Epilogue: The Same Old Story of the American Road

Jean Baudrillard’s America sets the dubious aspirations and ultimate disappointments of America’s early days of automobility alongside the grave concerns that trouble reflections on the contemporary landscape. Today many observers and some Americans are beginning to acknowledge that their highway infrastructure is woefully outdated where it’s not literally crumbling, and efforts to rebuild that infrastructure are situated within a matrix of conflicting social and cultural issues, including persistent disparities of access, a mania to perpetually stimulate economic growth, the will to mitigate the dangers of national and foreign policies dangerously committed to maintaining the flow of cheap oil, and the need to confront climate change caused, in no small measure, by devotions to automobility. Mobility scholarship has plumbed the need and charted ways to think beyond the steel and petroleum car. As Americans now endeavor to revise their cultural values and relationships to national (and global) space, it is critically instructive to reflect upon the period in history when the conflicted mindset with which we find ourselves contending was first forged; doing so helps us to evaluate the uncertainties, ambivalences, and elisions in the stories Americans have been telling themselves about their shared landscape for barely a century now, and doing so prepares us to consider more just and sustainable mobility futures.