Tag: auto industry

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The Big Lie: Cars = Freedom

Since the 1920s automobile manufacturers have been touting the wonders of car travel.

The goal of the industry was to create this pervasive myth to sell more cars.

Through the 1940s, 50s and 60s owning a vehicle was aspirational, possible for the well-to-do, mostly white American consumer. Racism was structurally built in. Robert Moses leveled minority neighborhoods to build highways to make way for cars.

Sara Seo in Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom, ” reveals how the rise of the automobile led us to accept – and expect – pervasive police power. As her book makes clear, “this radical transformation in the nature and meaning of American freedom has had far-reaching political and legal consequences.”

I wrote in this blog in 2020: Change Policing Of Our Cities, Starting With Traffic Enforcement

The NYTimes article below reveals the continuing racism built into car ownership and policing.

Onward.

Polli Schildge, Editor

Once You See the Truth About Cars, You Can’t Unsee It

NYTimes December 15th, 2022

By Andrew Ross and Julie Livingston

Andrew Ross and Julie Livingston are New York University professors, members of NYU’s Prison Education Program Research Lab and authors of the book “Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality.

”Today, officers make more than 50,000 traffic stops a day. “Driving while Black” has become a major route to incarceration — or much worse.

When Daunte Wright was killed by a police officer in April 2021, he had been pulled over for an expired registration tag on his car’s license plate. He joined the long list of Black drivers whose violent and premature deaths at the hands of police were set in motion by a minor traffic infraction — Sandra Bland (failure to use a turn signal), Maurice Gordon (alleged speeding), Samuel DuBose (missing front license plate), and Philando Castile and Walter Scott (broken taillights) among them. Despite widespread criticism of the flimsy pretexts used to justify traffic stops, and the increasing availability of cellphone or police body cam videos, the most recent data shows that the number of deaths from police-driver interactions is almost as high as it has been over the past five years.”

 

 

 

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The Infrastructure Bill: A Dinosaur Of A Federal Transportation Program

For those applauding the passage of the Infrastructure Bill…

Step one for repairing a problem: Stop making it worse

  • The refrain “roads and bridges” – there is no provision to repair anything before building new and bigger roads adding to environmental disaster.
  • Money for transit, but billions to promote more driving will undermine it as long as we keep building new roads and prioritizing driving as an unalienable American right.
  • The US has a horrible history of  building highways bisecting and destroying already poor neighborhoods, yet the practice continues with Louisiana’s current $750 million plan to bulldoze a Black neighborhood in Shreveport.
  • Subsidizing oil and gas industries keeps fueling cars and the construction of new roads, continuing the destruction of the environment.
  • President Biden’s pledges to cut emissions, pointing at the transportation sector.  But “Beth Osborne [and T4America]… accused Congress of ‘doubling down on a dinosaur of a federal transportation program’ that she said has produced a dangerous, inequitable and unsustainable transportation network.” – Airline, automotive, oil, gas and all related industries like asphalt etc. are all responsible for the climate disaster.

“With the infrastructure deal completed, the Build Back Better budget reconciliation act is still awaiting action. That package does include some important provisions for improving access to transit, grants for reducing emissions, and more. But it’s tough to swallow knowing that the infrastructure deal is likely to make many of these same issues worse, something we wrote about last week:

“We are encouraged to know that Congress is taking seriously the need to address climate change, equity, and economic recovery. But the $40 billion included here unfortunately won’t be enough to redeem the $645 billion-plus infrastructure bill that will continue to make many of those same problems worse. As we’ve said throughout the second half of this year, the administration has a difficult task ahead to advance their stated goals of repair, safety, climate, equity, and access to jobs and services through these small improvements, while spending historic amounts on unchanged programs that have historically made those issues worse.”

