Let's Stop Driving: Mother Nature

Mother Nature is a bitch.

We're like a bunch of petulant children who have been getting our way for years while Mom wasn't looking. But eventually, Mom realizes what we've been up to and starts throwing shoes at us. Humans have been advancing technologically at a frantic rate, figuring out all sorts of things, not the least of which is transportation. We drive, we ride, we fly, and we go where we want to go. But what we don't realize is that every time we go somewhere, we're tempting Mother Nature to give us a pump to the forehead.

(By the way, for the purposes of this post, I'm referring to the natural world when I say "Mother Nature. That is to say, "Mother Nature" is the Earth and how it works. Okay go.)

Lights Out

People weren't made for night time. We naturally get tired when lights go out. The basic schedules of our society work around the existence of sunlight. Why? Because people can't see in the dark. We need light for reading, for assembling, for cooking, and yes, for driving. You know how I know we need light for driving? Because we put these giant brightening devices on the fronts of cars.

"So we've got the lights, what's the problem?" you ask, knowing full well that I've already got an answer. The problems are twofold. First, the targeted beams of headlights are a poor substitute for the piercing, all-encompassing glow of sunlight. A night driver's peripheral and rear-view vision is almost nil. The second issue is the human eye. Our pupils grow and shrink based on the amount of light in our environment, to help improve vision in particularly bright or dark situations. But at night, when everything is dark, the beam of another car's headlights feels like staring at the sun, and your vision suffers. Impaired vision + night driving = not good. And that's science.

Through Rain, and Sleet, and Snow...

A 2005 survey reported that the average American commuter spends 26 minutes driving to work each day, and that most of us do that commute five days a week, 50 weeks a year. That's 250 days of traveling 50 minutes to and from work, through all sorts of weather conditions. For those of you not so good with math, that's over 200 hours of driving per year, just on your daily work commute.

We're all familiar with the effect of snow on driving conditions, and sometimes we respect it enough to say that it's not worth taking your life in your hands to drive to work today. But a lot of the time, you go to work anyways. You go despite sleet and snow and icy road conditions. The roads weren't designed for icy conditions, and really, neither were our cars (or we'd have spikes in the tires). But you go anyways, for the $75 or $200 or $500 you make in a day, because it's easier than telling your boss that you're uncomfortable driving in the day's weather conditions. Hey, I know all about it. It's the same reason I prefer ordering pizza online; that way, I don't have to talk to anyone.

What about a foggy morning or a stormy day? You'd never consider taking a day off for those kind of weather conditions, but in a lot of ways, those conditions are just as dangerous as ice, and people don't respect them. You'd never wait an hour to leave for work just because it's foggy outside. But you might be wise to do just that; again, impaired visibility is something that is simply unacceptable when you're dealing with a deadly machine like an automobile.

It's Coming Right For Us!

(Hopefully that reference isn't lost on all of you.)

Outside of weather, Mother Nature provides one more big problem for driving: animals. There are an estimated 20 million+ deer in the United States today, and if you spend any time in a rural or suburban area, you know that they're around. The extermination of many natural predators of deer has contributed to an ever-increasing deer population, and it's no surprise that they're showing up everywhere.

Deer are involved in an estimated 1.5 million vehicle collisions every year, and cause $1.1 billion in damages, along with 150 motorist deaths. Fences, guardrails, and deer whistles have not stifled the impact of deer collisions on humans' daily lives, and it's difficult to foresee a change that will. The reality is that, as long as we have any desire to preserve animals in a somewhat natural environment, and as long as we insist on driving cars on roads, we're going to encounter deer and other animals while driving.

"So we're screwed then, right?" Well, no. As long as we insist on driving cars on roads, yes, we're screwed. That's the whole point of this series of posts, remember? "Let's stop driving," that's the whole idea. I'm just trying to point out all the problems with driving, so we can start to realize that this simply can't be the apex of human transportation. There simply must be something better.

Let's Stop Driving: Traffic

Perhaps the most noticeable and most convincing piece of evidence that humans shouldn't be driving is the existence of traffic. Traffic represents a breakdown in the flow of the system. While a properly running transportation system should be bereft of bottlenecks, the Washington, DC area is a veritable bonanza of traffic jams.

It stands to reason that there was a time in human history when there were no traffic jams, probably for the first five, ten, maybe even twenty years of the existence of the automobile. And then, at some point, there were so many cars that people had to start waiting in line to drive from point A to point B. What was the solution? Widen the roadways. So crews were assembled, the ground was broken, and the roads were widened. And when the dust cleared, the traffic jams were gone.

