Jason King was in a Madison Avenue crosswalk when a dump truck driver backed into him and dragged him 30 feet. King's death prompted then-Senator Carl Kruger to take action -- not for tougher penalties for deadly driving, but for a ban on listening to music while walking. Photo: DNAinfo

But a closer look reveals some major caveats. First, the study relied on notoriously unreliable media reports to come up with 116 cases, between 2004 and 2011, in which pedestrians were killed or injured while wearing headphones (total U.S. pedestrian deaths during those years numbered in the tens of thousands). The majority of victims cited in the study were struck by trains, not cars, which as much as anything could call into question the perils of walking on train tracks — or the need for safer pedestrian thoroughfares.

Researchers noted that the overall use of headphones probably increased during the study period. If the study has any evidence that not wearing headphones is safer than wearing headphones, none of the press accounts we’ve seen have picked it up.

Then there’s this detail, reported by NPR:

The study is not the last word on the subject, the researchers concede. Because the data are drawn from media reports, they cannot say conclusively whether accident victims might have also had mental problems or drivers might have been at fault, for example.

Come again? With no accounting for driver error, this study isn’t worth the paper its printed on. In taking motor vehicles and their operators out of the equation, you might as well pin pedestrian deaths on Chuck Taylor tennis shoes or Orbit chewing gum.

Even if you start from the premise that the onus is on pedestrians to protect themselves from powerful multi-ton vehicles, the findings here are suspect at best. And though lead author Richard Lichenstein acknowledges that the study is basically a conversation-starter, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Stories like the ones circulating today lend credence to the idea that traffic crashes are as unpreventable as natural disasters, and the best we can do is remain vigilant and hope we don’t die. When a paper like the New York Post sees a chance to pen a victim-blaming headline, it doesn’t sweat the small print.

"What do we want? More of the same! When do we want it? Now!" Image: Untold Entertainment

It’s sad, really. Tremendous gains in vehicle fuel efficiency have been squandered, MIT’s Christopher Knittel demonstrates in a study published in the American Economic Review. Knittel’s analysis quantifies how, while automakers have applied meaningful fuel economy innovations over the past several decades, these have produced only modest gains in miles per gallon, because at the same time the companies inflated horsepower and vehicle size. As MIT’s press release put it:

Thus if Americans today were driving cars of the same size and power that were typical in 1980, the country’s fleet of autos would have jumped from an average of about 23 miles per gallon (mpg) to roughly 37 mpg, well above the current average of around 27 mpg. Instead, Knittel says, “Most of that technological progress has gone into [compensating for] weight and horsepower.”

Based on this history, Knittel rightly concludes that market forces cannot drive the social and environmental good of fuel efficiency; he supports an increase in the gas tax. Unfortunately, he goes on to perpetuate a convenient fallacy that has provided cover for an industry looking to evade regulation and avoid responsibility:

“I find little fault with the auto manufacturers, because there has been no incentive to put technologies into overall fuel economy,” Knittel says. “Firms are going to give consumers what they want, and if gas prices are low, consumers are going to want big, fast cars.”

In response to calls for less polluting or less dangerous vehicles, the auto industry has often depicted itself as hostage to a voracious, and quite imaginative, consumer mob that stands in the way of such progress. Apparently, car buyers expend great energy dreaming up spectacular new ideas for cars, which they then conspire to demand from the industry.

NHTSA should act swiftly and decisively on the plethora of distracting technologies being built into vehicles.

The truth is, consumers rarely want a product that they don’t know exists or that doesn’t exist yet. As marketing expert James Twitchell puts it, “In reality people often do not know what they want until they learn what others are consuming. Desire is contagious, just like the flu.” It isn’t until they see others wanting a product — in the media or in real life — that consumers start to want it.

Suburbanites across America were not collectively thunderstruck in the 1980s by the realization that living the good life meant clambering up into a giant vehicle. Instead, automakers, eager to sell more high-margin products, took advantage of regulatory loopholes to push bigger and bigger vehicles. They repositioned clunky trucks as “sport utility vehicles,” transforming them into symbols of wealth, leisure, and suburban family values. In ads, they implied that SUVs were safer by virtue of their heft and hammered on the need for capacious cargo space. The effort was so successful that despite the recession and outcry over gas prices, SUVs and SUV crossovers currently account for 31 percent of U.S. auto sales.

