There are three types of cities, each determined by a mode of transportation. The first city is at the scale of the pedestrian, the second is at the scale of the trolley, and the third is at the scale of the car. The third type is called the suburbs, but it is in fact just a city expanded to a scale that corresponds to its defining form of transportation, the car. It's also important to keep in mind that the cultural/market forces that expanded the city to the very limits of automobile transportation in the second half of the 20th century are identical to the forces that expanded the city to the limits of the trolley at the turn of the 19th century. This form of public transportation (the trolley) was also used to get out of the pedestrian city, the center, and settle in neighborhoods that had detached houses and lawns. Columbia City was once such a suburb. The universalization of the car after the Second World War expanded the city to distant places like Issaquah. This process, which only recently has slowed down and in certain places even reversed, almost killed the core, the pedestrian city. In fact, many futurists and sub-urbanists in the early '80s were certain that the next big technology after the automobile, the internet (then called "teletext and video text"—read the last chapter of Kenneth Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States), would finally create a massive city with no center, a black hole orbited by cars, freeways, malls, and houses.

But it turns out that the pedestrian city and the public transportation city are benefiting from the internet because, one, it is not isolated in the home and, two, work was never really domesticated. Most jobs have remained outside of the house, at places one has to drive to. But one cannot drive and use the internet at the same time. This fact has presented a huge and unexpected problem for the motor industry. Its aging technology is not that compatible with the current leading technology. And, as the ad pictured in this post makes clear, every effort to make one compatible with the other looks more and more ridiculous. The woman stops the car to surf the web. (The ad is from the current issue of Essence.)