A car is a rolling bomb. It sells you the lie of going as fast as you can, of getting away. Take your fast car and keep on driving.
We have become as numb to scenes like this as to school shootings.
About 41,000 Americans were killed by guns last year. But estimates for car deaths range from 39,000 to over 44,000. The last figure comes from the National Safety Council. While deaths in cars are declining, thanks to safety features, more cyclists and pedestrians are dying every year from enormous cars and trucks plowing into them.
While about half of our gun deaths are suicides, most car deaths are classified as “accidents.” We shrug. Thoughts and prayers. In fact, they’re mistakes usually caused by people trying to go as fast as they can.
I have been as guilty as anyone. On a four-lane road with the driver in front going the speed limit, I will hit the gas and go around. I sometimes do it on a three-lane. Or I’ll sit right behind an 18-wheeler at 60 mph, with no hope for survival if that driver suddenly brakes or swerves.
Most of what its critics call “the war on cars” involve government trying to make drivers slow the “f” down. Turn four lanes into three, with a turn lane in the middle. Narrow roads with traffic circles and street furniture, forcing drivers to pay attention. Cut urban speed limits to 25 mph or even 15.
Then there’s parking. Eliminating on-street parking forces drivers to take time before they stop. It makes them pay for parking. But this eliminates “dooring,” cars opening in front of moving cyclists.
It lets more people use the road.
An American Pathology
America loves cars. Since the rise of the suburbs, with Interstates as local roads, this has become a pathology.
This post isn’t about the suburbs’ damage to our environment. It’s not about the damage we do to our economy, about our dependence on fossil fuels and isolated, wooden houses surrounded by putting greens called lawns.
It’s more about the psychological damage we’ve done to generations of Americans, which your grandchildren will pay for in the form of shorter lives and diminished futures.
Here’s the pathology as it plays out in Atlanta. You can’t afford the rent, but you can afford a $60,000 ride with a stereo sized for a stadium and an engine suitable for NASCAR. You see these jamokes on every freeway, cutting in-and-out of traffic, risking their lives and those of everyone else so they might get somewhere 2 minutes faster. At night they take over urban intersections to do “doughnuts,” social media drawing the crowd.
If this is your thing, you might as well be walking around town with an AK-47 strapped to your shoulder. It may be the same fetish, employed by people who know they’d be shot if they strapped on a machine gun.
Cars are Drugs
Cars are more costly than a drug habit, and just as deadly. You have no money for rent, no way to raise a family, so you live fast and die young.
Cars, drugs, and guns are tearing American families apart. They’re killing us by distracting us. They’re cheap pleasure at a high price, like our politics, dependent on the next hit of short-term pleasure.
Maybe, very soon, a car will kill you. Maybe, soon, one will kill me. But they’re going to kill someone you love, they probably already have, and we should all stop accepting thoughts and prayers.
