Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Leave it to the Brits to create an incredible tool for examining America’s own crisis of traffic fatalities. Behold this somber map, made by ITO World, a UK-based transportation information firm. Each dot on the map is a traffic-related death. The entire eastern United States is blanketed with them.

The purple dots represent vehicle occupants – not necessarily drivers – who were killed. It may look like a lot of purple, and it certainly is, but when you zoom in closer you see a lot of blue dots, for pedestrians, as well as an awful lot of yellow dots, for motorcyclists. The green dots for bicyclists are fewer and farther between, but if you zoom into the cities, you’ll find them. Each dot even lists the year of the crash and the victim’s age and gender.

ITO World got their fatality data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. It appears they’ve captured not just fatalities on highways but on local streets as well.

The World Health Organization reports 12.3 annual traffic deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in the United States. Compare that with 3.85 in Japan and 4.5 in Germany. If the U.S. achieved similar rates, more than 20,000 deaths would be prevented each year.

This map is a useful way of visualizing the terrible consequences of our auto-addicted culture. Beyond that, it can be an indispensable tool for community transportation advocates to show local officials where problem spots are and how their community compares to others.

GM pulled its offensive ad that tried to depict biking as uncool in response to complaints from bicycling advocates, but they’re still running this ad, showing what a drag it can be as a pedestrian because cars will ruin your day. (Best just to get your own car and ruin someone else’s day.)

A GM spokesman said that they listened to the complaints they received about the bike ad and “there are changes underway.”

“The content of the ad was developed with college students and was meant to be a bit cheeky and humorous and not meant to offend anybody,” said Tom Henderson. “We respect bikers and many of us here are cyclists.”

But the hell with you, pedestrians! Sucks to be you, out on the street getting exercise and sunlight and not sitting in a two-ton steel bubble!

We renew our call for the GM marketing department to get with the program already.

Car ads that try to appeal to the desire for social status are nothing new, but here’s one that just gets it wrong: GM is trying to convince college students that driving a Buick is hipper than riding a fixie.

Nice try, GM. Unfortunately for you, college kids aren’t falling for it. People between the ages of 20 and 40 are driving way less today than people that age drove just 10 years ago.

So, in this picture, who would be the one smiling and who would be the one hiding her face? In the deliciously sarcastic words of Andy Clarke at the League of American Bicyclists:

If you are a student looking to add tens of thousands of dollars of long term debt, care little about the environment, and want to lump two tons of steel around campus while paying through the nose for insurance, gas, and parking… General Motors has got a perfect deal for you. Bonus: it’ll make you fat and unhealthy! All you have to do is give up that dorky bicycle that’s easy to use, practically free, gets you some exercise and is actually fun to ride.

The ad is so wildly off the mark that the League is mostly poking fun at GM’s misperception of the collegiate idea of Cool — but for good measure, they’ve got an action alert in case you want to tell GM just how out of touch its marketing department has become.

Running Saturday morning errands, you may have found yourself in traffic, only to realize you’re stuck behind a line of vehicles inching into a car wash. Each month, nearly half of all American car owners head into one of the nation’s estimated 100,000 car washes to bathe their vehicles in some loving suds.

Some people show more love for their cars than they do for their families. Photo: Guide to Detailing

“Then there are those—and I love these people—” says Mark Curtis, CEO of the Splash Car Wash chain, who visit weekly, core customers “who truly care for their cars” and “see them and their upkeep as a reflection of themselves, and have it as part of their regular routine.” This ardent minority keeps alive the cliché that we Americans love our cars, an oversimplification that fails to capture our divergent, ambivalent, evolving feelings about them. Still, on the whole, we may treat our vehicles better than we treat ourselves.

Take a gander at how much cash and credit we lavish on them. On the household level, transportation accounts for one out of every six dollars Americans spend, the crushing majority of which goes to owning and operating cars. (By contrast, families who use public transportation and own one less car can save up to $8,400 a year, according to APTA). Only housing accounts for a bigger chunk of our budgets; we fork out less for food.

It’s especially illuminating to look at spending “per capita”—that is, how much we spend per person and per vehicle in our household. Though we spend more than twice as much to fuel each body in our home with food than we do to fuel each vehicle in our garage with gasoline, there are several measures by which we treat our cars nearly as well or better than we treat ourselves—and our families.

The average American spends nearly as many dollars annually on the health and well-being of each vehicle—$2,536 for repairs, maintenance, and insurance—as we spend on each humanoid member of the family, whose allocation for healthcare and insurance is $2,747. That’s just $18 more a month preventing and treating disease than repairing dings and replacing tires. The amount we dedicate to buying and financing each car is triple what we spend educating each family member. In other words, we pour three times as much into our depreciating assets than we invest in our own, and our children’s, futures.

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It’s getting to be a little like the Boy Who Cried Wolf over on Capitol Hill. I mean, it’s hard to get all revved up about an impending government shutdown when Congress always insists on taking negotiations to the edge and they always figure out something right before the deadline.

