The Price Of Automotive Addiction. New Yorker Book Reviews.

What’s your main mode of transportation?

Like most Americans it’s probably vehicular.

Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker review of two new books:

Daniel Knowles’s “Carmageddon” is a serious argument against cars. Henry Grabar’s “Paved Paradise” is an anti-parking with an entertaining tilt. Both books make an argument for alternative like rapid transit, trains and trolleys, bicycles, but they mostly criticise the current systems. 

“We pay an enormous price for our automotive addiction—in congestion, time wasted, neighborhoods destroyed, emissions pumped out, pleasant streets subordinated to brutal expressways—but telling the addict that the drug isn’t actually pleasurable is a losing game. There is some slight hope in saying that it isn’t healthy, and that the replacement for the drug is about as good. But understanding this emotional infrastructure in favor of cars is vital to imagining their possible replacement.

The grip of the car as a metaphor for liberty is as firm as that of guns, if perhaps with similarly destructive results.”

Any thoughts about parking?  It’s the most contentious issue in many US cities. Gopnik references Donald Shoup’s 2005“The High Cost of Free Parking,”

Americans have been brainwashed to believe that they’re entitled to parking. Bitter battles about storing cars, and mis-belief that more cars = more business leads city leaders to backtrack on beneficial community projects like Open Street on Cookman Ave.

Cookman while it was open to people, and car-free.
Cookman after the brief single season of being open to people is again a car sewer.

Parking has its very own official committee in Asbury Park, with enough stuff about car storage to discuss in lengthy monthly meetings. We propose a Transportation Equity Committee, but that’s another story.

Parking minimums were established by The  Institute of Transportation Engineers, (which still exist in Asbury Park) whereby builders have to provide x-number of spaces for residences, and businesses, leading to cities’ swaths of asphalt dedicated to car storage, contributing in part to a housing shortage, suburban sprawl, and the development of neighborhoods where you can’t get anywhere to do or buy anything without a car.

Asbury Park is a “15 minute city”, as the now contentious concept is described in the article. It’s a walkable, rollable city, but private cars still rule. We propose on-demand transit to reduce car dependency, mitigate the parking problem, and to make our streets safer. Yes, that’s another story.

Now that parking minimums are being abolished in many cities, car owners are angry that they have to pay for it themselves. Oh the inequity of it.

What if we had reliable, affordable, convenient transit options? What if we didn’t need cars?

Read or listen to the book reviews:

How To Quit Cars

They crowd streets, belch carbon, bifurcate communities, and destroy the urban fabric. Will we ever overcome our addiction?

 

Two Wheels Good

I’ve loved riding bikes for most of my life.

“What? I have to slow down?”
“Yay here I go!”

I rode my bike to elementary school, and through college. I rode my kids for errands and for fun on kid seats, and pulled them to preschool in a trailer. I ran beside them as they each learned to ride on their own.

Eventually they all became proficient, and some have competed on road and mountain bikes, one becoming a professional cyclist.

I ride my bike almost every day for errands, and for recreation and exercise too, and experience hair raising close calls on every ride.

We have all ridden bikes in cities all over the world, and in all of those cities it’s safer and more enjoyable than it is in the US.

I have a fear every time I’m on my bike that it might be my turn, or that one of my kids’ will be in a crash.

It’s taking a very long time for America to grasp the importance of prioritizing bicycle riding over driving. Bikes are 10x more effective than electric cars for the environment, and the benefits for human physical and mental health are well documented. But American progress is stymied by laws that have been created (invented), and infrastructure built to expedite the movement of vehicles over the safety of people on bikes, and other countries are far, far ahead of us in changing that culture.

Maybe we can change the culture in our tiny city of Asbury Park.

Here’s a a bit of the thoroughly enjoyable and informative article about the history of the bicycle, and bicycling law, and personal bike riding experiences of the author. I hope you’ll read it in its entirety, and love to know your thoughts.

Onward~

Polli Schildge Editor – Asbury Park Complete Streets Coalition

Bicycles Have Evolved. Have We?

The New Yorker

From the velocipede to the ten-speed, biking innovations brought riders freedom. But in a world built for cars, life behind handlebars is both charmed and dangerous.

Bicycles are the workhorses of the world’s transportation system. More people get places by bicycle than by any other means, unless you count walking, which is also good for you, and for the planet, but you can travel four times faster on a bicycle than on foot, using only a fifth the exertion.

 

To ride a bike, in her book Two Wheels Good THE HISTORY AND MYSTERY OF THE BICYCLE  Jody Rosen points out is to come as close to flying by your own power as humans ever will. No part of you touches the ground. You ride on air. Not for nothing were Orville and Wilbur Wright bicycle manufacturers when they first achieved flight, in Kitty Hawk, in 1903. Historically, that kind of freedom has been especially meaningful to girls and women. Bicycling, Susan B. Anthony said in 1896, “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”

 

 

Cars Are Killing Us

Asbury Park is perfectly designed to support alternatives to cars. Bike share, scooter share, electric car share, jitneys, pedicabs, and more.

This article in The New Yorker, in addition to recent articles in The New York Times,  The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other respected and well- known publications tells the history and social, health and environmental impacts of automobiles in this country.  It has become clearer that we need to address the problem of #toomanycars.

“The road has emerged as the setting for our most violent illustrations of systemic racism, combustion engines have helped create a climate crisis, and the quest for oil has led our soldiers into war.”

The “Automobile Era” was ushered in by men who saw a way to make a lot of money hustling Americans into thinking that everyone needed, and everyone could afford a car, and that vehicles represented freedom and our very identity.

This author quotes the stats: “Since 1899, more than 3.6 million people have died in traffic accidents (*Let’s make sure we NEVER say “accident”. They’re CRASHES.*) in the United States, and more than eighty million have been injured; pedestrian fatalities have risen in the past few years.”

“In 2018 alone, an estimated 40,000 people lost their lives to car crashes.” Since 1990 1 million people have been killed in car crashes.”

The environment has suffered irreparably from automobile emissions, and from our dependence on gas and oil. Human health has been adversely affected with particulates in the atmosphere.

Let’s keep working toward a car-free Asbury Park.

Was the Automotive Era a Terrible Mistake?

For a century, we’ve loved our cars. They haven’t loved us back.

READ IT:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/29/was-the-automotive-era-a-terrible-mistake