slaves to the automobile

This morning on the way to work, while I was riding MARTA, I continued my reading of Jane Holtz Kay's The Asphalt Jungle. My reading this morning was in chapter 5, which discusses the health effects of our car culture. From accident-related deaths to chronic back problems to obesity to asthma, an astonishing range of human health problems can be traced, at least partly to the car.

Ironically, I got off the MARTA this morning and took a deep breath of the worst air in the nation. Atlanta's air quality was very unhealthy this morning. The immediate cause was the forest fires in southeast Georgia, but the car, of course, is what drives our air so close to the breaking point.

And the most startling thing about all these car-related problems is how blind we are to them. Noise pollution is viewed in terms of protecting drivers from the noise of their own cars, not protecting neighborhoods from nearby traffic. Accidents are judged in terms of "deaths per mile" rather than total deaths (which at publication of the book had not decreased despite improvements in driver education and car safety). And air pollution is measured by slight increments toward a federal standard that is probably not strict enough to truly eradicate pollution-related disease. Ultimately, all these factors come back to one fact: we can't imagine life without our cars.

The most telling of Kay's arguments in my mind was how quickly we rush to defend the car against all accusations, despite all evidence to the contrary. She writes:

Where else but behind the wheel is inattention so fatal? What other momentary distraction becomes a crime with such lethal consequences?...Reactions to daily life are dangerous behind the wheel...For the truly "defensive" driver, the car is no agent of freedom...but a constricting test of concentration. On the road we forfeit the otherwise forgiveable right to muse, to fantasize, to fight--to live. (106-7)

What a world it is, where we glady acquiesce to such an inhuman rule. St. Paul talks in his letter to the Romans of our choice as humans to offer ourselves in servitude to what we want to obey, either sin or righteousness. We moderns, I think, have willingly made ourselves slaves of the car. The irony is that we call it freedom of the road, and can't imagine living without it.