To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net
Undercut by the massive expansion of America's highways and
the rise of suburban sprawl, public transit ridership dwindled for
decades starting around the 1950s. But in recent years, that trend has
gradually begun to reverse, such that ridership is now higher than it has been since 1956.
This is an extremely positive development, but additional
funding will be needed to meet demand. A resurgence of mass transit
would, as has been well-documented elsewhere, ease traffic congestion,
reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, decrease dangerous emissions, and
improve public health. But there's another less intuitive reason why
states, cities, and the federal government should start pumping more
money into transit projects — and it has to do with the middle class.
Investments in public transit would most directly benefit
members of the middle and lower classes because they make up by far the
biggest share of riders. Almost two-thirds of all transit riders made
under $50,000 in 2007, according to a report from the American Public Transportation Association; only 9.5 percent of riders made more than $100,000.
But public transit budgets haven't kept pace with
resurgent ridership, and the recession only further eroded funds that
were already dwindling. Take New York's Metropolitan Transportation
Authority. In 2007, it took in $1.6 billion from real estate taxes; it
earned less than $400 million from the same source two years later.
Budgetary problems usually manifest themselves as either service cuts or fare increases. A 2011 APTA report
found that nearly 80 percent of transit systems in 2010 took at least
one of those actions due to funding concerns. And just as improvements
to public transit mostly impact the middle class, so, too, do negative
service changes. Indeed, the erosion in the middle class' share of
overall income correlates neatly with a reduction in federal infrastructure spending.
Fare increases are particularly problematic. For an average American family, transportation expenses rank second only to housing costs— meaning we're spending more on transportation than on food. Middle class families spend a greater share of their income
on transit than other income groups, too. And for the bottom 90 percent
as a whole, transportation costs consume one of every seven dollars of
income, according to Treasury Department estimates.
Dumping more funds into mass transit could alleviate the
burden of transportation costs. Between 2000 and 2009, median income
families living in areas with diverse transportation options saved $200 per month in transportation costs compared to similar families in less-transit-friendly areas, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Adding more train cars and expanding access would also cut
down on commute times for dedicated straphangers, potentially upping
their productivity. And through increased ease of mobility,
transit-dependent workers could gain access to more — and better — job
opportunities. As manystudieshave shown,
cities with strong investments in public transit tend to have much
greater economic mobility, a link that holds up even when other
contributing factors are stripped out.
Moreover, the lion's share of economic activity created by
pouring money into mass transit would go to the middle class. A 2012
Treasury report
concluded that 80 percent of the jobs created by infrastructure
investments — not only in public transit, though that would make up a
great deal of the investment spending — would go to three sectors:
construction, manufacturing, and retail trade. Of those jobs, 90 percent
would be expected to offer middle-class wages.
Now, critics may claim that it doesn't make sense to throw money at a mode of transport used by under 40 percent of all commuters. Isn't that a little unfair — redistribution-y, if you will?
But we already have a deeply biased transit system tilted in favor of driving. Car commuters enjoy all sorts of tax breaks, artificially cheap gas — prices in Europe are often double those in the States
— and funding schemes that heavily subsidize driving. And due to
congressional inaction last year, a public transit commuter tax credit
will be cut almost in half, costing some commuters more than $1,000 annually.
As Alex Pareene astutely remarked last year,
"Finding a steady and sufficient revenue source for the local transit
system...should be an urgent priority for local politicians, but most of
them simply don't care."
We already have a political
system in this country that, nationally, heavily favors the interests of
the rural and the suburban over the urban. Many state legislatures have
similar biases. But when, even in New York, politicians ignore transit,
because they don't know or interact with or receive checks from people
who rely on it every day, there's almost no hope for cheap, efficient
mass transit options anywhere." [Salon]
Supporting mass transit would cut middle class expenses,
boost economic mobility, and create a bounty of middle class jobs.
Lawmakers may not be so keen on the idea now, but as transit ridership
increases, they may ultimately have little choice.
There’s an open secret in America: If you want to kill someone, do it
with a car. As long as you’re sober, chances are you’ll never be charged
with any crime, much less manslaughter. Over the past hundred years, as
automobiles have been woven into the fabric of our daily lives, our
legal system has undermined public safety, and we’ve been collectively
trained to think of these deaths as unavoidable “accidents” or acts of
God. Today, despite the efforts of major public-health agencies and
grassroots safety campaigns, few are aware that car crashes are the
number one cause of death for Americans under 35. But it wasn’t always
this way.
“If you look at newspapers from American cities in the 1910s and
’20s, you’ll find a lot of anger at cars and drivers, really an
incredible amount,” says Peter Norton, the author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City.
“My impression is that you’d find more caricatures of the Grim Reaper
driving a car over innocent children than you would images of Uncle
Sam.”
