Bruce Gaarder wrote:
"It's quite clear that transportation related deaths are way down on a
deaths
per million passenger miles basis"
I can believe and accept this assertion. However, it does not get to what,
in my opinion, is a fairly central question: why must we put in so many
millions of passenger miles per year? Why can't we design our cities and
neighborhoods in a way that will allow human-powered transit to be a viable
option for a greater percentage of citizens?
This leads to the central point I hear Mr. Avidor making. Our society
continues to encourage and subsidize driving an automobile, which is
essentially a bad behavior. Ken did a good job outlining the automobile's
brutality. I can attest to this, having nearly been struck by a car after
an accident on Lyndale on Sunday, while biking down the street.
But the best indictment of the automobile is, in my opinion, its extreme
inefficiency. A miniscule, ridiculous amount of the energy used by an auto
engine goes to actually performing its main duty: moving a human being
around. The percentage is typically in the single digits. Even if we
change the energy source from petroleum to hydrogen, the inefficiency of the
very concept of the automobile will continue to make our lives difficult.
Where will we get the electricity to produce the hydrogen? At a certain
point, even voltaic cells and windmills become environmentally damaging. As
the world population grows, we simply can't afford to throw away roughly
ninety percent of the energy we harness for transportation on moving around
a big piece of metal.
Regarding the discussion of the cost of owning a car... I would encourage
everyone on this list to visit a really cool website for a group called
Redefining Progress ( www.rprogress.org <http://www.rprogress.org> ). They
have a wonderful campaign to point out to Americans the true costs of common
behaviors. For instance, when you drive you don't just pay for the
gasoline, insurance, and the car itself. You also pay for roads (which are
not cheap), health care (for the victims of accidents, children suffering
from asthma, etc.), the sort of foreign policy that petroleum-addiction
causes (million-dollar bombs and missiles to drop on Iraq and Afghanistan),
and the costs of environmental cleanups which we can't even imagine, but
which we will need to pay for. On the city level, factor in the percentage
of your property tax which will pay for buses, heated parking ramps, snow
removal, etc. Factor in the time you lose in traffic every day, and then
apply your hourly salary to that time. Factor in the negative societal and
personal consequences of obesity, a condition rampant use of the automobile
has helped to create. If the consumer were forced to pay all these costs at
the pump, rather than paying them in their current atomized form, spread
among federal, state, and local taxes, health care premiums, etc, fewer
people would drive. And the clamor for livable communities would increase
to the extent that local officials would no longer be able to ignore it. At
that time, the subsidies for the auto culture will decline. This is my only
optimistic thought about how we can get out of our auto rut.
Perhaps one day the automobile industry will be regarded as the tobacco
industry is now. Here's hoping...
Robin Garwood
Marcy Holmes
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