suburbs, and then extended many of the forms of urban life along the highways until the open road seemed to become nonstop cities. It created the asphalt jungles, and caused 40,000 square miles of green and pleasant land to be cemented over. With the arrival of plane travel, the motorcar and truck teamed up together to wreck the railways. Today small children plead for a train ride as if it were a stagecoach or horse and cutter: "Before they're gone, Daddy." The motorcar ended the countryside and substituted a new landscape in which the car was a sort of steeplechaser. At the same time, the motor destroyed the city as a casual environment in which families could be reared. Streets, and even sidewalks, became too intense a scene for the casual interplay of growing up. As the city filled with mobile strangers, even next-door neighbors became strangers. This is the story of the motorcar, and it has not much longer to run. The tide of taste and tolerance has turned, since TV, to make the hot-car medium increasingly tiresome. Witness the portent of the crosswalk, where the small child has power to stop a cement truck. The same change has rendered the big city unbearable to many who would no more have felt that way ten years ago than they could have enjoyed reading MAD. The continuing power of the car medium to transform the patterns of settlement appears fully in the way in which the new urban kitchen has taken on the same central and multiple social character as the old farm kitchen. The farm kitchen had been the key point of entry to the farmhouse, and had become the social center, as well. The new suburban home again makes the kitchen the center and, ideally, is localized for access to and from the car. The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man. Even before the Volkswagen, observers above street level have often noticed the near-resemblance of cars to shiny-backed insects. In the age of the tactile-oriented skin-diver, this hard shiny carapace is one of the