Though various automobiles powered by steam, gas, and electricity
were produced in the late 19th century, only a handful of these cars
actually made it onto the roads due to high costs and unreliable
technologies. That changed in 1908, when Ford’s famous Model T
standardized manufacturing methods and allowed for true mass
production, making the car affordable to those without extreme wealth.
By 1915, the number of registered motor vehicles was in the millions.
Top:
A photo of a fatal car wreck in Somerville, Massachusetts, in 1933. Via
the Boston Public Library. Above: The New York Times coverage of car
violence from November 23, 1924.
Within a decade, the number of car collisions and fatalities skyrocketed. In the first four years after World War I,
more Americans died in auto accidents than had been killed during
battle in Europe, but our legal system wasn’t catching on. The negative
effects of this unprecedented shift in transportation were especially
felt in urban areas, where road space was limited and pedestrian habits
were powerfully ingrained.
For those of us who grew up with cars, it’s difficult to
conceptualize American streets before automobiles were everywhere.
“Imagine a busy corridor in an airport, or a crowded city park, where
everybody’s moving around, and everybody’s got business to do,” says
Norton. “Pedestrians favored the sidewalk because that was cleaner and
you were less likely to have a vehicle bump against you, but pedestrians
also went anywhere they wanted in the street, and there were no
crosswalks and very few signs. It was a real free-for-all.”
A
typical busy street scene on Sixth Avenue in New York City shows how
pedestrians ruled the roadways before automobiles arrived, circa 1903.
Via Shorpy.
Roads were seen as a public space, which all citizens had an equal
right to, even children at play. “Common law tended to pin
responsibility on the person operating the heavier or more dangerous
vehicle,” says Norton, “so there was a bias in favor of the pedestrian.”
Since people on foot ruled the road, collisions weren’t a major issue:
Streetcars and horse-drawn carriages yielded right of way to pedestrians
and slowed to a human pace. The fastest traffic went around 10 to 12
miles per hour, and few vehicles even had the capacity to reach higher
speeds.
In rural areas, the car was generally welcomed as an antidote to
extreme isolation, but in cities with dense neighborhoods and many
alternate methods of transit, most viewed private vehicles as an
unnecessary luxury. “The most popular term of derision for a motorist
was a ‘joyrider,’ and that was originally directed at chauffeurs,” says
Norton. “Most of the earliest cars had professional drivers who would
drop their passengers somewhere, and were expected to pick them up again
later. But in the meantime, they could drive around, and they got this
reputation for speeding around wildly, so they were called joyriders.”
Eventually, the term spread to all types of automobile drivers, along
with pejoratives like “vampire driver” or “death driver.” Political
cartoons featured violent imagery of so-called “speed demons” murdering
innocents as they plowed through city streets in their uncontrollable
vehicles. Other editorials accused drivers of being afflicted with
“motor madness” or “motor rabies,” which implied an addiction to speed
at the expense of human life.
This
cartoon from 1909 shows the outrage felt by many Americans that wealthy
motorists could hurt others without consequence. Via the Library of
Congress.
In an effort to keep traffic flowing and solve legal disputes, New
York City became the first municipality in America to adopt an official
traffic code in 1903, when most roadways had no signage or traffic
controls whatsoever. Speed limits were gradually adopted in urban areas
across the country, typically with a maximum of 10 mph that dropped to 8
mph at intersections.
By the 1910s, many cities were working to improve their most
dangerous crossings. One of the first tactics was regulating left-turns,
which was usually accomplished by installing a solid column or “silent
policeman” at the center of busy intersections that forced vehicles to
navigate around it. Cars had to pass this mid-point before turning left,
preventing them from cutting corners and speeding recklessly into
oncoming traffic.
Left, a patent for a Silent Policeman traffic post, and right, an ad for the Cutter Company’s lighted post, both from 1918.
A variety of innovative street signals and markings were developed by
other cities hoping to tame the automobile. Because they were regularly
plowed over by cars, silent policemen were often replaced by domed,
street-level lights called “traffic turtles” or “traffic mushrooms,” a
style popularized in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Detroit reconfigured a tennis
court line-marker as a street-striping device for dividing lanes. In
1914, Cleveland installed the first alternating traffic lights, which
were manually operated by a police officer stationed at the
intersection. Yet these innovations did little to protect pedestrians.
By the end of the 1920s, more than 200,000 Americans had been killed
by automobiles. Most of these fatalities were pedestrians in cities, and
the majority of these were children. “If a kid is hit in a street in
2014, I think our first reaction would be to ask, ‘What parent is so
neglectful that they let their child play in the street?,’” says Norton.
