[Vision2020] Bridge a community issue

[Ted Moffett]

Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
***** Original material contained herein is Copyright 2000 through life
plus 70 years, Ted Moffett.  Do not copy, forward, excerpt, or reproduce
outside
the Vision2020.Moscow.com <http://vision2020.moscow.com/> forum without the
express written permission of the author.*****
-----------------------------------
As written in this letter, "...there wouldn't be many more cars on Third
Street when the bridge is built. But that is wishful thinking."  I'm not
sure it is really "wishful thinking"... Perhaps a deliberate misstatement
to downplay the implications of this bridge facilitating an increase in
motor vehicle traffic to accommodate various developments on the east side
of Moscow, as it most likely will do.
*The model of expansion of cities with the motor vehicle dominating the
planning has implications far beyond than just declaring it a "community
issue.'   It is a major national and global issue.  The following article
explores some of these issues, pasted in with no annoying ads...*

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/absurd-primacy-of-the-car-in-american-life/476346/
The Absurd Primacy of the Automobile in American Life
Considering the constant fatalities, rampant pollution, and exorbitant
costs of ownership, there is no better word to characterize the car’s
dominance than insane.

The car is the star. That’s been true for well over a century—unrivaled
staying power for an industrial-age, pistons-and-brute-force machine in an
era so dominated by silicon and software. Cars conquered the daily culture
of American life back when top hats and child labor were in vogue, and well
ahead of such other innovations as radio, plastic, refrigerators, the
electrical grid, and women’s suffrage.

A big part of why they’ve stuck around is that they are the epitome of
convenience. That’s the allure and the promise that’s kept drivers hooked,
dating all the way back to the versatile, do-everything Ford Model T.
Convenience (some might call it freedom) is not a selling point to be
easily dismissed—this trusty conveyance, always there, always ready, on no
schedule but its owner’s. Buses can’t do that. Trains can’t do that. Even
Uber makes riders wait.

But convenience, along with American history, culture, rituals, and
man-machine affection, hide the true cost and nature of cars. And what is
that nature? Simply this: In almost every way imaginable, the car, as it is
deployed and used today, is insane.

What are the failings of cars? First and foremost, they are profligate
wasters of money and fuel: More than 80 cents of every dollar spent on
gasoline is squandered by the inherent inefficiencies of the modern
internal combustion engine. No part of daily life wastes more energy and,
by extension, more money than the modern automobile. While burning through
all that fuel, cars and trucks spew toxins and particulate waste into the
atmosphere that induce cancer, lung disease, and asthma. These emissions
measurably decrease longevity—not by a matter of days, but years. The
Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculates
<http://news.mit.edu/2013/study-air-pollution-causes-200000-early-deaths-each-year-in-the-us-0829>
that 53,000 Americans die prematurely every year from vehicle pollution,
losing 10 years of life on average compared to their lifespans in the
absence of tailpipe emissions.

There are also the indirect environmental, health, and economic costs of
extracting, transporting, and refining oil for vehicle fuels, and the
immense national-security costs and risks of being dependent on oil imports
for significant amounts of that fuel. As an investment, the car is a
massive waste of opportunity—“the world’s most underutilized asset,” the
investment firm Morgan Stanley calls it
<http://orfe.princeton.edu/~alaink/SmartDrivingCars/PDFs/MorganStanley%20040715ReportJonas.pdf>.
That’s because the average car sits idle 92 percent of the time. Accounting
for all costs, from fuel to insurance to depreciation, the average car
owner in the U.S. pays $12,544 a year for a car that puts in a mere 14-hour
workweek. Drive an SUV? Tack on another $1,908.14
Then there is the matter of climate. Transportation is a principal cause of
the global climate crisis, exacerbated by a stubborn attachment to archaic,
wasteful, and inefficient transportation modes and machines. But are cars
the true culprit? Airplanes, for instance, are often singled out as the
most carbon-intensive form of travel in terms of emissions per
passenger-mile (or per ton of cargo), but that’s not the whole story: Total
passenger miles by air are miniscule compared to cars. In any given year,
60 percent of American adults never set foot on an airplane, and the vast
majority who do fly take only one round trip a year. Unfortunately, air
travel is not the primary problem, contributing only 8 percent of U.S.
transportation-related greenhouse gases. Cars and trucks, by contrast, pump
out a combined 83 percent of transportation carbon.

