How The Auto Industry Carjacked The American Dream | Climate Town

in 1968 the beatles released a song okay let's not shoot this in the literal middle of the road jesus christ in 1968 the beatles released a song called why don't we do it in the road which asked why don't we do it in the road 15 times and it's a bad song but it's an even worse question because everyone knows you don't do it in the road because that's where cars live and one might come along while you're in the middle of doing it and kill all three of you remember this is the beatles in the 60s they're putting up chamberlain numbers three is being conservative but before the 1920s getting your rocks off in the middle of the street was just a regular type bad decision and not an explicit death wish and that's because the road wasn't for cars it was for people then the fledgling auto industry realized what an insane amount of money it could make if it could just take over the roads and remove any other way of getting around that didn't involve a car all they'd have to do is use front corporations to buy up street car companies only to rip up the track and shut them down use racist advertisements and pay off politicians to shoot down laws that regulate cars and launch pr campaigns to make it illegal for people to be in the street like this one and believe it or not they leap in front of moving cars most of them suffer from an anxiety overdrive a mania for achievement and more obviously this is just the intro i mean look at the length of this video there's a ton more i'm raleigh williams climate science grad student and happy just to be nominated and this is the story of how the auto industry carjacked the american dream welcome to climatetown and yes freshman year business majors at duke university i get that's how business works in business you try to outmaneuver your competition when you do that well you make a ton of money and when you make enough money you buy a boat that's business i'm not mad at the auto industry for business but i do think that they saw an opportunity to kind of trojan horse their way into the american infrastructure and their version of the us is the version we're living in now and that boating enthusiast is the thesis of this [Music] in the 19 arts the streets of america were crammed full of dirty kids taking their pet hoops for a walk the occasional horse-drawn carriage a street car or two and all sorts of people named clarence or guthrie or phyllis oh same street baby that's what i'm talking about anyway the streets were mostly public spaces for walking or setting up shop or taking a swing at someone for calling you a drug i mean even if you are a drunk it was rude of them to call you one all that changed in the 1910s when henry ford hit the make cars button and mass production put over a million cars on the road and subsequently hundreds of thousands of people under the wheels of those very cars here's a little stat for you more americans were killed by cars in the four years after world war one and were killed fighting in world war one yeah cars are better at killing americans than the german soldiers and they were actually trying that's not exactly fair german soldiers were trying to kill american soldiers and cars were killing mostly chex notes children [Music] new york baby and sure if a kid is hit by a car nowadays oh and sure if a kid is hit by a car nowadays we might think something like well where were their parents but back in those days it was more like [Music] and america agreed in the event that a pedestrian was hit by a car the driver of the car was almost always held liable because they were a car and they hit a kid the problem got so bad that cities started voting on legislation that would limit a car speed to 20 miles per hour in city centers so cars would stop hitting kids by ironically the boat load it all came to a head in 1923 when a full 10 of the city of cincinnati 42 000 people physically signed a petition and this wasn't some kind of change.org petition to outlaw the word slacktivism online 42 000 people signed this thing like with a pen and not a good pen a pen from the 1920s so at this point car companies had to listen to the will of the people and i'm just kidding they launched this series of racist ads attacking cincinnati and successfully killed the mandate is this good for sound i think it's actually going to pick up some of that but the auto industry was after permanent custody in the streets not some kind of weekends and holidays visitation rights unfortunately by 1924 so many people were getting killed by cars such a psalm is difficult to comprehend that calvin coolidge aka the president america for god asked his then secretary of commerce herbert hoover to please do something anything so people would stop getting killed by cars hoover started the first national conference on street and highway safety and kicked the whole thing off with some pretty terrifying statistics over the past year alone america had suffered an estimated 600 million dollars in economic losses from death and injury 22 600 deaths so far that year and 678 000 serious injuries caused by cars and let's just take a quick peek at the list of organizations hoover gathered to figure out the best way to stop cars from killing pedestrians oh it's car companies it's shots almost all car companies okay but i'm sure putting a bunch of proverbial foxes in charge of metaphorical hen house security didn't have any lasting impact oh the conference laid the foundation for the 1928 model municipal traffic ordinance a set of the strictest anti-pedestrian rules in america okay that's not fair it gave people the freedom to do whatever they want in the road as long as what they wanted was to cross the street in only a tiny little designated area and only at right angles go around go around cars man problem solved thought the auto industry until they found out that people weren't obeying the law they worked so darn hard to get past and judges weren't convicting people for the obvious crime of being in the road so they did three things number one they made fun of people who got killed by cars do you wonder at the gentle chuckling of the undertaker out they rush running jumping and skipping across the street don't take foolish chances don't jaywalk they even spent money popularizing the term jaywalking see back in the 1900s a j meant like a doofus or a country idiot so by officially labeling the term jaywalking car companies cemented the idea that only idiots get hit by cars they aren't pedestrians at all they're jaywalkers with a capital j see if a person got hit by a car it was probably the car's fault but if that person was