Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile & Its Effect on our Lives
The average U.S. household spends one out of every five dollars on transportation — more than the cost of medical care or food. Cars are the leading cause of child deaths in the United States. And the number of people killed by car wrecks in 2007 was the equivalent of a passenger plane crashing every day. Childhood obesity, entrenched poverty, crowded emergency rooms, overworked court systems — the unrecognized costs of America’s car-focused lifestyle are staggering. And yet the concept that many Americans associate with their cars is "freedom." How did this happen? In their new book, Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile & Its Effect on our Lives , two sisters who lost a cousin and a good friend to car crashes attempt to make sense of it all. In the end, they advocate taking firmer control of your car — "making it, once again, a tool rather than a very greedy member of the family." Journalist Mary Newsom spoke to co-author Anne Lutz Fernandez, a former corporate manager who wrote the book with her sister, Catherine Lutz, an anthropologist. As you researched the many costs related to driving, what surprised you the most? Because we divided the research, we were surprised by different things. My sister found the health effects quite surprising. How much air pollution comes from cars and, in turn, how much of our high rate of asthma, heart and lung disease, and cancer can be attributed to the automobile — that was quite shocking. She was moved by the story of a tollbooth worker dying of cancer, probably caused by exposure to car exhaust. The worker couldn’t quit her job — she needed the health benefits. That was a tragic, Catch-22 situation. I was most struck by the time we spend in our cars. I found it shocking to realize I was spending a significant portion of my week behind the wheel. I’ve cut down considerably. On average, according to Arbitron, Americans spend 18½ hours a week in their cars. For me it was about 10 hours a week, which just seemed like too much. That’s a work day! A lot of it was mindless driving, deciding at the last minute to run some errand. Many of those I now walk to. I’m trying to be more mindful about car trips I take. We really do have a lot of flexibility in the smaller choices. The other thing that shocked us was the dollars. On average, one in five household dollars goes to transportation. For lower-income households, it’s an even higher percentage. Very few people really know the ongoing costs. We tend to just think about the cost of buying a car, not maintaining it or any of the other associated costs. Of all those hidden costs — injuries, depreciation, wrecks — what’s the most significant cost most people don’t think of? People don’t realize how many of their tax dollars go to support the infrastructure of automobiles. We all want the government to keep investing in roads and bridges. But I don’t think there’s a sense of how many tax dollars go toward industry subsidies. For example, the recent "Cash For Clunkers" program was lauded as a boon for consumers — rather than a $3 billion cost to taxpayers. It’s been shown to have had a very modest impact on the health of the American automakers, to have been unlikely to have made a significant environmental impact, and to have been quite costly to taxpayers. In essence, all of us paid so that some of us could have new cars. And of course those most hurt by the recession, the under- and unemployed, could not afford to take advantage of the program. Infrastructure, subsidies to the industry, crash costs, health care costs from crashes, costs to maintain a first-responder system for crashes, the long-term health costs — those are all costs we don’t look at. In the book, we document some of the costs. In 2005, the oil and gas industry got $3.6 billion in tax incentives. In a single year, 1999, governments across the country spent $74 billion on road construction and maintenance. Traffic lawsuits, judicial actions, and putting people with DUIs and other major traffic violations in jail added $11 billion a year onto local tax bills. If you think about police, fire and ambulance services, consider that one study found that 40 percent of Denver’s police activities, 15 percent of its fire department deployment, and 16 percent of its paramedic services were centered on automobiles. You suggest many needed changes. If you had a magic wand and could make only one change, what would you choose? I think it would be to have a more balanced transportation mix available to more people. Transit can’t solve all the problems. But we’ve created a system very much skewed away from transit. The current public transit system is woefully inadequate. Until more people at various socioeconomic levels start using public transit and demanding better transit from our politicians, government funding will continue to flow disproportionately toward the oil, gas, and automotive companies and highway infrastructure. In the meantime, carless Americans must rely on our thin public transit system. This puts them in a terrible bind, because our landscape is built around the car. And because in recent years job growth has been concentrated in the suburban ring, the urban poor in particular find it difficult or impossible