“In 1914, it was pretty much the opposite. It was more like, ‘What
evil bastard would drive their speeding car where a kid might be
playing?’ That tells us how much our outlook on the public street has
changed—blaming the driver was really automatic then. It didn’t help if
they said something like, ‘The kid darted out into the street!,’ because
the answer would’ve been, ‘That’s what kids do. By choosing to operate
this dangerous machine, it’s your job to watch out for others.’ It would
be like if you drove a motorcycle in a hallway today and hit
somebody—you couldn’t say, ‘Oh, well, they just jumped out in front of
me,’ because the response would be that you shouldn’t operate a
motorcycle in a hallway.”
Left,
an ad for the Milwaukee-style traffic mushroom, and right, the device
in action on Milwaukee streets, circa 1926. Via the Milwaukee Public
Library.
In the face of this traffic fatality epidemic, there was a fierce
public outcry including enormous rallies, public memorials, vehement
newspaper editorials, and even a few angry mobs that attacked motorists
following a collision. “Several cities installed public memorials to the
children hit by cars that looked like war monuments, except that they
were temporary,” says Norton. “To me, that says a lot, because you
collectively memorialize people who are considered a public loss.
Soldiers killed in battle are mourned by the whole community, and they
were doing that for children killed in traffic, which really captures
how much the street was considered a public space. People killed in it
were losses to the whole community.”
As early as 1905, newspapers were printing cartoons that criticized motor-vehicle drivers.
As the negative press increased and cities called for lower speed
limits and stricter enforcement, the burgeoning auto industry recognized
a mounting public-relations disaster. The breaking point came in 1923,
when 42,000 citizens of Cincinnati signed a petition for a referendum
requiring any driver in the city limits to have a speed governor, a
mechanical device that would inhibit the fuel supply or accelerator, to
keep vehicles below 25 miles per hour. (Studies show that
around five percent of pedestrians are killed when hit by vehicles
traveling under 20 miles per hour, versus 80 percent for cars going 40
miles an hour or more.)
The Cincinnati referendum logically equated high vehicle speeds with
increasing danger, a direct affront to the automobile industry. “Think
about that for a second,” Norton says. “If you’re in the business of
selling cars, and the public recognizes that anything fast is dangerous,
then you’ve just lost your number-one selling point, which is that
they’re faster than anything else. It’s amazing how completely the auto
industry joined forces and mobilized against it.”
One
auto-industry response to the Cincinnati referendum of 1923 was to
conflate speed governors with negative stereotypes about China. Via the
Cincinnati Post.
“Motordom,” as the collective of special interests including oil
companies, auto makers, auto dealers, and auto clubs dubbed itself,
launched a multi-pronged campaign to make city streets more welcoming to
drivers, though not necessarily safer. Through a series of social,
legal, and physical transformations, these groups reframed arguments
about vehicle safety by placing blame on reckless drivers and careless
pedestrians, rather than the mere presence of cars.
In 1924, recognizing the crisis on America’s streets, President
Herbert Hoover launched the National Conference on Street and Highway
Safety. Any organizations interested or invested in transportation
planning were invited to discuss street safety and help establish
standardized traffic regulations that could be implemented across the
country. Since the conference’s biggest players all represented the auto
industry, the group’s recommendations prioritized private motor
vehicles over all other transit modes.
A
woman poses with a newly installed stop sign in Los Angeles in 1925,
built to the specifications recommended at the first National Conference
on Street Safety. Via USC Libraries.
Norton suggests that the most important outcome of this meeting was a
model municipal traffic ordinance, which was released in 1927 and
provided a framework for cities writing their own street regulations.
This model ordinance was the first to officially deprive pedestrians
access to public streets. “Pedestrians could cross at crosswalks. They
could also cross when traffic permitted, or in other words, when there
was no traffic,” explains Norton. “But other than that, the streets were
now for cars. That model was presented to the cities of America by the
U.S. Department of Commerce, which gave it the stamp of official
government recommendation, and it was very successful and widely
adopted.” By the 1930s, this legislation represented the new rule of the
road, making it more difficult to take legal recourse against drivers.
Meanwhile, the auto industry continued to improve its public image by
encouraging licensing to give drivers legitimacy, even though most
early licenses required no testing. Norton explains that in addition to
the revenue it generated, the driver’s license “would exonerate the
average motorist in the public eye, so that driving itself wouldn’t be
considered dangerous, and you could direct blame at the reckless
minority.” Working with local police and civic groups like the Boy
Scouts, auto clubs pushed to socialize new pedestrian behavior, often by
shaming or ostracizing people who entered the street on foot. Part of
this effort was the adoption of the term “jaywalker,”
which originally referred to a clueless person unaccustomed to busy
city life (“jay” was slang for a hayseed or country bumpkin).
