“America’s love affair with the automobile” has cooled considerably in recent years, and the critics of Detroit have sent forth the word that it has been a sordid and corrupting experience from the start.  But according to Barry Bruce-Briggs, the affair has simply matured into a conventional middle-aged marriage.  Not as sweet as it once was, perhaps, but still a sturdy and honorable alliance.

Mr. Bruce-Briggs argues with great force that today’s “auto-highway system” comes about as close as the mind can conceive to the ideal transportation system one would plan if starting from scratch.  Cars take us precisely where we want to go, when we want to go; in comfort, security and privacy; at high speed and low cost; with minimal demands on operating and navigating skills; and with drivers who never go on strike.  In all of these respects the auto-highway system is decisively superior to every other form of intra-urban transportation, except in a few unique locations such as Manhattan Island; it is and will remain the mass transportation system upon which virtually all of us depend, both in and out of the city.

The automobile, the author summarizes, has “made real the ancient dream of personal mobility that was reflected in the myth of the centaur, giving every man the liberty of movement once afforded only the rich, and permitting the masses a quality of life previously inconceivable.”

Despite these manifest virtues, the auto-highway system has become the target of a concerted “war” led by our country’s most important politicians and opinion leaders, and it is the primary purpose of Mr. Bruce-Brigg’s book to explain why this has happened.  He makes short work of the critics’ more ridiculous charges against cars and highways—that they have “caused” insufferable congestion, for instance, or “paved over” the countryside, or discriminated against the poor and black.  And he shows that air pollution, fuel consumption and highway deaths and injuries, while they are substantial problems, have been exaggerated beyond all reason.  Each is in principle susceptible to solution at acceptable cost.

None of these genuine problems, however, justifies the legislative tantrums that have been thrown in their name, with Congress and Detroit engaged in an annual game of chicken over the detail of vehicle and engine design and pollution-control hardware.  Why is it, Mr. Bruce-Briggs asks, that our betters in Washington see fit to pursue sensible policy objectives through punitive, enormously costly laws?  And why are officials at all levels pouring billions of dollars into exorbitant “collective transit” systems, such as San Francisco’s BART and Washington’s Metro, which benefit primarily the well-to-do and cannot hope to have more than a trivial impact on any aspect of urban transportation?

The explanation, he tells us, is that powerful groups have acquired large stakes in dampening further development of the auto-highway system, and their apparently disinterested talk about pollution and “energy efficiency” is really just a cloak for their true, selfish concerns.  The “New Class” of academics, journalists and bureaucrats is contemptuous of the democratic culture and mass prosperity which the automobile symbolizes, and desires to have its own, more refined tastes imposed by law.  The “downtown business interests” see the automobile as the source of suburban growth at the expense of the central cities, and wish to see radial public transit made cheaper relative to driving.  And the vast middle class, increasingly threatened by having to rub bumpers with poor and working-class drivers on the highways, supports any measure which helps to put the “lower orders” back in the buses and subways (or homes) appropriate to their station.

This exercise in class analysis is titillating—it is always fun to see exposed the anti-egalitarian sentiments of those who pretend otherwise—but it does leave a good deal unexplained.  Downtown businesses have a clear interest in public transit subsidies, but they do not benefit from increased driving costs and EPA parking restrictions which tie the majority of car-bound shoppers more closely to their suburban malls.  Who does?  And who in the middle class will benefit from the fuel-consumption restrictions recently passed by the Senate, which would effectively ban the large family station wagon a few years hence?  (Mr. Bruce-Briggs himself asks how President Carter, who raised four kids in rural Georgia, could possibly support such nonsense.)

The style of “The War Against the Automobile” is exuberant, colloquial and occasionally cranky.  Mr. Bruce-Briggs is a master of the clever insight, as when he patiently explains that the planners’ dreams of futuristic “dial-a-bus” systems already exist in the form of radio dispatched taxi companies.  But his talents at argument and anecdote frequently lead him to neglect or scoff at the kind of dry, factual analysis that would be more persuasive to readers who don’t already share his views.

Thus Sam Peltzman’s powerful study of the effects of automobile safety regulations—which Mr. Bruce-Briggs seems to draw heavily on,  and which supports his argument that the regulations have had little or no effect—gets dismissed as “bizarre” and “ludicrous” because it uses assumptions that conflict with Mr. Bruce-Briggs’s hunches (unsupported and, I believe, incorrect) about what determines driving behavior.  More generally, while charts and tables abound in the book, critical points are too often left to bald assertion.

Many readers simply will not take Mr. Bruce-Briggs’s word for it that public expenditures on mass transportation are extremely regressive, or that at least until recently, serviceable used cars were inexpensive enough for almost anyone to own.  And there’s not even a stab at estimating the critical figure of the total costs of all the safety, pollution and other automobile regulations of the past few years, and the distribution of these costs among various groups in the population.

Still, Mr. Bruce-Briggs did not set out to write an academic book but rather a popular one; and I hope this characterization turns out to be correct.  Few readers of any persuasion will doubt that it is incomparably superior to the anti-automobile polemics whose influence it seeks to counter.