SECTION 8

　　Questions 7-19 are based on the following passages.

　　The following passages discuss an important issue in urban life.

　　Passage 1

　　Life in a pedestrian-friendly city cushions the slights of the auto age. Slowly, though, and over time, the lesions to my hometown of Boston penetrated my consciousness. As the landscape of the 1970s and the 1980s occupied my writing as an architecture critic. I came to realize that the designs I saw often literally housed more cars than human occupants: that building to building, place to place, office complex to complex, dwelling to dwelling, every institution and every structure did obeisance to the automobile.

　　To be sure. Boston's pedestrians are notable—or notorious—for their assertive stance against the automobile. Indeed, the word "jaywalking" was invented here. On foot, Bostonians bully the car. Even in this walking hub, however, the 1980s saw the motor vehicle create a sub-city of garages and parking lots, gnaw the sidewalk, and slick the city's surfaces with oil. Garage doors and black hole entrances lacerated the street. Walking by the city's newer buildings, the pedestrian is now as likely to be ambushed by a car sliding from some underground garage as to be visually assaulted by gap-toothed parking lots and eerie garage facades.

　　"Plan for People, Not Just Autos" was the title of an article I wrote about this new architecture that genuflects to the highway. I have watched this deference to the automobile manifest itself in worse ways across the continent. Time after time, I have witnessed cities and other environments become asphalt encrusted as the urge to hold the cars of shoppers or home owners has taken primacy. As economist Donald Shoup summed it up, "Form no longer follows function, fashion, or even finance. Instead, form follows parking requirements." In the end. the car's horizontal needs at rest and in motion mean that architecture is car bound.

　　For us these needs encompass some 200 million moving vehicles traveling 2 trillion-plus miles a year on roads and ramps, along with parking lots for resting. As speed and the search for parking have become the ultimate quests, a new urban axiom has evolved: if a city is easy to park in, it's hard to live in; if it's easy to live in, it's hard to park in Architecture critic Lewis Mumford predicted no less more than 40 years ago: "The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city."