![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusAl Quaeda is a paper tiger. Al Quaeda is a minor threat. There is an organisation -- a way of organising society -- that kills more than a million people per year worldwide. Let's call it Al Careda: motorised private transport. The car.
Let's not even look at the way the car contributes to global warming and pollution or causes wars in parts of the world with oil, or how the car turns vital, lively public space into dead, armoured, private space, or how cars make their drivers aggressive, fat or unfit. Let's just look at how many people cars physically kill and maim by hitting them, crushing them, mangling them, and throwing them to the ground.
According to the BBC, the World Health Organisation and the World Bank, 1.2 million people are killed in road traffic accidents around the world each year. Another 50 million people are injured. Traffic accidents, not terrorism, are the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 35. And things are getting worse. People are buying more and more cars. On current trends, by 2020 road traffic accidents will have risen by 60%, outstripping stroke and HIV as the main causes of preventable death.
Politicians are not decrying the car as 'evil'. There is little talk of danger, of 'Al Careda' or 'Carmageddon', and even less of measures to be taken. Politicians have not declared a 'War on Carism'. They have not invaded Munich or Detroit, or sent occupying armies to Nagoya. The WHO report contains a few mealy-mouthed and vague comments from Bush and Blair. But no politicians are curbing our civil liberties to fight Al Careda, despite the fact that you and I are thousands of times more likely to die prematurely due to cars than due to Islamist terrorism.
In fact, the spread of the car is an example of the spinelessness of politicians and the toothlessness of democracy. A machine is invented and introduced without much foresight or political debate. It seems like a good idea at the time. It seems to be about technology, not politics, health or morality. Some states require men with red flags to walk in front of cars when they're first introduced, but by and large everyone is excited about the machine. No elections are fought on the question 'Whether or not we should have cars'. The 'democratic' angle on cars is not how to get rid of them, but how to make them affordable to the common man. Carless places -- Venice, the island of Sark, Alicudi -- are that way for topographic rather than moral reasons. Very few voices against carism are raised. Even now, when the true cost of cars to the planet can to be calculated, radical political solutions don't seem to be proposed, because they don't seem to be possible.
'The WHO-World Bank joint report sets out specific measures aimed at reducing deaths from road traffic accidents,' the BBC reports. 'These include providing affordable public transportation and safe crossings and paths for pedestrians. It also suggests that communities should be planned so that residents do not have to travel far to go to work, school or local shops. In addition, it says more could be done to separate different road users, like lorry drivers or those doing the school run.'
These are pathetically small and unimaginative solutions. In a democracy, attitude matters. We can start the long march towards a car-free world by changing the prevalent attitude to cars. We should create an aura of unacceptability around cars, a car taboo. We need to draw people's attention to the toxicity of cars. We need to counter all the careless car-love, all the slick advertising, and make the idea that cars are toxic thinkable and sayable.
I'll say it right here. Cars are ugly. I hate them. I hate the look of them, the politics of them, the noise they make, their smell. I'd be delighted to see more cars in cities getting scratched, defaced, daubed with slogans, burned out. Cars deserve public vituperation much more than terrorists do. Cars are an idea that has had its time. They're past their sell-by date and they're damaging the world and the things I love.
A car cannot be cool. The world would be better off without cars. I will vote for people who are anti-car (unless they're Nader and my vote just helps an oil president). I want politicians to be proposing car-free cities, car-free days and car-free weeks, and eventually car-free nations and car-free years. I want to see Barcelona ban the carrida the way it has just banned the corrida. I want car bans to expand at the rate that smoking bans are currently expanding. I want to hear rhetoric about cars that matches rhetoric about terrorists. I want to see a big statue of Henry Ford toppled, to massive applause from freedom-loving people all over the world.
