Car-Free Day

Anyone who knows me knows that one of my pet projects—okay, my minor obsession—okay, my pathological, over-the-top, clinically certifiable obsession—is the year 1939. Anything that has to do with 1939 I am fascinated with. Call it random, call it crazy, you wouldn’t be the first.

And one of the major events of 1939, besides World War II breaking out and all that, was the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

Now, even if you’ve never seen or heard of the 1939 World’s Fair, you may be familiar with its layout. The Fair—and its 1964 reincarnation—were the inspiration for Walt Disney’s Florida themepark EPCOT Center. Disneyland on steroids you might say, but much more than that.

Disney designed EPCOT, the “Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow”, to be a place families could go, not just for S&G (laughs and entertainment) but to engage their children in subjects ranging from agriculture to technology to history, in a manner that neither Fantasyland nor schoolbooks could match.

It was at EPCOT that I got my first exposure of some of the countries I would later visit and grow to love: Mexico, Germany, Italy…

My encounter with EPCOT’s beautiful, albeit stereotypical Norwegian pavilion as a kid sparked my curiosity about that land, and led to my decision to later live there as a high school foreign exchange student.

I can imagine the wide eyes of a child of the Depression wandering through the massive New York World’s Fair complex in 1939. Ambling over what was swampland just years before, given the chance to travel all over the world without leaving New York. To places he or she might never get the chance to see. China, Japan, England, the Soviet Union. Czechoslovakia.

Yes, there was a Czechoslovakia Pavilion. Workers who traveled from the real Czechoslovakia in March to build and staff the pavilion in New York, arrived in the U.S. to find that their homeland, in the words of Adolf Hitler, had “ceased to exist.” The Nazi dictator swooped in on the Ides of March and annexed the peaceful, sovereign nation with the tacit permission of the West.

Polish workers at the Poland Pavilion would encounter a similar scenario at summer’s end. They watched the happy crowds devouring cotton candy and watching September fireworks as news headlines described Poland being devoured from both sides.

Well, this is a very roundabout way of getting to Car-Free Day.

The centerpiece of the fair was the glorious Trylon and Perisphere. The Trylon was a pointy 700-foot tall phallic symbol. The Perisphere was a perfect sphere, to which EPCOT’s Spaceship Earth bears an uncanny resemblance.

Keeping with the theme of the fair—”the World of Tomorrow”—fair-goers inside the Perisphere embarked on a journey to the city of the future: Democracity. As the guidebook stated, Democracity was a

“symbol of a perfectly integrated, futuristic metropolis pulsing with life and rhythm and music. The daylight panorama stretches off to the horizon on all sides. Here is a city of a million people with a working population of 250,000, whose homes are located beyond the city-proper, in five satellite towns. Like great arteries, broad highways traverse expansive areas of vivid green countryside, connecting outlying industrial towns with the city’s heart.“

But the most popular exhibit at the fair wasn’t the Perisphere, or any of the Lagoon Nations, Billy Rose’s Aquacade, or even the half-naked underwater mermaid show. It was the General Motors Pavilion: Futurama. (Not the Matt Groening TV show.)

Inside Futurama, the average Joe or Joanne of 1939 could take a ride over a large, moving miniature model of the city of the future, set in—hold onto your jetpacks—1960!

“Man continually strives to replace the old with the new,” stated the recording, as riders watched tiny cars zoom down superhighways connecting beautiful, pristine cities.

And what strikes me about these images and models of Democracity and Futurama is, is—how accurate they were. In certain respects. We are living in that city of the future, designed by the engineers of yesterday. It may not be clean, or crime-free, or even enjoyable to live in, but the suburbs, the self-washing dish machines, the sprawling metropolises, the superhighways, automobiles in nearly every driveway…They all came true.

The crowds of the fair embraced it. How could any citizen stand in the way of the progress toward tomorrow? In part because of exhibits like Futurama and Democracity, citizens and Congressmen eagerly supported tax measures that would improve the nation’s infrastructure, not through better public transportation, but by creating thousands of miles of new roads and highways. Rivers of asphalt that would replace railroads, just as the trains had replaced ships.

Thanks to documentaries like Who Killed the Electric Car and even the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, we are now all-too-familiar with General Motors successful plan to buy up and dismantle public rail systems across the United States during the post-war era, replacing them with noisy, slow, gas-guzzling buses.

Los Angeles, for example, had one of the country’s most efficient rail systems, one in which riders could go from downtown LA all the way to Long Beach or Orange County for a coin. Now tracks of the ghost-rail rise and submerge throughout the city, down the center of streets, or straight into buildings, completely unusable.

It’s easy to vilify General Motors and the other companies involved. Yes, they did it for profit. And yes, if we blame the corporations, we don’t have to blame ordinary people like ourselves (which are basically what corporations are made of). But at the time, the people working at those companies and the public at large believed the car was the way of the future, the key to individual autonomy. You were no longer forced to go where some bureaucrat or railroad tycoon decided the tracks should lie. The car could go anywhere. It was a symbol freedom for Joe, Joanne, and the entire J family.

(Also, despite getting the brunt of the blame for its dismantling, GM and its subsidiaries never owned L.A.’s Red Car transit system; they bought the Green Car.)

Of course, had as many engineers and professionals been focusing on how to build a better family, or a better neighborhood, instead of a better dishwasher a faster car, or a more imposing skyscraper, who knows what future we’d live in today.

Thanks to the ’39 World’s Fair and exhibits like Futurama and Democracity, we have a window to our forerunners’ perceptions of the future. And we can factor into our own equation of the future, variables they either could not see or chose to ignore:

Pollution. Congestion. Depletion of natural resources.

One suggested solution to the scarcity of resources is to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This would increase oil availability and reduce dependence on foreign crude. Of course this is a very short-term solution to the third problem, and only instigates the first two.

Another solution is to develop alternative energy sources. This is a necessity more than an option. But the recent execution of the corn-based ethanol strategy has already helped to drive up food prices in developing nations, without substantial environmental benefit.

The third option is to reduce energy consumption. Using public transit, bicycles, feet, etc., reduces all three major problems—pollution, congestion, and depletion of natural resources.

Car-Free Day, an international event that takes place each September 22, encourages everyone to step out from behind the wheel for a day and use alternative modes of transport.

Car-Free Day has its heart in the right place. But it’s only a beginning. The idea of not driving for a day is like the oft-emailed theory of bringing down gas prices by boycotting Exxon while patronizing Shell or 76. It doesn’t work, unless you use less gas.

In other words, the question isn’t Will we not drive today?

It’s Will we not drive tomorrow?

Wired article – Futurama