

As the car took over the city, people of means looked for a way out to the bliss they remembered from their youth. The automobile provided the very means to escape from itself. In the process our nation's rich resources of farm land, breathtaking wilds, archaeological treasures and rural histories have been paved over to make way for endless tracts of sprawling suburbs.

New roads such as the interstate system are a leading cause of extinction and deforestation.

As the motor car took over the cities, powerful lobbying interests grew up. Some of these conspired to take over public transportation and shut it down, effectively creating a radical monopoly -- a monopoly which controls not only what we buy, but how we live.

These companies (including General Motors and Firestone tires) used a front group, National City Lines, to affect a hostile takeover of public transportation systems across the nation. Once successful, they shut down and even burned the street cars that used to serve United States cities with good efficiency. With the trolleys out of the way, people were forced to buy cars, which could not all fit in the cities. Public transportation was forced to buy buses, sold to us by those who had shut down the cable cars.

The lead company, General Motors, was actually convicted of conspiracy but was not ordered to replace infrastructure it had destroyed, which today would cost many billions of dollars if not trillions. This event has been written about in much more detail and chronicled in the documentary by Martha Olson, "Taken for a Ride".

It is sadly similar that the first person killed by automobile was stepping off a streetcar and helping a woman step down when he was crushed.

The bicycle and the electric car were also victims, deliberately suppressed by the profiteering juggernaut that continues to push motor-first planning even in the face of escalating risks of runaway climate change.

This radical transformation of our way of life could not have been possible without the complicity of planning institutions. Every principle of keeping a society strong and healthy was violated when livable cities and towns were abandoned for the lucre of sprawl.

In the world picture, a similar story has played out; poorer and developing countries saw their transit systems sabotaged as well, and the global development aid structure became heavily biased to those countries which put the automobile first. The automobile kills more people than wars worldwide, and the engineered solutions of flyovers, expressways, tearing down housing, banning rickshaws and bicycles, etc. etc. etc., simply generates intolerable pollution, impaired mobility, misery, suffering, and death upon death in the millions per year.

Let us stop this madness.

* * *

(This history is admittedly altogether too brief and simplistic, and in many ways our history is not fully known despite how paramount the effects have been; please write with additions, suggestions or changes.)

* Although there were many problems with many cities prior to the automobile, a primary reason for those problems was that planning tended to precipitate around the interests of large private businesses, to the detriment of all, making those problems analogous and in the same class as the automobile problem.

There are alternatives to the automobile-first city which excel in their benefits to all.