Read more…

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A History Lesson: The Auto Industry Has Brainwashed Us

Here’s fascinating history on how we’ve been brainwashed, explained in Peter Norton’s book,  Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. “In ad after ad during the Super Bowl, auto companies… have long promised us nirvana. And we’ve blindly shilled out our life savings” to buy, insure, maintain and park cars. The 1920s program at Harvard taught “the first generation of traffic engineers to prioritize traffic lights for faster driving and more difficult walking.”

We need to use language and educate to make sure messages like “biking is normal,” “walkability,” and “good transportation choices” become better understood and more widely accepted over the next decade.

The conversation continues about scooters, “…as a transportation choice – and other micro mobility vehicles are not a novelty, and we should give everything we can to helping them succeed.”

 

To take back our streets, remember how we lost them to cars

By Paul Mackie – 

Ford Motor’s “Road of Tomorrow” from the 1939 World Fair

Streets are now thoroughly car-centric, and the idea of people-centered streets remains a difficult concept for most people to grasp. These groups recognized they needed to shift the perceived cause of collisions away from drivers and onto pedestrians. Under the name Motordom, the interest groups were quoted in a 1922 edition of Engineering News-Record that they would lead the effort in a “revision of our concept of what a city street is for.”

A 1937 anti-jaywalking ad from the Federal Art Project. Source

Read more…

https://mobilitylab.org/2015/10/09/how-we-lost-streets-to-cars/

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Let’s Go Big In 2020 And Beyond

In most American cities, bike and walk advocates beg for validation and funding like a “charity case”, and end up getting acknowledged and funded as such, resulting in insufficient or piecemeal infrastructure. We commonly see bike lanes that abruptly end, unprotected bike lanes that don’t offer leading bicycle intervals or leading pedestrian intervals (LPIs and LBIs), or safe left turns, and painted lines “that put cyclists between fast-moving traffic and parked cars with doors that capriciously swing open”, so only experienced riders will brave them, and discouraging new riders. This kind of bike and walk design and implementation continues to give drivers the sense of entitlement that roads are intended for them, and discourages people from riding bikes, scooters, and walking, thereby creating more traffic congestion perpetuating the inherent safety, health, and environmental issues.

As advocates for safe, complete streets, do we dare to go big to make environmental, social, and safety gains we hope to achieve?  If American bike and walk advocates are “pitching ourselves as a niche, special-interest group”, we are “tacitly agreeing that cars are and should be the dominant mode of transportation…”

The auto industry has dominated since the 1930s by promoting plans for highways and streets for cars.  Asbury Park is a 1.4 mile square city, where we have envisioned a plan for biking and walking, a network of infrastructure that can be a model for cities all over the US. Let’s do it big. Onward to 2020 and beyond!

Why We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

In the 1930s big auto dreamed up freeways and demanded massive car infrastructure. Micromobility needs its own Futurama—one where cars are marginalized.

TERENIG TOPJIAN
A cyclist rides on the bike lane in the Mid Market neighborhood during Bike to Work Day in San Francisco, California May 14, 2015. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith –
Protected bike lanes are often the most ambitious component of reform proposals. They should be a mere starting point. Robert Galbraith/ReutersOur current model is to beg for twigs        

“More often than not, bike infrastructure is created reactively. Typically in response to a collision or near collision with a car, an individual or advocacy group identifies a single route that needs better infrastructure. We gather community support and lobby local officials for the desired change, trying as hard as we can to ask for the cheapest, smallest changes so that our requests will be seen as realistic.

What’s the problem with this model?

It’s like imagining a bridge and asking for twigs—useless, unable to bear any meaningful weight, easily broken. And it’s treating bike infrastructure like a hopeless charity case.

This makes bike infrastructure seem like a small, special-interest demand that produces no real results in terms of shifting to sustainable transportation, and it makes those giving up road space and tax dollars feel as though they are supporting a hopeless charity.

But when roads, highways, and bridges are designed and built, they aren’t done one neighborhood at a time, one city-council approval at a time. We don’t build a few miles of track, or lay down some asphalt wherever there is “local support” and then leave 10-mile gaps in between.”

Read it:

We need to go big.