America’s collective decision in the 20th century to make cars and the roads serving them the bedrock of all urban and regional planning will go down in history as just another of our nation’s awful, ruinous ideas that we nevertheless clung to for generations, like slavery or lead paint. Cars, of course, have a way of making themselves very hard to progress away from. Once you build the towns and cities around the road patterns for cars, and allow the interstate highway system to determine development patterns, the entire system gets locked in in a way that is difficult to change. Even as ever-widening highways and air pollution and the immense parking lots destroy ever larger swaths of peace and scenery, they also represent ever larger sunk costs from consumers and governments, which make everyone more reluctant to try to break away from them.

New cars spawn new roads. New roads spawn new sprawl. It all spawns new debts. To admit that this entire thing was a mistake involves surveying our suburban homes, our paved driveways, our SUVs, our shopping centers, our entire beloved home towns, and saying: Okay, this has all gotten out of control. As all addicts know, this piercing self-criticism can be more difficult than just continuing doing something that is unhealthy, but familiar.