Passage 2

　　Today everyone who values cities is disturbed by automobiles.

　　Traffic arteries, along with parking lots, gas stations, and driveways, are powerful and insistent instruments of city destruction. To accommodate them, city streets are broken down into loose sprawls, incoherent and vacuous for anyone afoot. City character is blurred until every place becomes more like every other place, all adding up to Noplace. And in the areas most defeated, uses that cannot stand functionally alone—shopping malls, or residences, or places of public assembly, or centers of work — are severed from one another.

　　But we blame automobiles for too much.

　　Suppose automobiles had never been invented, or that they had been neglected and we traveled instead in efficient, convenient, speedy, comfortable, mechanized mass transit. Undoubtedly, we would save immense sums that might be put to better use. But they might not. Indeed, we would have had essentially the same results I just blamed on cars due to the sorry state of conventional urban planning. And then automobiles would have to be invented or would have to be rescued from neglect, for they would be necessary to spare people from vacuity, danger, and utter institutionalization.

　　The reason for this is that it is questionable how much of the destruction wrought by automobiles on cities is really a response to transportation and traffic needs, and how much of it is owing to sheer disrespect for other city needs, uses, and functions. Like city builders who face a blank when they try to think of what to do instead of massive building projects, highway builders and traffic engineers face a blank when they try to think what they can realistically do, day by day. except try to overcome traffic kinks as they occur and apply what foresight they can toward moving and storing more cars in the future.

　　Good transportation and communication are not only among the most difficult things to achieve; they are also basic necessities. The point of cities is multiplicity of choice. It is impossible to take advantage of multiplicity of choice without being able to get around easily. Furthermore, the economic foundation of cities is trade. Trade in ideas, services, skills, and personnel—and certainly in goods—demands efficient, fluid transportation and communication. The power of mechanized vehicles can make it easier to reconcile great concentrations of people with efficient movement of people and goods. Thus automobiles can hardly be inherent destroyers of cities. In fact, we should sec that the car is a potentially exciting and liberating instrument for city life.