Recap: The Absurd Primacy of The Car in American Life

So you know when you open a new tab in a web browser and it recommends articles for you to read? It’s like Firefox knows you’re about to embark on some task or side task, and exploits the opportunity to distract you. Well, that happened to me the other day, and I read this great (but admittedly a bit dated) article from the Atlantic on The Absurd Primacy of the Car in American Life and it really resonated with me. So in case you are either paywall blocked from The Atlantic or simply don’t have the time to read the full article here is a bit sized recap.

Edward Humes, point blank calls cars “insane” and points to the three major reasons cars are insane, they:

• Destroy the environment

• Waste human lives

• Waste money (above and beyond fuel prices, and killing people)

Environment

For those who already don’t like cars- this starts to feel like beating a dead horse, so I will be curt in my recap- please read the original article. But there were a couple of salient points.

While everyone is complaining that gas prices are wicked high right now- if the cost of the environmental damage each gallon causes were incorporated, the price would be well over $10 per gallon, so I guess enjoy how cheap gas is right now.

Src: analogicus

 

This problem is compounded by people often driving alone. A fully loaded car (e.g. a car with 4 adults) approaches a bus in terms of grams CO2 per miles per person traveled, but most people normally drive alone.

Death

This is really where Mr. Humes shines- the point that resonated the best with me (as a veteran of Afghanistan) was that if US highways were a war-zone they would be one of the deadliest entanglements we ever got ourselves into. Annual highway fatalities (as reported by the NHTA) outnumber the annual war dead in the wars in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, The War of 1812, and the Revolution combined.

Credit: Stevepb

He also compares car fatalities and why we think of them as inconveniences or “just a part of driving” unlike airline crashes which cause widespread panic. He cites Jim McNarma of the California Highway Safety Patrol, who calls the problem “massive but diffuse”, similar to climate change. That is to say- the problem doesn’t show itself all at once. A Boeing 737 crashing kills 400- that’s national news for weeks, a head on collision killing 2 on I-95 won’t make th 5 o’clock news in Chicago, however- nationwide we lose the equivalent of four airline crashes every week.

Money

Humes leads with this, personally I find death to be a more compelling argument, but he addresses why most American’s are just ‘meh’ on the dangers of automotive travel. He points out that the average American car costs between 12 and 14 thousand dollars a year and sits idle 92% of the time.

Src: photorabe

This is the cost of “freedom” freedom to drive wherever you want whenever you want, to not wait on trains/buses/Ubers, the freedom to be dependent on foreign oil, the freedom to die early of air pollution or horrific highway accident. When people say cars are status symbols, they’re not kidding.