By Abe Simpson This is a terrible article, MK. It focuses on proletariat unrest against cars without once touching on the social and financial inequality that drove it. It uses examples from 110 years ago to demonstrate how idyllic things were (US population, 83m; life expectancy, 49/52) then cites Nader's book from 50 years ago as the point where things changed and then continues to go "cars kill more people than AIDS!" Apparently mr. Fried doesn't live in, like, a city.“You don’t see cities saying outright that driving is bad, or asking people to take transit or ride a bike, in part because they’re getting flack from drivers. No one wants to be seen as ‘anti-car,’ so their message has mostly been about designing streets for greater safety. I think, by and large, this has been a good choice.”
Aw, I don't think it was all that bad. I'll concede that it doesn't succeed as a retrospective or an argument. Coming from Detroit, I kid you not, I never met anyone that was anti-car until I moved to Cambridge, MA when I was 20. The first time I encountered it, I was dumbfounded. If you take away cars here in MI (except for my city of Ann Arbor), you don't have a city. You simply cannot live here without one. You can subsist, but you'll need a friend with wheels. Some of the description of cars as violence resonated with me due to experiences I have had, and losses around me. Also, over the years, I have become increasingly aware of how quickly carnage is swept up. There is this long bend on I-75, for years when it was part of my commute to school, it had no guard rail between the two sides. I saw the wreckage of multiple deadly accidents there. One I won't forget was a Jeep Cherokee crossing onto oncoming traffic on a sunny day. The oncoming traffic could have included me. There's been a rail there for years now. It's always twisted up. We all can afford these things, and they have transformed the environment and our lives. I guess I am a bit interested in (or tolerant of) emotional pieces like this one.
Intellectually honest ones, sure. Two of the top three most deadly stretches of road in the United States run to and from my grandparents' house. In New Mexico, you put up a shrine everywhere someone dies on the road. Gives you fair warning - see a lot of crosses, know the road is a bad place to be (usually at night, especially fridays and saturdays). Always funny hearing the tourists ask why we put our cemeteries out in the middle of nowhere...
I'd really like to see statistics with this, I have a friend who was charged with multiple felony accounts of attempted murder/manslaughter (I thought the definition of manslaughter was that it wasn't preplanned, so I don't know if you can get charged with attempted manslaughter?) because he hit a house with his car while it was occupied. So this rings false to me. I also can't imagine anyone, especially a responsible DA's office, refusing to prosecute a child's death if it was the result of a car accident. Perhaps this is the case when the insurance companies agree that the dead party is "at fault" in the accident but still. I'd like to see data. I suppose this is my evidence? But just because they were not ticketed for careless driving does not mean they were not prosecuted in court for murder. Edit the second: Well now here is an interesting article about New York, New York City, fatal crashes and vehicular h omicide. As it turns out New York has one of the most narrow definitions of vehicular homidcide in the USA - so it's not a good representative sample of the country as a whole. However, it's an interesting read.As long as you’re sober, chances are you’ll never be charged with any crime, much less manslaughter.
In New York City during the last five years, less than one percent of drivers who killed or injured pedestrians and cyclists were ticketed for careless driving.