I want to hear about the complete separation of cars from cities. I want to see proposals from architecture students to put cars in underground tubes and tunnels. I want car drivers to be troglodytes. I want to see car drivers paying the actual price their cars cost the world, not just the cost of the metal and the gas. I want computers to take over all the functions of driving, not just parking, and I want cars to evolve into public spaces. For instance, when cars are snarled in tailbacks, I want little doors between their noses and tails to open automatically, turning the rows of private cars into a trainlike public space with a corridor. I want to see people getting up from their car seats, stretching, and walking up and down that corridor, looking at other people, buying a cup of green tea from a trolley.
I want to hear some acknowledgement from politicians that it's the things that everyone does, the things that pass for normal, that are the truly toxic and 'evil' things in the world today, not a few marginal guerilla movements or rogue states. If you want to see an 'evil' person, a person likely to wreak havoc and cause death, take a photo of yourself as you walk towards your car.
I dedicate this blog entry to Mary Hansen of Stereolab, a victim of terrorism.
Let's not even look at the way the car contributes to global warming and pollution or causes wars in parts of the world with oil, or how the car turns vital, lively public space into dead, armoured, private space, or how cars make their drivers aggressive, fat or unfit. Let's just look at how many people cars physically kill and maim by hitting them, crushing them, mangling them, and throwing them to the ground.
According to the BBC, the World Health Organisation and the World Bank, 1.2 million people are killed in road traffic accidents around the world each year. Another 50 million people are injured. Traffic accidents, not terrorism, are the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 35. And things are getting worse. People are buying more and more cars. On current trends, by 2020 road traffic accidents will have risen by 60%, outstripping stroke and HIV as the main causes of preventable death.
Politicians are not decrying the car as 'evil'. There is little talk of danger, of 'Al Careda' or 'Carmageddon', and even less of measures to be taken. Politicians have not declared a 'War on Carism'. They have not invaded Munich or Detroit, or sent occupying armies to Nagoya. The WHO report contains a few mealy-mouthed and vague comments from Bush and Blair. But no politicians are curbing our civil liberties to fight Al Careda, despite the fact that you and I are thousands of times more likely to die prematurely due to cars than due to Islamist terrorism.
In fact, the spread of the car is an example of the spinelessness of politicians and the toothlessness of democracy. A machine is invented and introduced without much foresight or political debate. It seems like a good idea at the time. It seems to be about technology, not politics, health or morality. Some states require men with red flags to walk in front of cars when they're first introduced, but by and large everyone is excited about the machine. No elections are fought on the question 'Whether or not we should have cars'. The 'democratic' angle on cars is not how to get rid of them, but how to make them affordable to the common man. Carless places -- Venice, the island of Sark, Alicudi -- are that way for topographic rather than moral reasons. Very few voices against carism are raised. Even now, when the true cost of cars to the planet can to be calculated, radical political solutions don't seem to be proposed, because they don't seem to be possible.
'The WHO-World Bank joint report sets out specific measures aimed at reducing deaths from road traffic accidents,' the BBC reports. 'These include providing affordable public transportation and safe crossings and paths for pedestrians. It also suggests that communities should be planned so that residents do not have to travel far to go to work, school or local shops. In addition, it says more could be done to separate different road users, like lorry drivers or those doing the school run.'
These are pathetically small and unimaginative solutions. In a democracy, attitude matters. We can start the long march towards a car-free world by changing the prevalent attitude to cars. We should create an aura of unacceptability around cars, a car taboo. We need to draw people's attention to the toxicity of cars. We need to counter all the careless car-love, all the slick advertising, and make the idea that cars are toxic thinkable and sayable.
I'll say it right here. Cars are ugly. I hate them. I hate the look of them, the politics of them, the noise they make, their smell. I'd be delighted to see more cars in cities getting scratched, defaced, daubed with slogans, burned out. Cars deserve public vituperation much more than terrorists do. Cars are an idea that has had its time. They're past their sell-by date and they're damaging the world and the things I love.
