From 2008:
Apropos of George F. Will's moronic column extolling as virtues the ravages cars cause to our social landscape and planet, I thought I'd point out that he clearly didn't read my post on why cars suck:
In no particular order, here is an elaboration of why cars suck:
1. Cars magnify the worst aspects of capitalist social relations by alienating drivers from lived interaction with fellow human beings. Cut off from immediate contact with others, and enclosed in a climate-controlled, steel/glass bubble, many drivers behave as though the world outside them is at best decoration, at worst a series of conspiring inconveniences plotting to sabotage their delusional mission to proceed unhampered by anything. Drivers treat other people in ways that they would never treat them if they were walking next to them on the street.
2. Following closely on the heels of #1: cars are selfish. It's all "me, me, me" with cars. Cars, in effect, habituate and encourage this kind of behavior. Moreover, the entire idea of a "personal automobile" is selfish in that it hogs up resources, space, etc. in a way that is unsustainable and unrealistic. For example, moving down a major thoroughfare in a city, a car with one passenger takes up roughly 1/4 of the space of a city bus (which can hold up to 100 or more people), uses a disproportionate share of fuel resources, and on top of that exacerbates the problems of congestion. Cars also crowd streets that would otherwise be excellent bike routes. Although it's hard to see from the point of view of the drivers seat, the reality is that city-life is a profound testament to the sense in which everyone is bound up in relations of dependency. A city is a space in which lots of people cohabitate on terms that no individual sets themselves. Yet, the unrealistic point of view encouraged by the car is something like the following: "I am free to the extent that I can drive my care where I want when I want however fast I want and not have to live by train schedules or interact with other city dwellers." It is undeniable that this mindset has been produced after many years of having infrastructure devoted exclusively to car-travel, pitting drivers against each other in a free-for-all traffic jam they are stuck navigating through every day of their lives. So it stands to reason that car drivers aren't inherently bad people; on the contrary they can be educated and habituated into new habits if we were to change to a car-free system of infrastructure and transportation.
3. Cars make cities less safe. Especially if you are a biker or a pedestrian (God forbid, right?). Some drivers get so caught up in their own quest to quickly make an unprotected left turn at an intersection (or quickly sneak in front of pedestrians to make a right on red) that they simply forget that they are inside of a climate controlled, metal/glass bubble which moves at the touch of a button on the floor of the car cockpit. Meanwhile, the people they almost mow down or intimidate or whiz in front of are walking on their own two feet. Nonetheless, the distorted relation that drivers stand with respect to the outside world causes them to miss a lot of the facts, thus they tend to focus intensely on whether they might have to wait either 0.5 seconds or 5 seconds to turn left (as the case may be). In such a case, the person trying to walk down the street becomes the enemy. "Must turn before this jerk pedestrian makes me wait for 2 more seconds than I have to", we can imagine drivers thinking to themselves. This is barbaric.
4. Cars are (f)ugly. Sorry, but they are. Particularly in salty, snowy conditions where they are all covered with dirty crud. There are strong aesthetic grounds, it seems to me, to purge the heavy presence of cars from the urban landscape. Let them be garnish at most, rather than the main course. At the very least, I think we can all agree that the hideousness of parking lots (and everything they represent) is the perfect exemplification of this problem. The most beautiful urban spaces in our country were almost all constructed and planned before the manufactured obsession with the personal car became pervasive. If we're talking only aesthetics here, in the narrow sense of how 'attractive' or 'scenic' an urban space is, should we go in for the walkable leafy streets of Greenwich Village or the prosaic, washed-out, lifelessness of suburban areas designed for maximum car-commuter ease? Rather than going on the defensive and merely trying to impede the creation of new parking lots, we should instead push for the immediate expropriation of all parking lots in dense urban areas, in order that the public might re-develop the space for affordable housing, urban agricultural efforts and other worthwhile activities that counteract the social/environmental ravages of cars.
5. Cars pollute city air and water. Set aside their role in climate change for the moment. From a more local perspective, the heavy use of cars by individuals in cities creates unnecessary smog and air pollution that is something you can smell, taste and sense on days when its particularly bad. Why should we put up with this when just about everything else about cars sucks?
