Tag: cars

Automotive Death Revealer

We hide many of the financial costs of our automobile culture, such as the exorbitant true price of parking, but just as much, we hide the cost in human lives.  By far, the most common source of violent traumatic injury and death in the developed world is our beloved motor vehicle.  In the US alone, every year 10 times as many people are killed by cars than were killed in the World Trade Center attacks, 10 times as many as have been killed in the Iraq war.  Every two years we kill more Americans with vehicles than we did in all of the Vietnam war.  Every three years, more than WWI, every ten, more than WWII.

Why do we deem these losses acceptable?  They aren’t inevitable.  The UK, Iceland, Sweden, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland and Switzerland all have vehicular death rates less than half of our 12/100,000 people per year (which puts us on par with Bangladesh…).  We can re-design and re-build our cities and our streets to avoid this carnage, for a fraction of the cost of our ill-fated War on Terror, and many other governmental actions supposedly undertaken in the name of keeping us safe.  Safe from threats which do not really exist, in a statistical sense, but which loom large in our monkey minds.

Would it be different if we left the corpses out on the roads to rot?  If we hung the out skeletal remains as a ghastly reminder?  Some software developers in Moscow are trying to do just that, with a mobile augmented reality app called the Death Revealer:

(via Copenhagenize)

Bicycles and Fresh Bread

The NY Times points out that bicycles and the European penchant for fresh bread are more closely related than you might at first imagine.  A writer in Amsterdam talks about how a slightly different conception of daily life enables cities without cars, and how that life is really more free than our slavish commitment to the car.

Star CSP Hotline for Bicyclists

Bicyclists are encouraged to use the *CSP hotline to report aggressive drivers to the Colorado State Police (just dial *277 on your mobile).  You must obtain the license plate of the vehicle and describe the aggressive behavior.  Location, direction of travel, and a driver description are good too, but not mandatory.  After 3 reports of the same vehicle, the registered owner gets a warning letter.  Subsequent reports will result in a state trooper visiting them in person and taking “appropriate enforcement action”, whatever that means.  If you’re not on a state highway, make sure you get them to enter the info into the database before you’re transferred to local law enforcement to make a report.  Hopefully they’ll make some kind of annual report as to what actions this system has actually resulted in.

Location Efficiency More Important than Home Energy Efficiency

How important is Location Efficiency?  Median US home price: $175k.  With a traditional 20% down 30 year mortgage, total loan payments amount to about $350k.  Utilities over the same timeframe are around $75k.  And the cost of commuting from suburbia?  Roughly $300k!  This is in general agreement with the energy (as opposed to financial) analysis recently published by the EPA.

Across Europe, Irking Drivers is Urban Policy

The New York Times almost seems upset that in Europe the mobility of people, not motor vehicles, is the measure of an urban transportation system.  With finite funding and urban space constraints, you sometimes have to choose which mode to prioritize.  Pedestrians, bicycles, and mass transit all move more people in less space, with less GHG emissions, noise and pollution, more safely than cars.  De-prioritizing automobiles also makes streets into vastly more livable public spaces.  It’s not about making life bad for cars, it’s about making it good for people!

The American suburbs are a giant Ponzi scheme

Suburbia as Ponzi scheme.  We have subsidized suburban growth through debt and taxes, and reaped the short-term financial rewards of that growth, but at the expense of taking on ever larger long-term liabilities in terms of infrastructure maintenance and a very energy intensive transportation system.  I disagree with Strong Towns on the appropriate overall scale of habitation (more people and a much larger fraction of our overall economy live in cities, not towns), but this is (another) good critique of the American Nightmare.

NHTSA, AAA join together for National Bike Danger Month

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and AAA have joined together to promote National Bicycles Are Dangerous Month.  I don’t understand why the US DoT would think that AAA and the NHTSA have any experience with bicycling.  They’re both catastrophically automotive organizations.  If anything, they have institutional imperatives to discourage cycling, which is exactly what their so-called safety recommendations do, by portraying bicycling as a dangerous activity, and placing the onus on cyclists to be safer, even though all the 100 daily deaths on US highways are perpetrated by cars.