The House of Representatives was nearly empty when three members voted "by unanimous consent" to fund the government for another few days, avoiding a shutdown. Photo: Brendan Hoffman / Getty Images

The 2011 fiscal year ends tomorrow, and up until a few minutes ago lawmakers were still fighting about funding the first few days of the next fiscal year. But the House just voted to approve the Senate’s bill to fund the government through Tuesday, at which point Congress will vote on another measure that would keep the government open through mid-November.

Actually, only three members of the House voted on the stopgap bill, because the House is in recess this week, and they were the only ones around. The session lasted five minutes.

The GOP had been insisting that money be cut from additional disaster funds inserted into the bill, or else that it be cut from another program — specifically, a Democratic favorite that gives loans to auto companies to encourage the development of green car technology. The standoff fizzled when FEMA “found” some money “under a couch cushion.”

Michigan Democrats had fought hard to protect the clean car subsidies from GOP cuts, saying the program is responsible for 40,000 jobs in their state and others.

Auto companies that receive the loans have kept auto plants in the U.S. rather than move them overseas, according to central Michigan’s Daily Tribune: “Ford elected to build its new Ford Focus in Michigan rather than Mexico and Nissan now plans to build electric vehicles in Tennessee thanks to the loans.”

There seems to be a new battle over spending cuts every couple of months, though, so if the Republicans have already given notice that they’ve got the auto loan program in their sights, don’t expect the issue to go away too quickly.

All eyes are on Texas Gov. Rick Perry these days, the faraway frontrunner in the Republican race. But as the primary goes on (and on and on) more Republicans might take note of the fact that in a matchup with President Obama, only one candidate stands a chance of winning: former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

As governor of Massachusetts, Romney had a mixed record on transit and smart growth. Photo: Daily Caller

According to the most recent polling data, Obama trounces Gov. Perry. He makes mincemeat of Bachmann and Gingrich. Only one poll shows a winning Republican candidate, and that’s Romney, with a two percent edge over the president in a recent USA Today poll.

We took a hard look at Rick Perry’s approach to transportation last fall, when he was running for re-election. As Texas governor, Perry championed a mega-highway plan that would make the Road Gang blush. He blocked metrorail extensions and vulnerable users legislation.

But what about Romney? His record as a red governor of the blue state of Massachusetts is a little more complex, and worth exploring.

In a recent Boston Globe story comparing current Democratic Governor Deval Patrick with his predecessor, Romney emerges as the more inspired candidate when it comes to smart growth. (It doesn’t help that Patrick was caught driving around in an SUV last week while telling his constituents to observe car-free week.)

According to the Globe, Patrick has done away with a program originated under Romney to encourage “mixed-use, walkable, downtown-centered, transit-oriented growth” and counter sprawl.

Under the Romney program, communities got credit for green building, saving energy, preserving open space, and zoning reform, among many other categories. Those that scored highest went to the front of the line to receive about $500 million per year in grants and revolving loan funds for infrastructure including water and sewer projects. The idea was to put state funding to municipalities through a filter, and reward innovation in sustainability at the local level; previously the money was just doled out.

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What’s keeping Congress from passing an extension to the federal budget? Democratic protection of automobile subsidies.

Top Senate Democrat Harry Reid vows to keep an clean-car subsidy in the budget, come hell or high water. Photo: J. Scott Applewhite / AP

After midnight last night, the House finally managed to narrowly pass a budget extension bill, but Senate leaders have already rejected it out of hand, since it includes about half the disaster relief they’d like and cuts $1.5 billion from a clean-fuel technology manufacturing program for the auto industry.

The disagreement is strong enough that it threatens to keep Congress in session longer than intended — likely through the weekend, and possibly even into next week’s scheduled recess.

That gives them a week, if necessary, to avert a government shutdown — the potential consequence of inaction on a bill to extend federal government spending past September 30.

Clean vehicles are great, but if Democrats really want to meet important environmental goals, just imagine how much good they could do by spending that $1.5 billion to implement better bus systems or provide emergency assistance to transit agencies struggling to keep up with higher ridership.

In addition to highlighting how Senate Democrats highly prize car subsidies, this situation also puts in perspective the brewing fight over the FY2012 budget. If Congress can’t even pass a simple extension to keep government operations for a few months, with just a few billion dollars’ difference, how will they ever agree to bridge the enormous gap between their visions for FY2012?

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Image: James Yamasaki / The Stranger

Under the headline, “Okay, Fine, It’s War,” Seattle’s weekly newspaper, The Stranger, this week published a manifesto “of and by the nondrivers themselves.” They’re sick of being called “militants” for caring about pedestrian safety, and they’re tired of the specter of a “war on cars.”

We heartily recommend that you read the whole thing, but here are some of our favorite parts. Like this, from the first plank of the manifesto: “The car-driving class must pay its own way!”

