The auto and suburbanization were perhaps the most important forces in shaping our present physical America. The approval of the first developed subdivisions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were the legal equivalent of authorizing residential development on land, rather than insistence on maintaining farmland close to population centers, that is, cities.
Those early subdivisions were made possible by trains, trolleys, and refrigerated shipping. But when autos began to dominate the roadways, overwhelming all other forms of transport, in the 1920s, those same zoning laws encouraged development at ever-wider rings around the cities. Municipalities paved roads, built new ones, used eminent domain to seize property for even *more* roads, and generally began to create a tax- and toll-system to support the use of cars.
It’s not that the laws are so egregious - although we do have all sorts of road rules that true Libertarians might hate. (Speed limits? Right-of-way and yield signs? Lines to designate lanes?)
It’s that the laws *support* making driving by car convenient and inexpensive. Automobile travel is the only sensible way to travel though much of the country because our nation has put laws in place that make it that way.
I admit that I am a Federalist, if only because we live in an industrialized and monetarized world now. Our nation stays strong because it remains unified. If the sates fractured into independent nations now, I don’t think it would take very long before they ended up like the former republics of the Soviet Union.
I prefer a strong and free people, able to raise their families, do their work, and worship as they wish to. We have a much better chance of doing that as a union first, rather than as states primarily.
But then, I am one of the people who preferred buying a finished house with sufficient local infrastructure such as water, electrical lines, and sewage, to building my home from scratch on a piece of raw land.
We’re on the same wavelength, FRiend. Great wrap up of the transportation and suburbanization initiatives in this country. You’ve sufficiently piqued my interest that my next visit to the library will ensure card catalog searches for those items. I never thought about suburbanization in that way. Thank you for opening my mind!
I, too, own a home with pre-run infrastructure. I daresay we couldn’t live without it, but I believe that I could subside on the land if forced to do so. It wouldn’t be fun or easy, but I believe I could survive.
Likewise, I wouldn’t want us to split into individual states, but we need to seriously curtail the Federal government’s reach. They’re too involved, and that’s not how the Framers wanted it. If I had to choose, I’d actually say that I’m an anti-Federalist, believing that a centralized Federal government is bad, but that’s based on recent historical trends rather than actual historical realities. I believe with sufficient rollbacks, freedom would be restored, and this country would realize a reformation like we’ve never seen.