6. Cars are a serious misallocation of resources. This is true from the perspective of production as well as of consumption. In terms of consumption, cars are a terrible investment: they require maintenance and upkeep costs, insurance costs, financing/payment costs, repair costs (when things inevitably break), parking costs, fuel costs, ticket-costs (for when you inevitably park in the wrong spot or get caught going 5 over). Moreover, cars do not hold their value (which, btw, is totally untrue of bikes; quite the opposite in fact). So, cars also represent a misallocation in the sense that consumer resources could be put into something that yields a more worthwhile return for their cash. From the perspective of production, cars are not what our society should be building: cars are not necessary since there are tons of alternative, more efficient, more egalitarian, progressive, environmentally sustainable and practical ways for people to get around. Now it is a unfortunate fact of the infrastructural design of much of the USA that cars are in some sense all but required. But three things must be said here: first of all, buses and bikes are in many ways more of an option than people in these places realize. Surely there are options for reducing car-use even where people are forced to use cars as a primary means of transport. Second, the inability to avoid heavy car-use in a certain area should not be a reason to condone cars as such, but should instead be a reason to change and re-think the way that the particular space in question is physically set up. Third, this unfortunate fact about much of America is not true of major cities at all (one thinks of Chicago, New York, Boston, Philly, DC, San Fran, etc.). In Chicago cars are not required at all; on the contrary they are more of a nuisance than a benefit even for convenience-minded, self-interested folks. To take a Chicago example, who can argue with 2 all-day all-night 24/7 rails (the 'blue line' and the 'red line') that let you stay out and play as long as you like on weekends without having to bother with designated drivers or pricey cab debacles? So with these three things in mind, bringing the conversation back to production, we should point out that manufacturing personal cars is a waste of labor power, capital and energy resources. They should never be built in the first place; there are, however, a lot of vehicles that society does need: A shit-ton more buses that we currently have, trucks and vans appropriate to certain tasks of building infrastructure, etc. One need not be anti-worker (or anti-UAW) just because they oppose the production of automobiles. Those workers have a ton of know-how about how to build all kinds of things we do in fact need, and a just society would hardly put them out of work simply because capitalists have been investing in the production of something we don't need.
7. Car horns and alarms are noise pollution.
8. As a friend of mine astutely points out in the comments, "cars make gyms make sense". There's a lot of wisdom packed into that short quip. Kind of reminds me of a guy I knew in college who would drive 0.25 miles from his apartment to the university gym to work out for two hours and then would drive back to his place. In the Spring, no less.
9. Oh yea... and have you ever heard of this thing called CLIMATE CHANGE? Either cars are on their way out or we're on our way out as a planet.
10. etc.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
From the Archives: Why Cars Suck
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
"All you see is... crime in the city"
Unlike previous generations of Americans, the vast majority of the children of baby-boomers have come of age in a social environment outside of urban centers. We must, however, be more specific here: the vast majority of white Americans (particularly middle class and wealthier) born in the postwar era have been socialized and formed by the Suburban social and political landscape. There are of course a handful of small exceptions (e.g. the Upper East Side, etc.).
By and large, however, the majority of Americans under the age of 40 are products not of urban life, but of a suburban social environment which itself only emerged and congealed in the 1950s.
There are, of course, millions of interesting insights to be gleamed from this fact, but I'll just focus on one here: large numbers of Americans are afraid of cities as such.
This fear manifests itself in many different ways, but it typically assumes a form something like the following. Cities are dark, crowded, dangerous places where one must always be on the lookout for the inevitable attack. The people there (most of whom, it is imagined, are criminals and of color) are mean, resentful and certainly not to be trusted. Moreover, city-dwellers are looking just for people like you, that is, people who are not from the city and fear its squalor and iniquity. They're looking for you, of course, in order to rob and ruffle your suburban purity. Watch out.
This phobia is homologous to (and deeply bound up with) common views about black people in the contemporary US. As political philosopher Tommie Shelby describes it, "in the present post-industrial phase of capitalist development, blacks are often viewed as parasitic, angry, ungrateful, and dangerous" (whereas they'd been characterized as "docile, superstitious, easily satisfied, and servile" under the conditions of plantation slavery). Witness, also, the way in which the term "urban" itself has become racialized and devalued on that basis.