Driving an SUV or even a mid-size car from New York to L.A. is worse for
the planet than flying there. This is true in part because cars’ fuel
efficiency has improved far more slowly than planes’, but also because of
Americans’ increasing propensity to drive alone, which has made car travel
less efficient and more carbon-intensive per passenger-mile in recent years.

So cars pose the biggest threat on the climate front, with all the costs
that global warming imposes on infrastructure, homes, and lives through
increasingly severe storms, droughts, rising sea levels, and pressure on
food supplies. If the price of gasoline and the vehicles that burn it
actually reflected the true costs and damage they inflict, the common car
would go extinct. Gasoline would cost way more than $10 a gallon. That’s
how big the secret subsidy is.

And that’s not even counting cars’ most dramatic cost: They waste lives.
They are one of America’s leading causes of avoidable injury and death,
especially among the young. Oddly, the most immediately devastating
consequence of the modern car—the carnage it leaves in its wake—seems to
generate the least public outcry and attention. Jim McNamara, a sergeant
with the California Highway Patrol, where officers spend 80 percent of
their time responding to car wrecks, believes such public inattention and
apathy arise whenever a problem is “massive but diffuse.” Whether it’s
climate change or car crashes, he says, if the problem doesn’t show itself
all at once—as when an airliner goes down with dozens or hundreds of people
on board—it’s hard to get anyone’s attention. Very few people see what he
and his colleagues witness daily and up close: what hurtling tons of metal
slamming into concrete and brick and trees and one another does to the
human body strapped (or, all too often, not strapped) within.

In contrast, a roadside wreck is experienced by the vast majority of
drivers as a nagging but unavoidable inconvenience—just another source of
detours and traffic jams. Increasingly popular and powerful smartphone
traffic apps eliminate even those brief close encounters with the roadway
body count, routing savvy drivers away from crash-related congestion. The
typical car wreck is becoming all but invisible to everyone but those who
are killed or maimed and those whose job is to clean it up. Many are aware
at some level that troubling numbers of people are injured and die in cars,
but most remain unfazed by this knowledge.

This disparity in attention between plane crashes and car crashes cannot be
justified by their relative death tolls. Quite the contrary: In the 14
years following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, there were eight crashes on
American soil of passenger planes operated by regional, national, or
international carriers. The death toll in those crashes totaled 442. That
averages out to fewer than three fatalities a month.

The death toll on America’s streets and highways during that same period
since 9/11 was more than 400,000 men, women, and children. The traffic
death toll in 2015 exceeded 3,000 a month. When it comes to the number of
people who die in car wrecks, America experiences the equivalent of four
airliner crashes every week.

A normal day on the road, then, is a “quiet catastrophe,” as Ken Kolosh,
the statistics chief for the National Safety Council, calls it. He ought to
know: He makes his living crafting the annual statistical compendium of
every unintentional injury and death in the country.

Car crashes are the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages
of 1 and 39. They rank in the top five killers for Americans 65 and under
(behind cancer, heart disease, accidental poisoning, and suicide). And the
direct economic costs alone—the medical bills and emergency-response costs
reflected in taxes and insurance payments—represent a tax of $784 on every
man, woman, and child living in the U.S.

The numbers are so huge they are not easily grasped, and so are perhaps
best understood by a simple comparison: If U.S. roads were a war zone, they
would be the most dangerous battlefield the American military has ever
encountered. Seriously: Annual U.S. highway fatalities outnumber the yearly
war dead during each Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, the War of 1812,
and the American Revolution. When all of the injuries from car wrecks are
also taken into account, one year of American driving is more dangerous
than all those wars put together. The car is the star.
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