Left,
a cartoon from 1923 mocks jaywalking behavior. Via the National Safety
Council. Right, a 1937 WPA poster emphasizes jaywalking dangers.
“Drivers first used the word ‘jaywalker’ to criticize pedestrians,”
says Norton, “and eventually, it became an organized campaign by auto
dealers and auto clubs to change attitudes about walking in the street
wherever you wanted to. They had people dressed up like idiots with
sandwich board signs that said ‘jaywalker’ or men wearing women’s
dresses pretending to be jaywalkers. They even had a parade where a
clown was hit by a Model T over and over again in front of the crowd. Of
course, the message was that you’re stupid if you walk in the street.”
Eventually, cities began adopting laws against jaywalking of their own
accord.
In 1928, the American Automobile Association (AAA) took charge of
safety education for children by sending free curricula to every public
school in America. “Children would illustrate posters with slogans like,
‘Why I should not play in the street’ or ‘Why the street is for cars’
and so on,” explains Norton. “They took over the school safety patrols
at the same time. The original patrols would go out and stop traffic for
other kids to cross the street. But when AAA took over, they had kids
sign pledges that said, ‘I will not cross the street except at the
intersection,’ and so on. So a whole generation of kids grew up being
trained that the streets were for cars only.” Other organizations like
the Automobile Safety Foundation and the National Safety Council also
helped to educate the public on the dangers of cars, but mostly focused
on changing pedestrian habits or extreme driver behaviors, like drunk
driving.
Street-safety posters produced by AAA in the late 1950s focused on changing behavior of children, rather than drivers.
Once the social acceptance of private cars was ensured, automobile
proponents could begin rebuilding the urban environment to accommodate
cars better than other transit modes. In the 1920s, America’s extensive
network of urban railways was heavily regulated, often with specific
fare and route restrictions as well as requirements to serve
less-profitable areas. As motor vehicles began invading streetcar
routes, these companies pushed for equal oversight of private cars.
“Automobiles could drive on the tracks,” explains Norton, “so this
meant that as soon as just five percent of the people in cities were
going around by car, they slowed the street railways down significantly,
and streetcars couldn’t make their schedules anymore. They could ring a
bell and try to make drivers get off their tracks, but if the driver
couldn’t move because of other traffic, they were stuck. So the
streetcars would just stand in traffic like automobiles.”
GE streetcar ads from 1928, left, and the early 1940s, right, emphasize the efficiency of mass transit over private automobiles.
The final blow was delivered in 1935 with the Public Utility Holding
Company Act, which forced the growing electric-utility companies to
divest their streetcar businesses. Though intended to reduce corruption
and regulate these growing electric utilities, this law removed the
subsidies supporting many streetcar companies, and as a result, more
than 100 transit companies failed over the next decade.
Even as government assistance was removed from these mass-transit
systems, the growing network of city streets and highways was receiving
ever more federal funding. Many struggling metro railways were purchased
by a front company (operated by General Motors, Firestone Rubber,
Standard Oil, and Phillips Petroleum), that ripped up their tracks to
make way for fleets of buses, furthering America’s dependency on motor
vehicles.
Meanwhile, traffic engineers were reworking city streets to better
accommodate motor vehicles, even as they recognized cars as the least
equitable and least efficient form of transportation, since automobiles
were only available to the wealthy and took up 10 times the space of a
transit rider. Beginning in Chicago, traffic engineers coordinated
street signals to keep motor vehicles moving smoothly, while making
crossing times unfriendly to pedestrians.
An
aerial view from 1939 of 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, in
Washington, D.C., shows early street markings. Via shorpy.com.
“Long after its victory, Motordom fought to keep control of traffic
problems. Its highway engineers defined a good thoroughfare as a road
with a high capacity for motor vehicles; they did not count the number
of persons moved,” Norton writes in Fighting Traffic. Today our cities still reflect this: The Level of Service (LOS)
measurement by which most planners use to gauge intersection efficiency
is based only on motor-vehicle delays, rather than the impact to all
modes of transit.
As in other American industries ranging from health care to
education, those with the ability to pay for the best treatment were
prioritized over all others. One 1941 traffic-control textbook read: “If
people prefer to drive downtown and can afford it, then facilities must
be built for them up to their ability to pay. The choice of mode of
travel is their own; they cannot be forced to change on the strength of
arguments of efficiency or economy.”
All the while, traffic violence continued unabated, with fatalities increasing every year. The exception was during World War II,
when fuel shortages and resource conservation led to less driving,
hence a drop in the motor-vehicle death rates, which spiked again
following the war’s conclusion. By the time the National Interstate and
Defense Highways Act was passed in 1956, the U.S. was fully dependent on
personal automobiles, favoring the flexibility of cars over the ability
of mass transit to carry more people with less energy in a safer
manner.