There are countless examples. A good starting place for analyzing this phenomenon is film. From my armchair, it seems as though the depiction of urban areas and so-called "inner cities" in particular, takes an increasingly negative turn from the 1950s/60s onwards (whereas the positive evaluation of the single-family home, the automobile, etc. seems to soar). Things seemed to have changed a bit in the 1990s with the return of many affluent white people to urban centers. But films from the late 1970s and 80s especially (when major US cities were at rock bottom all across the board) depict the city as a dirty, crime-infested den of violence and darkness. This is typically contrasted with the (apparently) idyllic, whitewashed landscape of suburbia. Such a gaze is always from the outside (suburbia) looking in (toward urban areas). Blue Velvet plays off of this phenomenon in really interesting ways, but I can't go into that right now. (Nor can I go into the political economy of why suburbs emerged and why cities went into severe decline in the middle of the 20th century in the US).
One cinematic example from my childhood stands out: the 1983 Tom Cruise film Risky Business. (Or also from 1983, see this). The entire film is an expression of the gaze of the adolescent, white male child of the suburban well-to-do on the North Shore. The film creates clear demarcations between a suburban land of paternal law, purity, cleanliness, conventionally-defined success, norms of chivalry, etc. on the one hand, and an urban landscape characterized by raw sexual "deviance", iniquity, and crime on the other. "Home" is a massive single-family house in Glencoe whereas the problems Joel faces are all to be found in the land of pimps, drugs, and violence: Chicago.
Film and TV, of course, are only two "ideological state apparatuses" involved in socialization and the creation of people for whom the city is a place unfit for those with "family values". There are doubtless many other examples.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Why cars suck REDUX
Apropos of George F. Will's moronic column extolling as virtues the ravages cars cause to our social landscape and planet, I thought I'd point out that he clearly didn't read my post on why cars suck:
In no particular order, here is an elaboration of why cars suck:
1. Cars magnify the worst aspects of capitalist social relations by alienating drivers from lived interaction with fellow human beings. Cut off from immediate contact with others, and enclosed in a climate-controlled, steel/glass bubble, many drivers behave as though the world outside them is at best decoration, at worst a series of conspiring inconveniences plotting to sabotage their delusional mission to proceed unhampered by anything. Drivers treat other people in ways that they would never treat them if they were walking next to them on the street.
2. Following closely on the heels of #1: cars are selfish. It's all "me, me, me" with cars. Cars, in effect, habituate and encourage this kind of behavior. Moreover, the entire idea of a "personal automobile" is selfish in that it hogs up resources, space, etc. in a way that is unsustainable and unrealistic. For example, moving down a major thoroughfare in a city, a car with one passenger takes up roughly 1/4 of the space of a city bus (which can hold up to 100 or more people), uses a disproportionate share of fuel resources, and on top of that exacerbates the problems of congestion. Cars also crowd streets that would otherwise be excellent bike routes. Although it's hard to see from the point of view of the drivers seat, the reality is that city-life is a profound testament to the sense in which everyone is bound up in relations of dependency. A city is a space in which lots of people cohabitate on terms that no individual sets themselves. Yet, the unrealistic point of view encouraged by the car is something like the following: "I am free to the extent that I can drive my care where I want when I want however fast I want and not have to live by train schedules or interact with other city dwellers." It is undeniable that this mindset has been produced after many years of having infrastructure devoted exclusively to car-travel, pitting drivers against each other in a free-for-all traffic jam they are stuck navigating through every day of their lives. So it stands to reason that car drivers aren't inherently bad people; on the contrary they can be educated and habituated into new habits if we were to change to a car-free system of infrastructure and transportation.
3. Cars make cities less safe. Especially if you are a biker or a pedestrian (God forbid, right?). Some drivers get so caught up in their own quest to quickly make an unprotected left turn at an intersection (or quickly sneak in front of pedestrians to make a right on red) that they simply forget that they are inside of a climate controlled, metal/glass bubble which moves at the touch of a button on the floor of the car cockpit. Meanwhile, the people they almost mow down or intimidate or whiz in front of are walking on their own two feet. Nonetheless, the distorted relation that drivers stand with respect to the outside world causes them to miss a lot of the facts, thus they tend to focus intensely on whether they might have to wait either 0.5 seconds or 5 seconds to turn left (as the case may be). In such a case, the person trying to walk down the street becomes the enemy. "Must turn before this jerk pedestrian makes me wait for 2 more seconds than I have to", we can imagine drivers thinking to themselves. This is barbaric.