Sure enough, though, as time wore on, more and more cars were being used, and traffic jams started popping up again. This time, however, maybe widening the roadways wasn't an option, because you'd have to tear down buildings. So what did we do? We built more roads. With more options of which road to use to get from point A to point B, fewer people would be on each road, and that would lessen traffic. And it did. The traffic jams disappeared, and everyone could drive without being hindered by the existence of other cars on the roads. But what happened next was really amazing, and was something that no one could have predicted.

More cars showed up, and traffic jams formed again. The same strategies were employed: more roads, wider roads. And they helped for a while, until the traffic jams cropped up again. This cycle has continued for decades, and continues today, except for one noticeable difference: we don't get rid of the traffic jams anymore.

It reminds me of Tetris. You start building up, leaving that one-block-wide spot at the end to drop the long pieces in to get the "Tetris," the four-line completion. And it works for a while; you drop in the long pieces, knock out four lines, and keep going. But as time wears on, the blocks next to the hole accumulate and get closer to the fatal top of the screen. And at some point, you say, "Alright, I'll just drop this one piece in there and get a couple of lines, then I can get back to working on Tetrises. But of course, you don't. You catch another bad piece, and have to cover up the hole, "temporarily" you tell yourself. And before you know it, it's a race just to stay alive.

That's how it is with traffic. We're no longer working to prevent traffic jams altogether. We're just trying to mitigate their impact, and spread them out over a larger area. But they're completely beyond our ability to control at this point. Am I the only one who finds that worrisome? We've created a monster that we can't control. This is like Jurassic Park; traffic is the velociraptors. It's only a matter of time before it gets out of hand and we're running for our lives...alright, maybe that analogy isn't as good as the Tetris one, but you get my point.

The reality is that every day you'll see work being done to expand roads, add a lane here, build another highway there. But no one has any hope of actually eliminating traffic as a time drain on all of us. We're willing to settle for a slight reduction in backups, and saving 5% off our daily commute.

If we're going to spend money, lots of money every year, expanding and "improving" our road system, shouldn't we start to look at other options that might dramatically increase the efficiency of our transportation systems?

One last point that I didn't really make clear in my first post: I don't have an answer. I think a top-flight mass transit system is a good idea, but it's certainly not going to eliminate our dependence on motor vehicles altogether, which means it's not going to solve the traffic problem completely. The intention of these blog posts is not to try to sell a specific transportation idea; it's to sell the conversation. I think people should be talking about this as a real problem.

This post is running long, so I'm gonna cut it here. But if any of what I've said has given you pause, take the next step. Ask someone you think is smart what they think of the situation. Like I said, all I want is the conversation.

Let's Stop Driving.

Enough is enough.

On Tuesday morning as I was getting ready for work, my mom told me about a terrible tragedy. A car accident occurred Monday evening in Damascus that claimed the life of Ryan Didone, and has another teenager fighting for her life. Ryan Didone was the son of Tom Didone, a police officer who worked closely with my father (Joseph A. Mattingly) as members of the underage alcohol program in Montgomery County. Chances are, if you were busted at a drinking party in the late 80's or early 90's, they were among the officers who made your night suck.

As many of you already know, my father was also killed in an automobile accident, back in 2003. But they aren't alone. There are about 45,000 transportation-related fatalities a year in the United States. Not fender-benders, not injuries, deaths; 45,000 of them. Of those 45,000 deaths, approximately 42,000 were a result of motor vehicle collisions. The remaining 3,000 include aviation, boating, heavy/light rail, railroad and railroad trespassers (people standing in the way of trains), and others.

But back to the focus here, 42,000 people die every year while driving on, biking on, or walking near roadways. Cars kill people. And despite dramatic advances in technology and information, they haven't really stopped killing people. Air bags, seatbelt laws, anti-lock brakes, these have all been around for over a decade now, and there has been no noticeable decrease in the number of people getting killed by car accidents. And I use the phrase "getting killed by" rather than "dying in" intentionally. Car accidents deserve the same level of villainy associated with heart disease and bears; not completely unavoidable, but very preventable.

I'll probably be making several posts over the next....well, over the rest of my life, arguing that the United States needs to take the lead in reducing our dependence on motor vehicles, with the intent of eliminating them altogether.

I'm not going to go into the whole discussion right now, but I do want to handle one point right off the bat. I've talked to several people about this viewpoint of mine, and often one of the first arguments against it that comes up is, "People won't want to get rid of their cars." In the past, I've accepted this as a likely hurdle, and one that would be difficult to overcome. Now, however, I'm realizing that it's perhaps the most foolish hurdle of any. People will initially want to keep their cars, yes, that's true. But I think that most people are smart enough that when they think about it, they'd rather be alive and ride a fancy metro system than be dead and own a Mazda Miata. It's a tough sell, but I think I can pull it off.