In 1962, Boston formally adopted jaywalking laws to penalize pedestrians.
In 1966, Ralph Nader published his best-selling book, Unsafe At Any Speed,
which detailed the the auto industry’s efforts to suppress safety
improvements in favor of profits. In the preface to his book, Nader pointed out
the huge costs inflicted by private vehicle collisions, noting
that “…these are not the kind of costs which fall on the builders of
motor vehicles (excepting a few successful lawsuits for negligent
construction of the vehicle) and thus do not pinch the proper foot.
Instead, the costs fall to users of vehicles, who are in no position to
dictate safer automobile designs.” Instead of directing money at
prevention, like vehicle improvements, changing behaviors, and road
design, money is spent on treating the symptoms of road violence. Today,
these costs are estimated at over $99 billion, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC).
Nader suggested that the protection of our “body rights,” or physical
safety, needed the same broad support given to civil rights, even in
the face of an industry with so much financial power. “A great problem
of contemporary life is how to control the power of economic interests
which ignore the harmful effects of their applied science and
technology. The automobile tragedy is one of the most serious of these
man-made assaults on the human body,” Nader wrote.
Dr. David Sleet, who works in the Division of Unintentional Injury Prevention
at the CDC, says Nader’s book was a game-changer. “That really started
this whole wave of improvements in our highway-safety problem,” says
Sleet. “The death rates from vehicle crashes per population just kept
steadily increasing from the 1920s until 1966. When these two acts were
implemented, creating these two agencies at the U.S. Department of
Transportation, the fatalities started to decline.”
Ralph
Nader’s book, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” brought a larger awareness to
America’s traffic fatalities, and targeted design issues with the
Corvair. A few years prior, in 1962, comedian Ernie Kovacs was killed in
a Corvair wagon, seen at right wrapped around a telephone pole.
The same year Nader’s book was published, President Lyndon Johnson
signed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act and the Highway
Safety Act. This legislation led to the creation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
(NHTSA), which set new safety standards for cars and highways. A
full 50 years after automobiles had overtaken city streets, federal
agencies finally began addressing the violence as a large-scale,
public-health issue. In 1969, NHTSA director Dr. William Haddon, a
public-health physician and epidemiologist, recognized that like
infectious diseases, motor-vehicle deaths were the result of
interactions between a host (person), an agent (motor vehicle), and
their environment (roadways). As directed by Haddon, the NHTSA enforced
changes to features like seat belts, brakes, and windshields that helped
improve the country’s fatality rate.
Following the release of Nader’s book, grassroots organizations like Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD,
1980) formed to combat car-safety issues that national legislators were
not addressing. The CDC began adapting its public-health framework to
the issue of motor-vehicle injury prevention in 1985, focusing on high-risk populations like alcohol-impaired drivers, motorcyclists, and teenagers.
In the late 1970s, the NHTSA standardized crash tests, like this 90 mph test of two Volvos.
“I think the perennial problem for us, as a culture, is recognizing
that these injuries are both predictable and preventable,” says Sleet.
“The public still has not come around to thinking of motor-vehicle
crashes as something other than ‘accidents.’ And as long as you believe
they’re accidents or acts of fate, then you won’t do anything to prevent
them. The CDC continues to stress that motor-vehicle injuries, like
diseases, are preventable.”
Sleet says the CDC’s approach is similar to its efforts against
smoking: The first step is understanding the threat, the second is
identifying risk factors, and the third is developing interventions that
can reduce these factors. “The last stage is getting widespread
adoption of these known and effective interventions,” explains Sleet.
“The reason we think motor-vehicle injuries represent a winnable battle
is that there are lots of effective interventions that are just not used
by the general public. We’ve been fighting this battle of increasing
injuries since cars were first introduced into society, and we still
haven’t solved it.
“Public health is a marathon, not a sprint,” adds Sleet. “It’s taken
us 50 years since the first surgeon general’s report on smoking to make
significant progress against tobacco. We need to stay the course with
vehicle injuries.”
Though
their advocacy is limited to drunk driving, MADD is one of the few
organizations to use violent imagery to promote road safety, as seen in
this ad from 2007.
Although organizations like the CDC have applied this public-health
approach to the issue for decades now, automobiles remain a huge danger.
While the annual fatality rate has dropped significantly from its 1930s
high at around 30 deaths for every 100,000 persons to 11 per 100,000 in
recent years, car crashes are still a top killer of all Americans. For
young people, motor-vehicle collisions remain the most common cause of
death. In contrast, traffic fatalities in countries like the United
Kingdom, where drivers are uniformly viewed as the greatest danger on
streets, are about a third of U.S. rates.