4. Cars are (f)ugly. Sorry, but they are. Particularly in salty, snowy conditions where they are all covered with dirty crud. There are strong aesthetic grounds, it seems to me, to purge the heavy presence of cars from the urban landscape. Let them be garnish at most, rather than the main course. At the very least, I think we can all agree that the hideousness of parking lots (and everything they represent) is the perfect exemplification of this problem. The most beautiful urban spaces in our country were almost all constructed and planned before the manufactured obsession with the personal car became pervasive. If we're talking only aesthetics here, in the narrow sense of how 'attractive' or 'scenic' an urban space is, should we go in for the walkable leafy streets of Greenwich Village or the prosaic, washed-out, lifelessness of suburban areas designed for maximum car-commuter ease? Rather than going on the defensive and merely trying to impede the creation of new parking lots, we should instead push for the immediate expropriation of all parking lots in dense urban areas, in order that the public might re-develop the space for affordable housing, urban agricultural efforts and other worthwhile activities that counteract the social/environmental ravages of cars.
5. Cars pollute city air and water. Set aside their role in climate change for the moment. From a more local perspective, the heavy use of cars by individuals in cities creates unnecessary smog and air pollution that is something you can smell, taste and sense on days when its particularly bad. Why should we put up with this when just about everything else about cars sucks?
6. Cars are a serious misallocation of resources. This is true from the perspective of production as well as of consumption. In terms of consumption, cars are a terrible investment: they require maintenance and upkeep costs, insurance costs, financing/payment costs, repair costs (when things inevitably break), parking costs, fuel costs, ticket-costs (for when you inevitably park in the wrong spot or get caught going 5 over). Moreover, cars do not hold their value (which, btw, is totally untrue of bikes; quite the opposite in fact). So, cars also represent a misallocation in the sense that consumer resources could be put into something that yields a more worthwhile return for their cash. From the perspective of production, cars are not what our society should be building: cars are not necessary since there are tons of alternative, more efficient, more egalitarian, progressive, environmentally sustainable and practical ways for people to get around. Now it is a unfortunate fact of the infrastructural design of much of the USA that cars are in some sense all but required. But three things must be said here: first of all, buses and bikes are in many ways more of an option than people in these places realize. Surely there are options for reducing car-use even where people are forced to use cars as a primary means of transport. Second, the inability to avoid heavy car-use in a certain area should not be a reason to condone cars as such, but should instead be a reason to change and re-think the way that the particular space in question is physically set up. Third, this unfortunate fact about much of America is not true of major cities at all (one thinks of Chicago, New York, Boston, Philly, DC, San Fran, etc.). In Chicago cars are not required at all; on the contrary they are more of a nuisance than a benefit even for convenience-minded, self-interested folks. To take a Chicago example, who can argue with 2 all-day all-night 24/7 rails (the 'blue line' and the 'red line') that let you stay out and play as long as you like on weekends without having to bother with designated drivers or pricey cab debacles? So with these three things in mind, bringing the conversation back to production, we should point out that manufacturing personal cars is a waste of labor power, capital and energy resources. They should never be built in the first place; there are, however, a lot of vehicles that society does need: A shit-ton more buses that we currently have, trucks and vans appropriate to certain tasks of building infrastructure, etc. One need not be anti-worker (or anti-UAW) just because they oppose the production of automobiles. Those workers have a ton of know-how about how to build all kinds of things we do in fact need, and a just society would hardly put them out of work simply because capitalists have been investing in the production of something we don't need.
7. Car horns and alarms are noise pollution.
8. As a friend of mine astutely points out in the comments, "cars make gyms make sense". There's a lot of wisdom packed into that short quip. Kind of reminds me of a guy I knew in college who would drive 0.25 miles from his apartment to the university gym to work out for two hours and then would drive back to his place. In the Spring, no less.
9. Oh yea... and have you ever heard of this thing called CLIMATE CHANGE? Either cars are on their way out or we're on our way out as a planet.
10. etc.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Can a manifesto be written in 45 minutes? If so, this is my Transportation Manifesto.
