The car culture thesis—also known as “America’s love affair with the automobile”—has endured in part because it’s half true. Most Americans like cars and want to own one. But the preference is not absolute: Where the alternatives are good, they’re often popular. This love affair has endured because motordom developed it, nurtured it, and continues to promote it.
The apogee of American car culture was in the 1950s and 1960s—decades when most American families had a car, but before ecological values and energy constraints complicated the picture. It was during these decades when the car looked most like the future of urban mobility, and when American influence on other nations’ mobility policies, direct and indirect, was at its height.
But even in 1970, many Americans owned no automobile, or had no reliable access to one. Many could not drive, for a variety of reasons. Nearly one of five U.S. households had no car. According to research published by the Federal Highway Administration early in that decade, among the 10.7 million households in which the family income was less than $3,000 a year, 63 percent had no car. Women drove much less than men: About 56 percent of all licensed drivers were men, and according to drivers’ own estimates 73 percent of all miles driven were driven by men. People of color were much less likely to drive than whites. Whites made 52 percent of their trips as car drivers, nonwhites 37 percent. Among school children in 1970, 42 percent walked or bicycled, compared to 38 percent who rode a school bus. Only 16 percent were driven to school.
What these statistics suggest is that car culture, even at its height, cannot offer a complete account of American mobility. Given such disparities in car usage in the 1950s and 1960s, policies favoring drivers must have been controversial, especially among women and people of color. Their criticisms, however, are absent from the popular automotive histories and museum exhibits, and practically absent from academic articles too.
But all over America in the 1950s and 1960s, residents, particularly women, organized demonstrations against car traffic—and their street protests often closely resembled the Dutch Stop de kindermoord protests that would come in the 1970s. They demanded slower driving, usually seeking stop signs, streetlights, or crossing guards. Some demanded pedestrian over- or underpasses. Most such demonstrations were in dense residential districts of large cities, but many occurred in small cities, suburbs, and towns. Though white women predominated in many or most such demonstrations, black and Hispanic people organized some and participated in many. Men participated too, though generally as a small minority of the total.