A car cannot be cool. The world would be better off without cars. I will vote for people who are anti-car (unless they're Nader and my vote just helps an oil president). I want politicians to be proposing car-free cities, car-free days and car-free weeks, and eventually car-free nations and car-free years. I want to see Barcelona ban the carrida the way it has just banned the corrida. I want car bans to expand at the rate that smoking bans are currently expanding. I want to hear rhetoric about cars that matches rhetoric about terrorists. I want to see a big statue of Henry Ford toppled, to massive applause from freedom-loving people all over the world.
I want to hear about the complete separation of cars from cities. I want to see proposals from architecture students to put cars in underground tubes and tunnels. I want car drivers to be troglodytes. I want to see car drivers paying the actual price their cars cost the world, not just the cost of the metal and the gas. I want computers to take over all the functions of driving, not just parking, and I want cars to evolve into public spaces. For instance, when cars are snarled in tailbacks, I want little doors between their noses and tails to open automatically, turning the rows of private cars into a trainlike public space with a corridor. I want to see people getting up from their car seats, stretching, and walking up and down that corridor, looking at other people, buying a cup of green tea from a trolley.
I want to hear some acknowledgement from politicians that it's the things that everyone does, the things that pass for normal, that are the truly toxic and 'evil' things in the world today, not a few marginal guerilla movements or rogue states. If you want to see an 'evil' person, a person likely to wreak havoc and cause death, take a photo of yourself as you walk towards your car.
I dedicate this blog entry to Mary Hansen of Stereolab, a victim of terrorism.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
in cars
Date: 2004-04-07 02:01 pm (UTC)i had lived in walkable cities with excellent public transportation (boston and nyc) for two years before moving to LA, so when i got here i found the car culture to be a bit of an inconvenience. having to be constantly in command of a deadly weapon definitely raises the level of stress you feel going about your day-to-day business. the drivers are either extremely aggressive or just incompetent, and the amount of traffic on the roads at any given time makes it that much worse. also, drunk driving is rampant here.
yesterday on the way to school i was held up by the aftermath of a serious crash on sunset boulevard at about 11am. the emergency vehicles were already gone and they were just beginning to load the two cars onto tow trucks. it was a head on collision between a little black miata and some sort of other small sedan, and it's really odd to see such a direct crash - i figure one of them had to have been driving in the wrong lane. what was so strange that neither car seemed to have swerved at all, and they seemed to have collided at a relatively high speed. the sedan was crumpled about halfway up the hood, and the front end of the miata was entirely crumpled to the windshield. from the fracture pattern on the glass it looked like there had been a passenger whose head had hit the windshield, but i didn't see any blood; either they'd cleaned things off, or it may have just been a result of the impact. in any event, i would be surprised if anyone in either car survived.
there is a book that i recommend to everyone that i will recommend to you, particularly if you are at all interested in southern california "american dream" car culture. it's a taschen photography book called car crashes and other sad stories (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/3822864110/qid=1081370918/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/102-7554949-7967343?v=glance&s=books&n=507846). it's photos of crashes in orange county in the 40's and 50's by a guy called mell kilpatrick. the police would alert him whenever someone reported a crash, and often he'd get there before any emergency vehicles showed up. what is so beautiful and disturbing about the photos is the bystanders and the expressions of the victims who survived the crashes - the feeling of "how could this possibly happen?" some are bloody and gruesome but that isn't what is shocking about them so much as that people in the post-war suburban days seemed to be so full of hope and acceptance of the kind of life that cars made possible, and really had never considered that it could prove deadly.
i have a friend named olli who used to do visuals for this dj night back in DC, and i lent him the book one week and he made a sort of car crash montage movie to be projected on the screen. he didn't even use any of the really gruesome ones, but apparently the partygoers were so disturbed that he had to take it off the screen. he actually runs a bar in berlin now called 8mm (http://www.8mmbar.com) that you should check out, if you haven't already!
this is the other one i was thinking of
Date: 2004-04-07 03:12 pm (UTC)