The trumpet sounded from eighth row center at a Washington University lecture hall in St. Louis five years ago. It was early in my explorations for the book that would become Asphalt Nation, and I was happy preaching to the choir. Or, I should say, to fellow passengers; for the students at the architecture school were already on the same trip. They knew intuitively, if not literally, the design formulas that I recited from the podium-for example, that every motor vehicle required building an ancillary seven parking spaces to hold it at rest. They realized that big chunks-some 30 percent-of our cities were hardtopped in service to the car's voracious appetite. And they knew how that transformed the built environment into a grim "carchitecture."

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