Miriam's post On Transportation has generated a pretty interesting thread over at Feministing, and made me realize once again how strongly I feel about public transit. I don't want to misrepresent Miriam's reflections on public transit in Washington DC, nor do I want to deny the frustrating nature of her experience with DC. buses. Her post is thoughtful, and it's certainly not pro-car. But I was pretty disappointed in the main thrust of her argument.
To give a reductive summary, Miriam essentially said: "Man, it's tough to be poor, because then you can't afford a car, so you have to take public transportation. And sometimes public transportation really sucks and makes you late for work and makes your already tough life even harder."
Yep. Public transit advocacy foiled again -- on a progressive blog. Instead of uplifting public transit as a sustainable, social and affordable means of getting around, Miriam added her voice to the chorus of millions of car-dependent people who complain about the slow, inconvenient, terrible public transit in their cities.
The funny thing is, many of my fellow Chicagoans feel the same way about our transit system. Although I sing the praises of the Clark bus, taking me through my bustling neighborhood for errands, other people say the Clark bus "makes them suicidal." Although I safely take the Red Line to points far South and far North, many people avoid the Red Line's homeless solicitors and late-night riders. Although I commute car-free to the South Side, north suburbs, and everywhere in between, many people claim they could "never make it" without their car.
So that's the difference between Us and Them? Between the public transit lovers, and the haters? I'm starting to think it's a matter of principle. And some of the principles I hold most dear are below.
1. Basics. I believe that the "one person, one car" model of transportation is bullshit. It's environmentally disastrous, it's antisocial, and it's a waste of resources. We have a massive body of scientific evidence which supports this belief, and our city and state governments need to start responding. So do we.
2. The Rest Of The World. I also believe, and have seen from experience, that the "one person, one car" is a standard to which most of the world does not adhere. More specifically, it is largely an American construct. People all over the world -- in Africa, Asia, Europe -- manage to live happy, productive lives without getting whisked around in an upholstered, air-conditioned bubble which plays the music of their choice. They ride rickshaws and daladalas. They walk places. They take high-speed rail. They wait for the bus. These experiences do not traumatize them.* These experiences do not suck. These experiences do not ruin their day.
3. Road Rage Sucks. I believe that driving a car creates dangerous beliefs and attitudes in drivers: namely, that we are in control, that we have a right to proceed quickly and smoothly, and that other people (especially pedestrians and bikers) are obstacles in our path. These beliefs are symptomatic of a fast-moving, impatient culture in general, but they create a particularly dangerous environment on our roads. I believe that these aggressive attitudes have poisoned some segments of bike culture as well.
4. Patience, Sharing and Community Rock. Conversely, I believe that riding public transit can increase your patience, increase social contact with your community, and build willingness to relinquish some control over your own transportation. Drivers and bikers need to slow down. Transit riders need to take a breath and bring a book. These changes can bring increased tranquility to our daily lives, if we allow that to happen. I know this part sounds really Zen and silly, but I think it's true.
4. This Stuff Matters. I believe your selected mode of transportation says something about your values and priorities. Not only environmentally, but also financially: how do you want to spend your money? What is most important to you? And frankly, being able to get from place to place faster, blasting the environment with carbon each time I start my car, is not important to me. I would rather wait twenty goddamn minutes in the cold for that cursed bus you're complaining about so much.
Giant Caveat: Did I mention I'm privileged to live in a place with access to these options? I know, I know, I know. When you live in suburbia (et al), it's damn hard to think of anything you can do besides drive. I'm mostly talking about my fellow city-dwellers. But I think there are changes that can be made (more carpooling, more biking, more ride-sharing, fewer car trips, more activism in suburban planning) across our country, whether in urban, suburban, or rural communities.
* One commenter on Miriam's thread, a public school teacher, sounded convinced that her students were arriving to school grumpy, tired and anxious because they have to take the bus to school. Dude. In Boston public schools, do you really think these kids don't have bigger problems in their lives than waiting fifteen minutes for a bus? I respectfully refer this person to Item 2.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Reminder: Cars kill people.
According to an article in today's RedEye (an outlet of the Chicago Tribune), there were fifty-six pedestrians killed in traffic accidents in Chicago in 2008. As the article points out, there are a LOT of pedestrians in this city. Chicago was named the 4th most walkable city in America by the organization Walk Score, and I can vouch for the awesome walkability of my own neighborhood.
