On Cars
Inspired by a few conversations on the topics of bike safety, wearing helmets, and investing in one’s own health, I’ve been thinking about cars a lot lately.
What we have now, at least in these United States, is a culture dominated by cars. And I worry, have we made grave miscalculations? Certainly automotive transport fills a vital role in the infrastructure of our society; the benefits are countless. But perhaps the consequences outweigh them? 1987, Heathcote Williams publishes his epic poem Autogeddon in the Whole Earth Catalog.
…This is half-way house.
Half the world’s paychecks are auto-related,
Half the world’s resources are auto-devoted,
And half the world will be involved in an auto-accident
At some time during their life.
Interconnecting roads, laid out like lattice-work,
Might sometimes strike a moderately subtle viewer
As a predatory web…
Accidental death is the third biggest killer of men in the United States, and the seventh biggest of women. Of these accidental deaths, 44.3% are classifies as Motor Vehicle Accidents (MVA), according to a National Vital Statistics report.
Are these acceptable losses? Of our personal daily trips, nearly 90% are made by car, while their average distance is only 10 miles. Considering also the abundant anecdotal evidence, it’s obvious that there is a lot of unnecessary driving going on. The desire to drive, the right to drive, the need to drive is so deeply ingrained in us, so heavily thrown upon us through advertising, so encouraged that it may be hard to imagine how little and how rarely it’s actually necessary that we do drive.
If people chose to drive less, instead opting for other means of transport that didn’t involve 3 ton of steel hurling through residential areas, would this have an impact the number of MVA deaths every year? Of course it would, but I don’t presume to be able to predict by how much. Our brains time and time again fail to accurately model large statistical systems; we’re just not good at fitting big numbers in there. Sure, we can make inferences about the tendencies of large data sets, and I assume that less driving would result in fewer deaths, but to what degree I couldn’t say. For accurate statistical modeling real data is needed, and it just doesn’t exist for this hypothetical model.
“There’s a slight chance” blurs to “it’d never happen to me.” But it does happen, often. In all likelihood, it will happen to me in my lifetime, and to you in yours. This is why I worry.