" There was nothing like it before in history: a machine that promised liberation from the daily bondage of place. And in a free country like the United States, with the unrestricted right to travel, a vast geographical territory to spread out into, and a national tradition of picking up and moving whenever life became intolerable, the automobile came as a blessing. "

― James Howard Kunstler , The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape