The automobile has not merely taken over the street, it has dissolved the living tissue of the city. Its appetite for space is absolutely insatiable; moving and parked, it devours urban land, leaving the buildings as mere islands of habitable space in a sea of dangerous and ugly traffic. -----James Marston Fitch, historic preservationist (1909-2000)

Yet, without the automobile, we would have remained largely rural, insular and wholly dependendant on the media for our view of the larger world.