But even at the small intersection I have to cross to reach the El, or the Asian groceries nearby, motorists don't give a damn about pedestrian safety or the right of way. When pedestrians get their long-awaited walk signal, cars taking left and right turns hover like panting dogs, waiting for you to cross, inching closer and closer to your fragile human body with their giant steel-framed monster. And those are the nice people. Many motorists decide to take their chances, and dash out for a screeching left turn before you've taken three steps.
And don't get me started about the Garfield Red Line, where commuters determined to catch the next bus have to cross literally six lanes of expressway-bound traffic.
Yeah. So it's not difficult to imagine people getting killed. As the Department of Transportation spokesman said, "The most difficult part of this is changing driver behavior."
The article is informative and lays out several ways the city is working on reducing pedestrian deaths. Check out the particularly sneaky move in which undercover police officers, posing as pedestrians, pulled over and issued warnings to motorists who failed to yield to them. I would have paid money to see that shit.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Why cars suck.
The immediate impulse to write this post issues from the mind-numbing disturbance caused by some asshole's car alarm on my street, (its been going off steadily for 3 whole minutes now).
In no particular order, here is an elaboration of why cars suck:
1. Cars magnify the worst aspects of capitalist social relations and streamline the alienation of driver from actual, lived interaction with fellow human beings. Cut off from immediate contact and enclosed in a climate-controlled, steel/glass bubble... many drivers behave as though the world outside them is at best decoration, at worst a series of conspiring inconveniences plotting to sabotage their delusional mission to proceed unhampered by anything. Drivers treat other people in ways that they would never treat them were they walking next to them on the street.
2. In a closely related fashion: cars are selfish. It's all "me, me, me" with cars. Moving down a major thoroughfare in a massive city, a car with one passenger takes up roughly 1/4 of the space of a city bus, some disproportionate fraction of the fuel resources compared to their bus-riding counterparts, and on top of that adds to congestion which impedes the ability of buses to travel more smoothly and quickly. They also crowd streets that would otherwise be excellent bike routes. The reality is that city-life is a profound testament to the sense in which everyone is bound up in relations of dependency and made to cohabit a space on terms that no individual sets themselves. Yet, the logic of city-dwelling frequent car drivers seems to try to ignore (or even abjure) this reality in favor of a narrow individualism: I am free to the extent that I can drive my care where I want when I want however fast I want and not have to live by train schedules or interact with other city dwellers. This notion of heroic individualistic escape from social imperatives is a Romantic fantasy at best, pathological at worst.
3. Cars make cities less safe. Especially if you are biker or a pedestrian (god forbid). Some drivers get so caught up in their own quest to quickly make an unprotected left turn at an intersection, quickly sneak in front of pedestrians to make a right on red, etc. that they simply forget that they are inside a climate controlled, metal/glass bubble which moves at the touch of a button on the floor of the car cockpit. Meanwhile, the people they almost mow down or intimidate or whiz in front of are walking on their own two feet in conditions which are usually cold, icy, windy, etc. Or if you're biking hard, you're expending a great deal of energy. Nonetheless, the distorted relation that drivers stand with respect to the outside world enables them to take for granted all of these facts, thus they tend to focus intensely on whether they might have to wait 0.5 seconds or 7 seconds to turn left (as the case may be). The person trying to walk down the street is therefore the enemy. Must get home quickly, must get to Grocery Store, must get to TV, must get to work, must get... Its barbaric.
4. Cars are ugly. Sorry, but they are. Particularly in salty, snowy conditions where they are all covered with snowy/dirty crud. There are strong aesthetic grounds, it seems to me, to purge the heavy presence of cars from the urban landscape. At the very least, I think we can all agree that parking lots are the perfect exemplification of this thought, or at minimum, that parking lots are an atrocious eyesore in every instance. I advocate the immediate expropriation of all property holdings on which there are parking lots, in order that the public might re-develop the space for affordable housing, urban agricultural efforts and other activities that are the manifest opposite of parking lots.