In 2012, automobile collisions killed more than 34,000 Americans, but
unlike our response to foreign wars, the AIDS crisis, or terrorist
attacks—all of which inflict fewer fatalities than cars—there’s no
widespread public protest or giant memorial to the dead. We fret about
drugs and gun safety, but don’t teach children to treat cars as the
loaded weapons they are.
“These losses have been privatized, but in the ’20s, they were
regarded as public losses,” says Norton. After the auto industry
successfully altered street norms in the 1920s, most state Departments
of Transportation actually made it illegal to leave roadside markers
where a loved one was killed. “In recent years, thanks to some hard work
by grieving families, the rules have changed in certain states, and
informal markers are now allowed,” Norton adds. “Some places
are actually putting in DOT-made memorial signs with the names of
victims. The era of not admitting what’s going on is not quite over, but
the culture is changing.”
In
recent years, white Ghost Bikes have been installed on roadways across
the country where cyclists were killed by motorists, like this bike in
Boulder, Colorado, in memory of Matthew Powell.
“Until recently, there wasn’t any kind of concerted public message
around the basic danger of driving,” says Ben Fried, editor of the New
York branch of Streetsblog, a
national network of journalists chronicling transportation issues.
“Today’s street safety advocates look to MADD and other groups that
changed social attitudes toward drunk driving in the late ’70s and early
’80s as an example of how to affect these broad views on how we drive.
Before you had those organizations advocating for victims’ families, you
would hear the same excuses for drunk driving that you hear today for
reckless driving.”
Though
drunk driving has long been recognized as dangerous, seen in this WPA
poster from 1937, reckless driving has been absent from most safety
campaigns.
Though anti-drunk-driving campaigns are familiar to Americans,
fatalities involving alcohol only account for around a third of all
collisions, while the rest are caused by ordinary human error. Studies
also show that reckless drivers who are sober are rarely cited by
police, even when they are clearly at fault. 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.
(In most states, “negligent” driving, which includes drunk driving, has
different legal consequences than “reckless” driving, though the jargon
makes little difference to those hurt by such drivers.)
Increasingly, victims and their loved ones are making the case
that careless driving is as reprehensible as drunk driving, advocating a
cultural shift that many drivers are reluctant to embrace. As with
auto-safety campaigns in the past, this grassroots effort is pushing
cities to adopt legislation that protects against reckless drivers,
including laws inspired by Sweden’s Vision Zero
campaign. First implemented in 1997, Vision Zero is an effort to end
all pedestrian fatalities and serious injuries; recently, cities like
New York, Chicago, and San Francisco also announced their goals of
eliminating traffic deaths within 10 years. Other initiatives are being
introduced at the state level, including “vulnerable user laws,” which
pin greater responsibility on road users who wield the most power
whether a car compared to a bicyclist, or a biker to a pedestrian.
Fried says that most people are aware of the dangers behind the
wheel, but are accustomed to sharing these risks, rather than taking
individual responsibility for careless behavior. “So many of us drive
and have had the experience of not following the law to a T—going a
little bit over the speed limit or rolling through a stop sign,” he
explains. “So there’s this tendency to deflect our own culpability, and
that’s been institutionalized by things like no-fault laws and car
insurance, where we all share the cost for the fact that driving is a
dangerous thing.”
This
dark political cartoon from “Puck” magazine in 1907 suggested that
speeding motorists were chasing death. Via the Library of Congress.
As cities attempt to undo years of car-oriented development by
rebuilding streets that better incorporate public transit, bicycle
facilities, and pedestrian needs, the existing bias towards automobiles
is making the fight to transform streets just as intense as when cars
first arrived in the urban landscape. “The fact that changes like
redesigning streets for bike lanes set off such strong reactions today
is a great analogy to what was going on in the ’20s,” says Fried.
“There’s a huge status-quo bias that’s inherent in human nature. While I
think the changes today are much more beneficial than what was done 80
years ago, the fact that they’re jarring to people comes from the same
place. People are very comfortable with things the way they are.”
However, studies increasingly show
that most young people prefer to live in dense, walkable neighborhoods,
and are more attuned to the environmental consequences of their
transportation than previous generations. Yet in the face of clear
evidence that private automobiles are damaging to our health and our
environment, most older Americans
still cling to their cars. Part of this impulse may be a natural
resistance to change, but it’s also reinforced when aging drivers have
few viable transportation alternatives, particularly in suburban areas
or sprawling cities with terrible public transit.
“People know they don’t have to smoke,” Sleet says, “whereas people
might feel they do need a car to get to work. Our job is to try and make
every drive a safe drive. I think we can also reduce the dependency we
have on motor vehicles, but that’s not going to happen until we provide
other alternatives for people to get from here to there.”
Gory
depictions of car violence became rare in the United States after the
1920s, though they persisted in Europe, as seen in his German safety
poster from 1930 that reads, “Motorist! Be Careful!” Via the Library of
Congress.
