In the event you lived within the suburbs within the Nineteen Seventies, you may see it in your thoughts’s eye: driveway after driveway crammed with Nation Squires and Pontiac Safaris and Buick Property Wagons. The Silvermans, for example, with whom we shared a double-driveway within the Boston suburb of Lexington (“birthplace of American liberty”) and who, on a heat summer time night, would pile all the youngsters in again and all of the adults in entrance and drive off two or three miles to Buttrick’s ice cream stand. Once I say the youngsters piled within the again, I imply we crammed into the again cargo space — and, if reminiscence serves appropriately, on the again roads Mr. Silverman would truly decrease the tailgate and allow us to dangle our legs over the again. For sure all of this is able to now get you arrested for little one endangerment, however we beloved it. Cherished it with out fascinated with it, as a result of the automobile was absolutely the unquestioned actuality of our lives.
People had, after all, been shopping for automobiles in huge numbers since Henry Ford began up his meeting line in 1913, however till the tip of World Struggle II the numbers weren’t that huge: in 1950 there have been solely 25 million automobiles registered within the nation. That summer time, over Lexington, a fleet of seven skywriting planes puffed out a gasoline commercial within the sky: “New Blue Sunoco,” it stated, day after day.
The message took — all such messages took. U.S. factories produced 8 million new automobiles that 12 months, and by the tip of the last decade there have been 67 million automobiles on the roads of America. These roads stretched all over the place, because the Fifties additionally noticed the development of the interstate freeway system, the biggest public works program in American historical past. I’d by no means left the continent until nicely previous school, however I’d seen an terrible lot of the US: trip meant piling into the automobile and driving, masking floor alongside the route that somebody within the AAA workplace had highlighted in our TravelGuide, till about 5 within the afternoon when it was time to seek for a motel (the TravelGuide image for a swimming pool was an absolute requirement.)
By 1970, there have been 118 million automobiles on the highway within the U.S. — greater than quadruple the quantity 20 years earlier than.
It took no time — a decade — for America to assemble itself across the automobile. That’s what the suburb was, a mirrored image in concrete and wooden and brick of the logic of the auto, designed for its dimensions, its turning radius. Lexington was an older and extra compact suburb, so it was theoretically attainable to barter it with no automobile — however probably not. We shopped on the mall one city over, and so far as I do know nobody had ever approached it on foot; why would you? And the additional out you went, the extra car-centric the suburbs grew to become, only a sequence of branching roads that ultimately become driveways.
Greater than three-quarters of People drove to work, and most of them drove by themselves. As Meg Jacobs wrote in her historical past of the interval, by 1970, People consumed a 3rd of the world’s vitality — greater than the Soviet Union, Britain, West Germany and Japan mixed. And largely due to the automobile. By then there have been 118 million automobiles and vans on the American highway — greater than quadruple the quantity 20 years earlier than. The automobiles had been huge: 20 p.c greater than they’d been simply 5 years earlier than. Three-quarters of them now got here with air-con (up from 20 p.c in 1960), which subtracted about two and a half miles a gallon from the gasoline effectivity, not that that was a factor anybody even thought of in 1970, as a result of gasoline was 36 cents a gallon.
I received my learner’s allow the day I turned 15 and a half, and naturally I sat by means of driver’s ed, with its interminable movie strips about youngsters who took a bewildering number of medicine and subsequently crashed their automobiles. We practiced on a driving simulator, after which on the highway with a baseball coach supplementing his pay — he directed me to merge on to the freeway at 70 miles per hour 4 minutes into my driving profession. I beloved it, and never simply because automobiles meant intercourse. (We actually referred to as it ‘parking.’) As a result of it meant financial freedom: you may work, so as to get cash to purchase gasoline.