Warning: Driving Kills (excerpt)
Source: Behind the Surface
Cars cover and suffocate our lives but somehow their dominance is also strangely invisible. Our unique adaptability as a species has enabled us to acclimatize to their staggering “everywhereness,” and not see it as odd. Were the car a disease it would be an epidemic. Yet, spellbound, we embrace the great destroyer and design our lives, communities and countryside around it. We welcome cars into our lives when, rationally, we should be emblazoning them with public health warnings in the same style as cigarette packets. Driving can seriously damage your health, or Driving Kills.
In the century since the first recorded fatal traffic accident, the car has claimed 30 million lives. Traffic accidents are now predicted by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies to become the world’s third most significant cause of death and disability by 2020. The World Health Organization estimates that 1.2 million people die on roads each year: similar to total fatalities caused by malaria.
I’ve often wondered if the increasing alienation present in today’s American society isn’t related to the increasing use of cars. It’s true that the car has rewritten our landscape; suburbs, for example, generally couldn’t happen without cars, and urban decay was largely unknown prior to the automobile age. This article also cites some startling (if anecdotal) evidence about asthma rates in the presence of motor vehicle emissions.
It’s admittedly a little hypocritical of me to say this given that I currently hold title to not one, but two cars[1]. But it seems that the automobile age has brought only one good thing: mobility. The bad things it has also brought — social alienation, urban decay, problematic fossil fuel consumption, etc. — provide a considerable balance to the mobility aspect.
At the same time, there are many things in current society that could not have been accomplished without the automobile. The article notes that the problem isn’t really cars per se, but the impact they’ve had on their alternatives. Here in Raleigh, there is a tremendous debate about funding of a new rail transit system; many drivers, apparently, prefer adding an extra hour to their commute[2] instead of going without immediate access to their cars. The article notes that this particular aspect of “car addiction” is really related to the combination of advertising and government subsidies that are poured into the automobile industry.
I wonder what would happen if all that energy were poured into the alternative transportation industry. Not only is there enough money and advertising involved to change attitudes, there is enough involved to fund a strong improvement to the transit infratructure. Until then, people like me will battle “car addiction” a little bit at a time.
1. It’s a long story involving family politics, but the short version is that, functionally, I only own and operate one car — and I intend for car title records to reflect that by next summer.
2. Most of that hour is spent idling on I-40, which is one of the area’s larger rush-hour parking lots. All the 50 mpg cars in the world won’t change the fact that this has a serious negative impact on local air quality.