Fried says that unlike campaigns for smoking and HIV reduction,
American cities aren’t directly pushing people to change their behavior.
“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.”
“The biggest reductions in traffic injuries that the New York City
DOT has been able to achieve are all due to reallocating space from
motor vehicles to pedestrians and bikes,” says Fried. “The protected
bike-lane redesigns in New York City are narrowing the right of way for
vehicles by at least 8 feet, and sometimes more. If you’re a pedestrian,
that’s 8 more feet that you don’t have to worry about when you’re
crossing the street. And if you’re driving, the design gives you cues to
take it a bit slower because the lanes are narrower. You’re more aware
of how close you are to other moving objects, so the incidence of
speeding isn’t as high as it used to be. All these changes contribute to
a safer street environment.”
Like in the 1920s, these infrastructure changes really start with a
new understanding of acceptable street behavior. “That battle for street
access of the 1910s and ’20s, while there was a definite winner, it
never really ended,” says Norton. “It’s a bit like the street became an
occupied country, and you have a resistance movement. There have always
been pedestrians who are like, ‘To hell with you, I’m crossing anyway.’
“The people who really get it today, in 2014, know that the battle
isn’t to change rules or put in signs or paint things on the pavement,”
Norton continues. “The real battle is for people’s minds, and this
mental model of what a street is for. There’s a wonderful slogan used by
some bicyclists that says, ‘We are traffic.’ It reveals the fact that
at some point, we decided that somebody on a bike or on foot is not
traffic, but an obstruction to traffic. And if you look around, you’ll
see a hundred other ways in which that message gets across. That’s the
main obstacle for people who imagine alternatives—and it’s very much
something in the mind.”
This
1935 Chevy safety film made the argument that motor vehicles were “the
safest place to be,” and that danger was only created by careless
drivers.
(This article is dedicated to my uncle, Jim Vic Oatman, and friend, Chris Webber, both of whom were killed by car collisions. Learn more about the CDC’s battle against motor-vehicle injuries here, find out how to bring Vision Zero to your city, or scare yourself with the Boston Public Library’s archive of historic car wreck images.)
California Gov. Jerry Brown, state Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima)and
Google co-founder Sergey Brin exit a self-driving car at Google
headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
Driverless cars sound more like science fiction than practical
technology, but the advent of autonomous vehicles may be less than a
decade away.
The California Department of Motor Vehicles
has developed rules on when and how developers can test the
computer-directed models on the road. Now the state is moving to the
next step: How to incorporate driverless cars onto the state’s streets
and highways.
But this is no easy job. California is essentially rewriting the
rules for operating a vehicle on the public roadways and hashing out
complicated liability questions. Should somebody have to sit in the
driver’s seat? What happens if the car malfunctions, or if there is an
accident? Would the passenger be responsible even if he or she didn’t
operate the vehicle? Should the state require that someone be in the
vehicle who knows how to drive it?
Autonomous cars could be the
great equalizer – allowing greater mobility for the elderly and the
disabled, who may not drive or have access to transit. But they may also
have a big impact on how California spends its transportation dollars.
There might be much greater demand to build more road lanes to
accommodate driverless cars, and less demand to build public transit
that shuttles the masses. Driverless cars could affect development
patterns, making far-flung suburban communities more attractive for
commuters who could nap or work while being whisked to work in their
private vehicle.
As we get closer to a world of driverless cars, it’s time to start
thinking beyond the logistics of licensing and liability, and start
talking about how this technology will reshape the way Californians
live, work and travel.
PARIS: With its exploding urban population burning ever more coal and wood, Africa could contribute as much as 55 percent of the world's particle pollutants by 2030, a study said on Tuesday.
In 2005, the continent's global share of these atmospheric pollutants
ranged from a five percent for sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide to 20
per cent for organic carbon, according to the findings published in the
journal Environmental Research Letters.
It was about 10 per cent each for black carbon, carbon monoxide, and non-methane hydrocarbons.
"A considerable increase in emissions from Africa is ... expected in
2030 if no regulations are implemented," wrote the study authors from
France and the Ivory Coast.
The particles are released in burning petrol and diesel for car and
motorcycle combustion, and coal, fuel wood, charcoal and animal waste
incinerated for heating and cooking.
The study said Africa
could represent 40 per cent of the world population by 2100 and its
urban population could double from 2000 to 2030 — along with rapid
growth in mining, oil and industrial activities.
"In western and eastern Africa, action on biofuels would be the most
efficient way to decrease domestic emissions ... not to mention the
decrease in the use of two-wheeled vehicles," the authors wrote.
"In southern Africa, action on coal would be the most efficient way to decrease industrial and power plant emissions."