to find or keep jobs they need a car to get to. The last chapter lists things we all could do, with the underlying thread of, "Be smarter." But can people get smarter? How optimistic or pessimistic are you about that? I think people can become more financially literate and media literate, if we all raise awareness of how much we’re spending and look at automotive marketing in a more critical way. Our original motivation for writing the book was the loss of our cousin and a very good friend in car crashes. And we began with a focus on the safety stuff. So we started from a fairly dark place. But toward the end of our research we became more optimistic. With the recession and gas prices rising, people were driving less. Not all was by choice; some were out of work. But some were realizing they could cut back. The reduction in driving reduced fatalities and injuries. That gave us optimism. So many of the problems of the car can be reduced by all of us driving just a little bit less. Some people may see the book as an anti-auto screed Is that where you’re coming from? What we’re proposing is automobile moderation. I own a car. I love my car. We’re not anti-car. We are asking folks to look at how the auto affects their life. We’re not telling people what to do. We tried to make suggestions that we could live up to in our own lives. We talked to people who you’d think would be traditionally conservative, a lot of police officers and prosecutors — people who see the damage that the car causes on roadways — who were a lot more anti-car than we turned out to be. You point out that driving less would keep us all safer. But most of us do have to drive. How can we be safer in our cars? When you buy a car, choose one with options that help you avoid collisions and that protect you during one, such as antilock brakes, air bags, and electronic stability control, which helps a driver gain control of a vehicle that’s skidding or sliding in a turn. You can enhance the safety of new and older cars by adding accessories, even inexpensive ones such as electronic deer alerts. And you can change your personal driving habits. Set your cruise control at the speed limit. You’ll use less gasoline, too. Stay two seconds behind any vehicle directly in front of you. Make fewer lane changes. Don’t drive tired. Don’t use the phone — hand-held or hands-free. Don’t eat or drink while driving. If you’re not the driver, be considerate. Don’t call people when you know they’re driving, and if you’re a passenger, keep conversations light — shelve heavy discussions or political arguments until you’re out of the car. Help with navigating or setting the radio or comfort controls so drivers need not take their eyes off the road. But the surest way to keep your family safer is to drive less. What’s your fantasy car? I used to live in New York City. Now I live in suburban Norwalk, Connecticut. I think my fantasy is to be living in a town with super-convenient, super-clean public transit. My fantasy future car is the one with no emissions that costs me very little to fill up and gets 100 miles per gallon. So until then, what kid of car do you drive now? I drive a Prius. I had a six-year-old Honda Civic that probably would have lived to be a hundred. I write in the book about going to buy the Prius. There’s no question that I fell prey to automotive marketing and went out to buy a hybrid when I didn’t need one. But I do love my Prius, and I hope to own it for a long, long, long, long time. If there’s any one thing I’ve learned from a financial perspective, it’s that it’s smart to own cars for a long time. As a Toyota owner, what do you think about the recent recalls? It is not yet clear how many people have been killed or injured as a result of the Toyota accelerator problems, but the estimate so far is 19 dead over 10 years. Even if more have died, that number is a tiny fraction of the roughly 400,000 Americans who died on the highway over the same period. The real danger to drivers runs across all manufacturers and models. The rest of the industry is happily hiding behind — and profiting from — Toyota’s relatively small, if frightening and unnecessary, problems. Even after Toyota’s accelerator problem gets fixed, Americans ages 3 to 34 will still be more likely to die in a car crash than from any other cause. The largest question that will remain is whether the American public will get a safer transit system or remain hostage to the government’s prioritization of the health of car companies over the health of people.
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Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile & Its Effect on our Lives
Cut the Road Rage
Why not put your video game addiction to good use? At ecodrivingusa.com , you can take the wheel of a virtual car and test whether your personal driving habits are earth-friendly. EcoDriving USA is an educational campaign launched in August 2008 that aims to show America’s 240 million car owners how to cut their CO2 emissions by using less fuel. Sample eco-driving tips: keep your tires inflated, avoid idling, and no jackrabbit accelerations. Bad news for me. Vrooming down straightaways and braking suddenly on right turns gave my test drive an eco-rating of zero.
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Cut the Road Rage