According to Christopher Leo, reviewing Douglas Rae's book City: Urbanism and Its End, Rae draws on his experience as a city manager to argue that the most dramatic and direct contribution of automobiles to urban decline was to overwhelm city centers with traffic congestion, rather than to make urban residents' flight to the suburbs easier. Leo says this contradicts conventional wisdom among scholars of urbanism.
According to Leo, Rae's view that traffic congestion kills cities fails to notice that the most successful cities all suffer from serious congestion, while unsuccessful cities, persuaded by their engineers, build roads in vain, in many cases until there is no city center left. Leo writes: "If we could find one example of an obviously successful city—say London, New York, Tokyo, or Toronto-whose economy was harmed by excess traffic, the road engineers' argument might gain some credibility. But ordinary observation suggests that complaints about traffic and parking are not a major concern in those cities, which actually have serious traffic and parking problems—but are a constant refrain" in some other North American cities. In one such city, Leo writes, parking complaints that would be "considered laughable" in the Canadian city of Vancouver are "offered as reasons for not spending time in a downtown that is beset by urban decay."
1. As represented in the passage, Leo's statements are most likely intended to indicate that in a particular North American city (see highlighted phrase), the primary factor discouraging some people from spending much time downtown is thatA) they have everything they need in the suburbs
B) the downtown area suffers from serious traffic congestion
C) it is too difficult to find a parking spot in the downtown area
D) the downtown area is too far from their homes in the suburbs
E) they find little, if anything, downtown attractive enough to outweigh perceived difficulties with parking
2. The primary purpose of the passage is toA) describe two effects of automobiles on city centers
B) compare several major cities with regard to traffic congestion and parking problems
C) provide an account of one writer's response to an opinion ascribed to Rae concerning cities' decline
D) challenge one critic's view of Rae's claim regarding the role of
automobiles in urban decline
E) present evidence against the conventional view of scholars of urbanism regarding the influence of automobiles
3. If Leo's views as represented in the passage are correct, which of the following would, if true, most help explain why serious traffic and parking problems in certain cities have relatively little, if any, negative effect on those cities' economic success?A) Some metropolitan areas are more successful than others in arranging traffic flow to eliminate or significantly reduce traffic and parking problems.
B) Some cities that are economically successful and succeed in solving their traffic-congestion problems become even more successful economically.
C) The economies of cities like London, New York, Tokyo, and Toronto are driven primarily by international trade that is little affected by traffic congestion.
D) The roads of New York and Toronto were built much more recently than those of London and Tokyo.
E) Many successful cities do not have traffic congestion or parking problems.