And ordinary people, who spend much of their drive time slogging through stop-and-go traffic, inching across parking lots, and idling in drive-thrus, never rose up in protest that cars weren’t meeting their horsepower needs. Instead, automakers have been stoking desire for superfluous power and speed since the 1960s. Yes, drivers need to be able to merge onto highways safely, but going from zero to 60 in so many seconds and speedometers topping out at 150 mph are marketing conceits reminiscent of Nigel Tufnel’s amp that went to 11.

Now what consumers want, in addition to size and horsepower, the industry tells us, are “connected vehicles.” And while some of what buyers are clamoring for in this regard are safety features, many are distracting technologies automakers are promoting, like enabling a driver to post a Facebook status while changing lanes or run a Google search at a four-way stop. It would be naïve not to anticipate that turning cars into rolling smartphones could cancel out decades of safety innovations just as increasing size and power negated fuel economy gains.

Car companies will seek to maximize profits; this is their fiduciary duty to shareholders. But blaming consumers for their failure to deliver safety or environmental improvements is merely an evasion of their corporate responsibility to contribute to the common good by reducing the social ills their products create. So we can’t rely on the corporations for meaningful progress. And allowing consumer preferences, even if they were independent of industry influence, to drive policy on automotive issues would be a mistake: It equates the car consumer with the citizen and the short-term interests of drivers with the long-term interests of the nation.

To achieve a national vehicle fleet that does less damage to public health, we must have stronger regulations and now. The proposed 54.5 mpg CAFE standard, over which public hearings are now taking place, should be adopted. The states should follow the NTSB’s recent recommendation to ban nonemergency cell phone use by drivers. And NHTSA should act swiftly and decisively on the plethora of distracting technologies being built into vehicles. Let’s not wake up in forty years to calculate another squandered opportunity.

Anne Lutz Fernandez, a former investment banker and marketing executive, is co-author, with anthropologist Catherine Lutz, of Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on Our Lives.

Maybe Kia could have been just a little less transparent about marketing cars to kids than this Super Bowl ad from last year. Photo: AutoEvolution

While the choked parking lots at many suburban high schools might mislead you, young people today are less interested in driving and owning cars than their counterparts in previous generations. This is happy news for environmentalists and complete streets advocates, who see fewer vehicles on the road as key to a healthier, wealthier society. For the global auto industry, though, it is an existential threat not to be ignored.

Generation Y’s reluctance to embrace car culture may be temporary, reflecting merely the tough economic times, especially for those burdened with college debt. But studies show teens now maintain connectivity through the internet, not though cars, and teen driving rates have been in steady decline since the late seventies. So young people’s lack of interest in driving may presage a more fundamental shift in how we connect with other people, where we choose to live and work, and how we construct our identities. Either way, the auto industry isn’t taking any chances. Here are just a few tactics car makers are employing to take back the future.

Ratcheting up marketing to kids. Marketing cars directly to children pays off big for car companies even though they won’t be driving or buying their own for years. American children in particular hold real sway over family purchases: more than half of parents surveyed by JD Power said their children had meaningful input in choosing the family vehicle.

Children also carry into adulthood the brand awareness that marketing creates. Many adults own or still lust after their childhood “dream car.” So, in the 1990s, preschoolers started seeing ads created for them on shows like Blue’s Clues. And the Kia Sorento ad with toys whooping it up on a Vegas joyride, the Town and Country ad in which kids on a sidewalk envy kids riding by in the minivan, and the VW Passat ad starring that achingly cute boy dressed as Darth Vader are a few of the growing slew of commercials targeted at children as much as their parents.

Traditional ads are only part of a marketing mix that increasingly includes social media, which can cut parents out of the loop and get kids marketing to each other (one early successful product launch using social media had young people passing virtual BMW keys among Facebook friends). At the local level, Ford dealers have teens recruiting potential car buyers in return for money for their high schools.

Going Urban. Young adults have reversed the trend their parents set by showing their preference for living in cities rather than suburbs — and the car industry means to follow them there. The iconic advertising image of the lone vehicle winding through a stunning wilderness is being replaced with that of a car traversing a gorgeous or gritty cityscape. Once solely the backdrop for certain luxury vehicles, the city now provides the setting for ads hawking entry-level cars such as the Ford Fiesta, Kia Soul, and Fiat 500.

