Life & Wisdom Quote by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Ban all automobiles from the city center? From Ferlinghetti, that isn’t policy wonkery; it’s a Beat-era provocation aimed at puncturing the religion of “progress” with a grin and a shiv. Calling the automobile a “passing fad” is the key bit of mischief: cars were already the dominant American infrastructure, the concrete fact of postwar life. Labeling them a fad flips the power dynamic, demoting a massive system into something flimsy, trendlike, disposable - the way advertising talks about products, not the way cities talk about arteries.

The repetition - “It’s got to go. It’s got to go a long way from here” - reads like a street-corner incantation, half rant, half poem. Ferlinghetti isn’t arguing; he’s casting. That rhythm does what his poetry often does: it turns civic life into a moral atmosphere. The “central part of the city” matters because it’s where public life is supposed to happen: walking, lingering, talking, seeing. Cars don’t just take up space; they colonize attention and reorder the city around speed, private isolation, and the constant threat of impact.

Context sharpens the edge. Ferlinghetti, a San Francisco institution and City Lights impresario, watched bohemia and street culture get squeezed by midcentury planning, freeway logic, and consumerist mobility. The line carries nostalgia, yes, but also a refusal: the city is not a highway interchange with coffee shops attached. It’s a commons, and the “fad” he wants to end is the one that convinced us otherwise.