say some kind of fugly well then it was probably their fault i mean they were basically asking to be hit one track mine's just blundering stubbornly ahead number two in 1928 the american automobile association or aaa took over road safety education for children and they forced kids to sign a pledge promising they'd never jaywalk another abstinence-only program that's sure to have no negative repercussions later in life hey i wonder why these tickets were so cheap it's horribly cold up here it's like nine degrees we're whipping across the streets of new york wind blowing off new jersey smelling like a big pile of trash my god all right okay where were we and number three the national automobile chamber of commerce built and paid for a national wire service that allowed newspapers to report on car accidents but if they didn't like what you wrote about the cars they could take your wire service away giving your competitors a huge advantage over you it'd be like if you got kicked off of facebook just for writing i got home last night and mark zuckerberg was in my house going through my closet even if it was true oh man unkillable applebee's pandemic rolls right through construction on the street nothing this guy's jaywalking we got a jaywalker move it in boys all right you ready hop off but people weren't the only ones the auto industry needed to kick out of the streets there were also public street cars and urban railways a government regulated public transportation system that required reasonable fares and that lower income areas be connected and served well after some lobbying cars were just allowed to drive on the tracks and with hundreds of cars constantly cutting off public transportation left and right it got pretty impossible for the trains and street cars to make their stops on time now fewer people wanted to take public transit and some of those people bought cars which made the problem way better oh i'm sorry uh worse oh so much worse think of it this way a bus can hold maybe 60 people cars can hold five usually hold one maybe two the amount of space 60 cars takes up is you're looking at it i mean you it's way more right and all of this is maybe just the nature of competitive business i mean maybe cars are just the result of the product consumers want sure maybe but the part that is maybe not okay is the part where the auto and fossil fuel industry hired front companies to buy up public transportation and then ripped out the tracks and purposely destroyed the businesses to give the road to cars i mean it would maybe be illegal for a monopoly to buy up and destroy the competition it would be and it was and in 1949 firestone tire standard oil of california phillips petroleum gm and mac trucks were all convicted of conspiring to monopolize luckily the regulators had enough power to force gm to pay the unfathomably high sum of five thousand dollars and the gm treasurer himself was forced to pay a fine of one dollar the family's automobile which they will probably trade in for a new one next year not only helps keep the automobile industry thriving but continually supports the gasoline station the service garage the tire dealer these moves worked wonderfully to reorient people to a cars focused version of their own streets but the auto industry wanted to be woven into the fabric of every city in every state in america and that meant highways that crisscross applesauce all over the u.s and especially through the dense urban centers in the early 1930s there were a bunch of privately owned toll roads but that wasn't going to get every american to buy a new car every year so in 1932 the president of general motorist alfred p sloan and some other auto industry groups created the national highway users conference to in their words protect highway funding sources from depression-born demands oh these pores with their demands all the time well it became clear to them that they needed to fund highway spending through a more socialist kind of method so they successfully lobbied to fund roads using a national tax on gasoline ever heard the term freeway well the free refers to the fact that it wasn't a toll road and the way is for the way that it actually wasn't free at all and it was in fact subsidized by the government when the gasoline tax didn't cover the cost there was a 1939 congressional report called toll roads and free roads it really lays out exactly what the auto industry was hoping for and spoiler alert almost exactly what they would get but most people don't read congressional reports so in 1939 gm sold their dream of highways chopping apart american cities and connecting everything by cars by sponsoring a gigantic diorama of their idea of the future of america and i know what you might be thinking how could a diorama possibly do something like that easy you do it at the 1939 new york world's fair baby oh the world's fair imagine you live in a world with no cell phones internet or cargo pants there's no color tv or modern medicine and you and everyone you know just went through the great depression and then you get to go to a future themed amusement park slash coachella i mean it was like if ecstasy did cocaine people were getting emotional whiplash just from walking in the front gates the new york world's fair was a banger and the baganist exhibit was gm's futurama a 16 minute immersive diorama slash ride showcasing the future according to general motors created by the legendary designer norman bell gettys at an ever accelerating rate of progress a greater world a better world a world which always will grow 1.5 million handcrafted buildings and trees 50 000 model cars a 14-lane highway with moving miniature vehicles and no public transportation here is an american city replanned around a highly developed modern traffic system people flew along the diorama in chairs attached to a series of tracks and were absolutely blown the away by what gm was showing them in america there was no cohesive understanding of what the future could even look like within the first three months of opening two million people had seen the exhibit and were convinced this was the future sprawling interstate highways a car for everyone no public transportation lots of people living in the suburbs and basically exactly what america ended up looking like by the 1970s it was so good that walt disney admitted to ripping it off when he created epcot the most culturally sensitive destination in america it was an acid trip inside a crystal ball inside of a general motors commercial and gm had now successfully incepted their dream of the future inside the minds of millions of americans and for the record i'm not saying this is