As a child in the mid-1960s, I had a book featuring a photograph of every car manufactured in the world. The final entry was a drawing of a prototype called the “Ford Dream Car.” The Dream Car could fly. According to the book, Ford expected to have the Dream Car available for sale in 2013.
It’s 2013, and no Dream Car.
Oh, there are cars whose doors open automatically, and ones with rear-view cameras to help prevent us from hitting a vehicle (or child) behind us, and cars with radios where you can to listen to a cellular caller. But my car is fundamentally the same as the one my parents owned 50 years ago, and so are the roads and bridges and tunnels and highways.
There are more of all of them, though not as many as we need, which means they are all more crowded than they used to be.
In my youth, you could play stickball on an Upper West Side side street, moving occasionally when a car passed by. That’s impossible today, and not just because parents won’t allow it; there’s simply too much traffic to make a street game practicable.
In 1975, 25 percent of New York households had a car; in 2010, 48 percent.
Meanwhile, the city hasn’t gained a single new bridge, tunnel or highway since 1964, when the Verrazano Narrows Bridge opened — and probably only a handful of new streets. (It’s not like this in far less populous precincts of the American West, where highways to nowhere have grown like weeds as federal transportation spending has rained down.)
There seems to be no sense that something new is going to come along to revolutionize the system. (The Dream Car seems even more of a fantasy today than it did in the 1960s.) And so this state and the federal government are going to spend $5 billion-plus building a new Tappan Zee bridge because the current one, finished 58 years ago, is falling apart.
The Tappan Zee’s obsolescence is due to the fact that it was used far more than anyone expected — and because there was probably an implicit sense when it was being designed in the first place that these old behemoths were destined to be supplanted by new things eventually.
They won’t be.
We think of our age as an age of innovation and revolutionary change — the Internet bringing the world’s information into our homes at touch-typing speed, the collapse of Big Media, globalization and the like. These changes have brought the world to us, inside our homes, and they are extraordinary.
But it’s astonishing how little the physical dimensions of the developed world have actually changed in the 52 years since I was born. Trains are trains; cars are cars; planes are planes.
The year 1909 came 52 years before my birth. Now think about what happened between 1909 and 1961. The development of the airplane. The assembly line that made universal car ownership possible. Mass electrification. Mass indoor plumbing. Mass telephony. Mass entertainment in the form of the motion picture, radio and TV. Air conditioning and refrigeration, making it possible to store food and work effectively year-round. The splitting of the atom. Rocketry. Radar. Space exploration.
Since 1750, each half-century has seen the world change more than it had ever changed in the millennia before it. But since 1961, the rate and pace of these changes have slowed dramatically — even as the benefits have spread themselves across the globe.
There are many reasons for this, none of which should make us feel all that positive about the possibility of dramatic future change.
For one thing, innovation is disruptive — and we seem far more concerned in America today with minimizing and mitigating the effect of disruption than we do with looking to the better future that will follow it.
That’s understandable. Visionaries like Robert Moses were far too cavalier about disruptive change; the blowback against the wounds they inflicted has had a paralytic effect on today’s leaders.
But we’ve also lost something ineffable. We are not looking beyond; we are looking within.
The innovations that dazzle us are the ones that seem to be designed to submerge us within ourselves — like Google Glasses, for example, which will effectively allow you to live inside the Internet.
There’s something parched about that. The Dream Car would carry us aloft, to see the world from above, to transcend our physical limitations — which is what the train and car and the plane did more than 100 years ago.
The Internet, the motive force of all our innovations, keeps us inside.