These tiny particles can cause asthma and allergies, respiratory and
cardiovascular ailments and the smallest among them, which can enter the
bloodstream and lungs, have been classified as cancer-causing by the
World Health Organisation ( WHO).
The UN's health body estimates more than two million people die every
year from breathing in tiny particles in indoor and outdoor air pollution.
PARIS:
With its exploding urban population burning ever more coal and wood,
Africa could contribute as much as 55 percent of the world's particle
pollutants by 2030, a study said on Tuesday.
In 2005, the
continent's global share of these atmospheric pollutants ranged from a
five percent for sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide to 20 per cent for
organic carbon, according to the findings published in the journal
Environmental Research Letters.
PARIS:
With its exploding urban population burning ever more coal and wood,
Africa could contribute as much as 55 percent of the world's particle
pollutants by 2030, a study said on Tuesday.
In 2005, the
continent's global share of these atmospheric pollutants ranged from a
five percent for sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide to 20 per cent for
organic carbon, according to the findings published in the journal
Environmental Research Letters.
Americans made nearly 10.7 billion trips
on public transit in 2013, the country's highest ridership point in
more than half a century. The mark is largely the result of increased
investments: bigger systems in some cities, more off-peak service in
others. We can and should discuss whether the public costs of these
projects matched the ridership return, but the trend is at a minimum in
the right direction.
At the end of the day, though, improving trains and buses alone can
only attract so many riders. The bigger changes in travel mode won't
occur until local governments pair such transit incentives with automobile disincentives.
The latter involves removing the social discounts that encourage
driving — chief among them, an artificially low gas tax that doesn't
cover the cost of our roads.
We catch a glimpse of this potential shift from road to rail whenever
gas prices spike. Bradley Lane of the University of Texas at El Paso recently showed
that a 10 percent increase in fuel cost led to bumps of 4 percent in
bus ridership and 8 percent on rail. That trend even held true in
heavily car-reliant cities with traditionally poor transit systems, like
Omaha, Des Moines, Kansas City, and Indianapolis (below, the bus
bumps):
But gas prices as posted in big numbers high above a filling station
aren't the only thing with the power to influence our perceptions about
the cost of driving, and thus our travel behaviors. Turns out the volatility of fuel costs matters, too. Every price swing at the pump makes it harder to estimate a reliable cost of a regular commute and form a dependable budget for household car expenses.
And as planning professor Michael Smart of Rutgers shows in a new analysis, gas prices have been nothing if not volatile in recent years:
The solid top line of the chart shows real gas prices (in 2012 money)
since 1979. The dotted and light lines, meanwhile, show fluctuations in
those prices over 6- and 12-month windows. The massive leap that those
lines have made in recent years indicates gas price volatility. In more
practical terms, these lines reflect how unreliable the costs of fuel —
and thus of driving — have become.
For his research, Smart paired this volatility with surveys on support
for public investment in mass transit since 1984. His models revealed a
connection between this support (as shown through agreement with a
statement that "We are spending too little on mass transportation") and
the variance in gas prices. Meanwhile, the models found no such link between support and real gas price.
So it wasn't cost per gallon that got us thinking more positively about
public transit, it was the dizzying leaps and dives. When gas
volatility was low, respondents displayed a 37 percent likelihood of
stating support for transit investment. When volatility was high, that
likelihood grew to 46 percent:
What's happening, Smart believes, is that rapid fuel-cost fluctuations
inspire support for transit as a means to buffer price shocks in the
future. Drivers might not head for the train or the bus at the first
sign of wild gas price swings, but they take some comfort in knowing
that if the swings ever get too wild, they could. With that in mind,
Smart encourages public officials trying to drum up support for transit
to highlight the stability of transit fares, not just their low cost.
Now for the caveats. This research tracked stated support for transit investment on a survey — not actual ridership swings, not even a call to a
local representative. In that sense, even the highest support figure
seems a bit low; to paraphrase the famous Onion headline, just about everyone favors public transit for others.
Still, the larger point about transit incentives and car disincentives
remains. Cities can and should invest in balanced transport networks
with high-quality alternatives to driving. But until the cost of taking a
car becomes much higher or much more unstable, those efforts are likely
to go largely unnoticed.
Three lanes of the northbound 5 Freeway near Castaic were closed
Wednesday morning following a traffic incident involving a tanker truck,
the California Highway Patrol said.
The accident was reported
around 4:47 a.m. near Lake Hughes Road, the CHP said. It was not
immediately known what led to the collision involving the 26,000-pound
truck.
CHP officials said diesel fuel on the road prompted the closure of
the freeway lanes, and that an onramp was also closed for several
minutes.
One lane of the roadway remains open to motorists, causing traffic to back up for many miles.
Authorities did not have an estimate of when the other lanes will reopen.
