"Discount air fares, a car in every parking space and the interstate highway system have made every place accessible - and every place alike"
About this Quote
Steel’s line lands like a postcard from the age of mobility, stamped with a warning: the very technologies that promised freedom have quietly standardized the American experience. The phrase “every place accessible” carries the old democratic romance of travel - the idea that the country opens up to anyone with a cheap ticket, a set of keys, an exit ramp. Then he pivots: “and every place alike.” That dash is doing moral work, turning convenience into consequence.
His specific intent isn’t to sneer at travel; it’s to name the trade-off modern infrastructure smuggles in. Discount air fares and interstates don’t just move people, they move expectations. They import the same franchises, the same hotel logic, the same zoning patterns. Accessibility becomes a solvent: it dissolves local eccentricities by making them economically risky and culturally optional. The subtext is that homogenization isn’t a conspiracy, it’s an algorithm of scale. When movement is frictionless, difference has to fight harder to survive.
Context matters: Steel is writing from within a late-20th-century American landscape reshaped by federal highway spending, mass car ownership, and the airline deregulation era that made flying routine rather than rare. Those shifts didn’t merely connect cities; they reorganized where people live, how suburbs sprawl, what “downtown” means, and what gets preserved versus paved. The line works because it compresses a whole cultural history into a neat paradox: the more we can go anywhere, the less “anywhere” feels like it has to exist.
His specific intent isn’t to sneer at travel; it’s to name the trade-off modern infrastructure smuggles in. Discount air fares and interstates don’t just move people, they move expectations. They import the same franchises, the same hotel logic, the same zoning patterns. Accessibility becomes a solvent: it dissolves local eccentricities by making them economically risky and culturally optional. The subtext is that homogenization isn’t a conspiracy, it’s an algorithm of scale. When movement is frictionless, difference has to fight harder to survive.
Context matters: Steel is writing from within a late-20th-century American landscape reshaped by federal highway spending, mass car ownership, and the airline deregulation era that made flying routine rather than rare. Those shifts didn’t merely connect cities; they reorganized where people live, how suburbs sprawl, what “downtown” means, and what gets preserved versus paved. The line works because it compresses a whole cultural history into a neat paradox: the more we can go anywhere, the less “anywhere” feels like it has to exist.
Quote Details
| Topic | Travel |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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