For cars we have paved our forests, spanned our lakes, and burrowed under our cities. Yet drivers throw tantrums at the painting of a mere bicycle lane on the street. They balk at the mere suggestion of hiking a car-tab fee, raising the gas tax, or tolling to help pay for their insatiable demands, even as downtrodden transit riders have seen fares rise 80 percent over four years.

No more! We demand that car drivers pay their own way, bearing the full cost of the automobile-petroleum-industrial complex that has depleted our environment, strangled our cities, and drawn our nation into foreign wars. Reinstate the progressive motor vehicle excise tax, hike the gas tax, and toll every freeway, bridge, and neighborhood street until the true cost of driving lies as heavy and noxious as our smog-laden air. Our present system of hidden subsidies is the opiate of the car-driving masses; only when it is totally withdrawn will our road-building addiction finally be broken.

They go on to demand better, more expansive transit, safer streets and sidewalks, and traffic calming. And this:

This antagonism [between car driver and nondriver] traces directly to the creation of the modern car driver, a privileged individual who, as noted, is the beneficiary of a long course of subsidies, tax incentives, and wars for cheap oil. But the same subsidies that created this creature (who now rages about the roads while simultaneously screaming of being a victim in some war) can—and must, beginning now—be used to build bike lanes, sidewalks, light rail, and other benefits to the nondriving classes.

That’s the kind of manifesto we can get on board with.

After the manifesto, The Stranger goes on to report on the rising numbers of crashes between cars and cyclists, the violent anti-bike rhetoric being spewed by car drivers that are the  “victims” of some imagined war on cars, the massive disparity between funding for car infrastructure and everything else, and the heroes of the non-driver, beloved both for their advocacy and their tight asses. Read it, read it all.

While Hollywood’s screenwriters, FX wizards, and product placers have contributed mightily to the idea of the automobile as the vehicle of freedom, joy, and rebellion, our literary lions have often taken a more gimlet-eyed view of car culture.

Now, as summer ends, high school and college students across the country will put the car chases and road trips of film on pause to tackle a semester’s assigned reading. Many are picking up these classics, which were remarkably prescient about the automobile’s impact on society.

Fahrenheit 451 author Ray Bradbury.

Fahrenheit 451: Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel anticipated a nation anaesthetized by mindless media and high technology. When they meet on the rarely used sidewalk, free-spirited Clarisse explains to protagonist Guy Montag what is lost in car culture’s velocity:

“I sometimes think drivers don’t know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly,” she said. “If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he’d say, that’s grass! A pink blur! That’s a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days.”

For Bradbury, being a pedestrian connects us to nature and to each other; the government in his cautionary tale has made it a crime because it gives citizens too much “time for crazy thoughts.”

Brave New World: Aldous Huxley feared the potential for conformity and social control presented by mass production and mass consumption, so in the dystopian World State of his 1932 novel, the people worship Henry Ford: “My Ford!” has replaced “My Lord!” and the year is 632 AF (After Ford).

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Another day, another news story, another media outlet wielding an old saw like this one: high gas prices are a political problem for the president because Americans “love their cars.” American car culture, fed by everything from our sprawled out landscape to a daily bombardment of car ads, is kept alive by journalists’ use of a set of hackneyed narratives. Beyond clichés, these story lines represent a collection of myths that shore up an unhealthy, unequal, and ultimately unsustainable car system.

"Americans Love Their Cars" -- and that's why we pollute our air, destroy our cities, and make ourselves fat? Image: Smashing Magazine

Americans love their cars. A Google search for this statement returns 2.8 times as many hits as “Americans love their pets” and 6.3 times as many as “Americans love their guns”. Yes, there will always be automotive enthusiasts and drivers fond of their cars. But our car culture is both shifting and conflicted: The last time they were surveyed by Pew, Americans saying they saw their cars as “something special”, more than just a means of transportation, had dropped from 43 to 23 percent. Americans may need their cars in our transit-starved and poorly planned landscape, but with mind-numbing traffic and volatile gas prices, the luster is off the chrome.

Teens can’t wait to grab the car keys. The press persists in romanticizing a teen’s first trip to the DMV as the ultimate coming of age ritual. But it’s their middle-aged parents who are more likely to be champing at the bit, fed up with schlepping their kids and steeped in nostalgia about the freedom they felt when they first drove. But this generation is different. Already connected by smartphones and computers, and graduating into a terrible job market, young people are less car-happy than their parents were at the same age. Today’s teens are delaying getting their licenses and purchasing vehicles, and college students are more interested in living in urban centers where they can be less car-dependent.

The economy depends on the auto industry. The popular, business, and political media alike echo the fallacy that a healthy US economy depends on a healthy auto industry. This chorus helped justify the 2009 bailouts of GM and Chrysler. But the auto industry knows that the dependency is reversed:  it needs economic growth, tax breaks and subsidies, and vibrant credit markets to sell cars. A nation more reliant on transit and active transportation would be one in which households had lower debt and more discretionary income to spend on housing, leisure, and other products, enriching a wide swath of industries. It would also be a nation, in the next downturn, less hostage to how a single industry’s fate might affect entire communities and supply chains. Read more…