5. Cars pollute city air and water. Set aside their role in climate change for the moment. From a more local perspective, the heavy use of cars by individuals in cities creates unnecessary smog and air pollution that is something you can smell, taste and sense on days when its particularly bad. Why should we put up with this when everything else about cars suck as well?
6. Cars are a misallocation of resources. This is true from the perspective of production as well as of consumption. In terms of consumption, cars are a terrible investment: they require maintence and upkeep costs, insurance costs, financing/payment costs, repair costs (when things inevitably break), parking costs, fuel costs, ticket-costs (for when you inevitably park in the wrong spot or get caught going 5 over). Moreover, cars do not hold their value. They are not necessary in the broad sense that there are tons of conveivable, more egalitarian, progressive, environmentally sustainable and practical ways for people to get around. Yet, it is a unfortunate fact of the infrastructural design of much of the USA that cars are in some sense all but required. But this is not so in a major city like Chicago. Cars are not necessary, anything but. So, this is a misallocation in the sense that consumer resources could be put into something more worthwhile. From the stand point of production, personal cars are a waste of labor power, capital and energy resources. They should never be built in the first place; there are, however, a lot of vehicles that society does need: A shit-ton more buses that we currently have, trucks and vans appropriate to certain tasks of building infrastructure, etc.
7. Car horns and alarms are noise pollution.
8. As a friend of mine points out in the comments, "cars make gyms make sense".
9. etc.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Rewarding citizens for eco-friendly decisions
On my lunch break on Saturday, I chatted with one of my fellow teachers about his new, zippy little car. As it turns out, because his new car is more fuel-efficient than his previous one, he will receive a tax credit around 10% of the car's value. I can't find state-specific information on the credit my friend received, but our government also offers tax credits to folks who purchase gas-electric hybrids and other eco-friendly vehicles.
Today, Sunday, I learned that Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) intends to increase fares in 2009 by more than 20% in some cases. This means that, instead of spending $75 per month for my unlimited monthly pass, I'll have to spend $90. I don't relish the idea of spending more on transportation, and I'm well aware that many Chicago residents can barely afford their present transit costs. Chicago has some of the highest fares in the nation.
(soapbox alert)
So where is the tax credit for public transit riders? Where's the government-sponsored, monetary reward for people who commit to a car-free life?
Car-free residents help ease traffic congestion and pollution. Car-free residents do not contribute to expensive wear and tear on our roads. Car-free residents give their cities freedom to build something besides a new parking garage. (Indeed, car-free residents are the only people who do not bitch about parking.) Car-free residents patronize local businesses within walking distance of their homes. Car-free residents, by riding CTA, help create public-sector jobs with living wages and good benefits.
Thousands of Chicagoans are making these earth-friendly, economical, constructive choices every day. And what do their local, state, and federal governments do? Punish them with higher fares, crumbling infrastructure, and slow service.
Hell, CTA riders don't even want a tax credit! They want stable fares and reliable transportation. And yeah, a little more appreciation and a little less bullshit would be nice.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Ridiculous Stuff Motorists Do on the Road
During our extremely brief bike ride on this beautiful Sunday afternoon, T and I were harrassed by a motorist ... again. As we rode with traffic in a shared bicycle lane marked with a giant picture of a bicycle every 100 feet (!), some ass hole veered around me and nearly clipped my left side. Guess he didn't feel like waiting to pass. I pretty much screamed, and T all-too-easily flipped him the bird.
Of course, his dick move proved unrewarding, and he ended up waiting at the same goddamn red light we were. We gave him some disappointed-looking headshakes, and he began to mouth off loudly through his open window. I'm fairly sure he said "Get a motor vehicle!" Stay classy, dude.
Anyway, check out this interesting conversation between cyclists, pedestrians, and motorists in San Francisco's Mission Hill. It's a pretty respectful discussion, sparked by a driver who didn't understand some cyclists' aggressive, lawless behavior. Asshole cyclists who run around disobeying basic traffic rules are a serious problem. I've repeatedly witnessed cyclists blowing through stop signs and red lights. Not only are they seriously endangering their own lives, but they're creating anti-bike resentment among rule-abiding motorists who might otherwise share the road nicely.
Still, I can't blame people who respond with some level of militancy. As a biker on the road with cars, your life is in danger. You can key somebody's paint job or ruin their morning - and they could end your life in retaliation.
