Having done my best to piss off a lot of people on this website one thing that stands out is how people who are accustomed to driving their car everywhere have never even really given car culture any thought.
Like, no part of it.
People don't know how roads are paid for -- or that their taxes don't cover them. People don't know driving is the leading cause of climate pollution in the US. People don't know cars are the leading killer of children on earth, and leading cause of hospitalization for all humans
People don't know that their suburban, car-oriented lifestyle leads to virtually guaranteed municipal bankruptcy. People don't know that it's not actually cheaper to "drive til you qualify" when you ... include the cost of the driving.
People don't know carmakers target their products/advertising to that part of human brain focused purely on survival -- which includes the instinct to kill perceived threats.
People don't know that the only difference between a $75,000 car and a $25,000 car is your ego.
People don't know most cars sold today could be made lighter/more fuel efficient -- easily 50 miles per gallon, arguably ~ 60 mpg, but carmakers don't give a shit about pollution & so add heavier features to their models instead of capturing fuel economy gains in the powertrain.
People don't know one of the stupidest ideas any human has ever come up with, during any time in our history, is putting a video screen in front of the driver, even if it's at an angle off to the right. People don't know the other stupidest idea is letting cell phone users drive.
People don't know the reason driving is so deadly in the US is we have a traffic engineering profession that mandates death. Like, actually has a manual that says that unless a certain number of people are killed on a street/intersection each year, it is *not dangerous enough.*
People don't know there's no such thing as "free parking" because someone has to pay for that land/concrete -- but they *do* know to get insanely angry if someone asks them to pay for it.
People don't know the housing crisis was caused, and is exacerbated by, car culture.
People don't know that almost everything they claim to want -- good health care, schools, streets safe enough to let their kids walk to school, affordable housing, jobs that aren't 3 hours away, parks/open space, walkable neighborhoods -- can't happen in cities dominated by cars.
And of course, people don't know how to drive. They don't know the laws about turn signals, or sudden braking, or yielding to pedestrians in crosswalks, or staying in their lane, or checking their blind spot, or not tailgating, or how to fucking parallel park.
And so it strikes me that, the thing almost everyone does, that people risk their lives for every day, that costs people millions of dollars over their lifetimes and utterly destroys their well-being, their neighborhoods, the climate --
They've never really thought about it.
"I don't want to live the wrong life and then die" has got to be the single best line of sci-fi I've heard in a long, long time and yeah, it's got me thinking about stuff
One thing drivers do, if they're committed to their dissonance about cars, is point out small, trivial errors.
For example, I made the statement "cars are the leading killers of children on earth" -- but actually, this is only true for children between ages of 5 - 19.
Gotcha!!
I of course did not mean to erase the world's toddlers, or the challenges of overcoming malaria, dysentery, etc.
But if you're born in the USA you are still more likely to be killed by a driver than anything else before the age of ~ 40.
That said ...
If drivers really cared about the lives of children, we'd take the same, aggressive, no-holds-barred approach to traffic violence as we've taken to eradicating the water-borne and nutrient-related diseases that kill so many kids around the world.
Among the many reasons that vehicle weight taxes are good is, carmakers are planning to replace 5,000 pound gasoline SUVs with 8,000 pound battery/electric ones and, as usual, stick us with the bill for the increased deaths and road damage.
I've been arguing for ~ 15 years all road users should pay taxes proportionate to road impact -- as long as it's based on physics.
So, for example, biklings should pay $1 per year for wear and tear we cause roads -- if drivers pay $17,000 per year. streets.mn/2016/07/07/cha…
I'm open to negotiation on this. So, if drivers don't want to pay $17,000 per year, then ... we could pay cyclists $1,000 a year to ride their bikes, and in exchange for the dramatic reduction in road wear, charge drivers only, say, $10,000 a year.
This is the best argument for safe streets I’ve ever read.
“Despite the common misperception that Slow Streets are designed for athletic ‘tech bro’ bikers, they aren’t the ones who benefit most. It is people like me who need more space to feel safe.” sfchronicle.com/opinion/openfo…
“Rather than taking away transportation options from seniors and mobility impaired people like me, Slow Streets offer us new, healthier possibilities.”
Dear drivers, they’re not your god damn streets, they being to us all and your time monopolizing and dominating them is over.
One thing that makes violent drivers so pernicious in their anti-safe-streets advocacy is, most people don’t know the details behind their lie:
Victims of driver violence are overwhelmingly NOT athletic “tech bros.”
They’re children, the elderly, disabled, & people of color.
electric vehicle advocates are basically assuming they'll be able to convince a ~ billion gasoline SUV drivers in 2030 to retire their SUVs early and drop ~ $25,000 on a new electric vehicle "because it's better"
The more likely scenario is, taxpayers will be forced to give SUV drivers $25 trillion in "cash for clunkers" programs.
Hell, Bernie Sanders proposed this exact approach two years ago -- $2 trillion in handouts to the for-profit capitalist car industry!
"climate action"
alternatively, we could *stop* burning money, start to claw back all the land and tax dollars the car industry stole from us, use it for housing and transit, and do it all *for less money*
Demand for walkable neighborhoods is through the roof.
Honestly, these things are always impossible to see in the moment but I abso-fucking-lutely guarantee that the humans of 2122 will view the car industry (which will have been nuked from outer space -- just to be sure) as the single worst villain in the history of humanity.
What's wild about this, is cars are *just about* single-handedly responsible for failure on climate because of where they sit in the ecosystem of pollution sources.
This is not just about gasoline.
In addition to their oil addiction, cars are the largest consumers of steel and related products on earth, and *also* the largest drivers of demand for concrete for roads.
Steel and concrete cause 15% of all carbon emissions globally.