a big conspiracy or a shadowy cabal of deep state lizardmen but after world war ii countries in asia and europe invested in their public transit infrastructure and america invested in roads so just in case you're out there wondering why any of this matters or what america is actually missing it's this by 1941 excuse me excuse me gm had a new ceo a man named charles wilson but now this charles wilson or this charles wilson this charles wilson ceo of gm and majorly influential in crafting the national system of interstate highways plan in 1947. charles wilson was forced to leave gm when president eisenhower selected him as secretary of defense in january of 1953. the former general motors president stirred a controversy in congress during a hearing congress asked charles wilson if he could make a decision that went against gm's interests and he said he couldn't possibly think of a situation because and i'm quoting here what was good for our country was good for general motors and vice versa okay guys come on just because gm started that group to get highways funded and then they popularized the idea of a car centric america and then gm's new ceo helped craft a plan to make highways cut through every part of america which would result in a huge spike in car sales and then he became one of the most powerful people in the government the secretary of the department of defense the very department that would divert funds in order to actually build the highway doesn't mean there's a conflict of interest secretary of defense wilson with other administration officials to discuss the nation's defense budget for the year ahead secretary wilson is urging a 2 billion increase in military spending anyway in 1956 the national interstate and defense highways act passed which directly funded the biggest system of highways the world has ever seen eisenhower had always been hot on highways as a way to transport troops around america so he ensured it was almost completely paid for with federal funding and just to be clear no special interest group could have single-handedly gotten highways built but did one particular industry have an outsized hand in getting the job done [Music] so with americans bought in and congress and the president pushing hard construction began immediately after serving as secretary of defense charles wilson retired to teach conflict of interest ethics at harvard no i'm sorry he joined the board of directors at gm in 1957. so a little different and so they built the highways according to the plan from 1947. they built them across states but more terrifyingly they built them right through cities some neighborhoods even got demolished just to put a highway in guess which ones guess who lived in the neighborhoods that got demolished i'll give you a hint uh it was the 1960s and 70s and politicians called it urban renewal to remove blight guess who lived there yeah yeah it was people of color so they built highways straight through non-white areas sprinkling health problems like johnny asthma seed just to make a handful of people a big bag of money oh and when gm wanted to do another diorama for the year 2000 norman belgetti said he couldn't do it because there'd be no more gas-powered cars by that well that actually wasn't going to work for the auto and fossil fuel industry so they used the twin guns of power and influence to destroy any technology that looked like it was going to affect their bottom line i did a whole video about it but long story short gm kinda and here we are and by here i mean a world where cars completely own the streets public transportation is on life support cities are borderline inaccessible without a car and people who live along highways who are disproportionately people of color are more likely to get asthma heart disease childhood leukemia and a whole host of other health ailments yikes okay well i skipped over a ton but let's get to the ending so you can get back to doing whatever it is that you're supposed to be doing one thing you can do right now without any help from anybody else is dream your own dream of what a fair and equitable society looks like according to multiple studies access to transportation is the single greatest factor in an individual escaping poverty we're currently living in the auto industry's dream but what does a future look like for someone who's not a rich dude trying to buy a boat for his boat you can also support some of the initiatives that are trying to take city streets back from cars and improve public transportation that i linked in the bio we're actually in the middle of a potentially very big public investment in infrastructure so you know fingers crossed for that going well but above all we've got to get educated about how the infrastructure and policies we live with directly contribute to climate change consider taking a peek at the green new deal and see what that thing has to say about equity and the future of america now is the time to get involved because we've got to make some huge changes to america's infrastructure we just we have to do it and if we're looking for a good place to start i mean why don't we do it in the road well that was about four minutes longer than it needed to be huh seriously thank you so much for watching i really appreciate it and i'm going to keep making more videos but if you do want to support the channel i just started a climatetown patreon page and the link is in the bio wait people have to pay for these videos now oh no they're still all on youtube for free this would just be if you wanted to like help me make them faster and better oh also uh exclusive behind the scenes content and interviews and like stuff that gets cut from the final videos so you want people to pay for the stuff that's not good enough to be free i am just hoping that a few people might want to send like five bucks a month uh my way because you appreciate what could be described as highly researched low budget super try-hard climate comedy climate comedy like edutainment no like infotainment and you have to pay for it only the bad stuff the good stuff is still free right okay this i feel like this really went off the rails hey man don't look at me you're the one trying to get people to donate to your climate comedy patreon page and the link is in the bio

Channel: Climate Town

Views: 815,119

Keywords: cars, auto industry, climate town, new york world's fair, american dream, norman bel geddes, the beatles, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, world war 1, model T, GM, jaywalking, jay walking, pedestrian

Id: oOttvpjJvAo

Length: 18min 58sec (1138 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 08 2021