Better Living Through Car Ownership. Other types of marketing geared toward wooing young urbanites back to car culture are perhaps more insidious. To co-opt young people interested in urban issues, efforts are underway such as “Future Mobility Now”, which “is inviting Europe’s brightest young talent to get involved and have a say on the big issues facing the transport industry.” This initiative, funded by the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, held a conference this summer at which Daimler Chairman Dieter Zetsche gave the welcoming speech to Gen Y “delegates” who considered such leading questions as, “How can cars and transport help us lead better lives?”

Caring about sharing. Car-sharing, whether cooperative or commercial, arose as a way to reduce car ownership and increase mobility options for people who don’t need or want to own a vehicle. It remains to be seen if it will deliver on its potential to cut down on traffic, pollution, and household debt now that the automakers have decided to turn this potential threat into an opportunity.

Through its recent partnership with Zipcar, Ford is bringing its sedans and SUVs to college campuses across the US. The company’s stated goal is to allow students to “experience” its “latest fuel-efficient vehicles, while helping them reduce their cost of living and help relieve congestion on campus.” While this sounds terribly noble, the battle for advantage in a slow-growth market could well be won this way. It’s no surprise that on the heels of Ford’s deal, GM announced it was teaming up with peer-to-peer network Relay Rides.

And there’s always the chance that this driving “experience” could lead students to view ownership of these vehicles, loaded with connectivity and luxury, not as future needs but immediate wants. Undermining the social good to come out of car-sharing may not be the industry’s purpose in entering the market, but they’ll surely benefit from this potential side effect.

Auto industry leaders, it seems, take young people’s disinterest in a car-dependent lifestyle seriously. Advocates for other transportation options should also be inspired to push even harder for smarter planning, better transit, and greater safety for cyclists and pedestrians. Demographics may seem to favor change, but a deep-pocketed industry is determined to turn that tide, and they’re just getting rolling.

Anne Lutz Fernandez, a former investment banker and marketing executive, is co-author, with anthropologist Catherine Lutz, of Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on Our Lives.

Now, as summer ends, high school and college students across the country will put the car chases and road trips of film on pause to tackle a semester’s assigned reading. Many are picking up these classics, which were remarkably prescient about the automobile’s impact on society.

Fahrenheit 451 author Ray Bradbury.

Fahrenheit 451: Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel anticipated a nation anaesthetized by mindless media and high technology. When they meet on the rarely used sidewalk, free-spirited Clarisse explains to protagonist Guy Montag what is lost in car culture’s velocity:

“I sometimes think drivers don’t know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly,” she said. “If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he’d say, that’s grass! A pink blur! That’s a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days.”

For Bradbury, being a pedestrian connects us to nature and to each other; the government in his cautionary tale has made it a crime because it gives citizens too much “time for crazy thoughts.”

Brave New World: Aldous Huxley feared the potential for conformity and social control presented by mass production and mass consumption, so in the dystopian World State of his 1932 novel, the people worship Henry Ford: “My Ford!” has replaced “My Lord!” and the year is 632 AF (After Ford).

In Brave New World, Henry Ford is an object of worship.

Indeed, as James Flink pointed out in The Automobile Age, it was the sale of cars on credit, introduced in the 1920s, that accustomed us to the idea of buying things before we have the money to do so, setting the stage for today’s consumer culture. When Huxley’s World State encourages certain consumer behaviors simply to keep industry rolling, it’s hard not to draw parallels to our government subsidizing roads and sprawl, auto bailouts, and incentive programs such as Cash for Clunkers.

A Death in the Family: When James Agee’s novel, inspired by his father’s death in a crash, debuted in 1955, roughly a million Americans had already been killed by cars. Since then, another 2.5 million have died this way, but few works have better captured the slashing pain of sudden loss and anxious search for explanations (Was the driver drunk? Was death quick and painless? Was it God’s will?) that families undergo when a loved one is killed on the road.

Agee also understood the vulnerability of the human body to the destructive power of the automobile; his Jay Follett is killed the instant he hits the steering wheel because he hits it just so. The hours we now spend driving and decades of safety improvements can cause forgetfulness, even denial, about the danger vehicles still pose.

The Great Gatsby: In the automobile’s early days, F. Scott Fitzgerald saw with amazing clarity how it symbolized the myths and realities of the American Dream. New Money mogul Jay Gatsby attempts to woo his beloved Daisy and establish his bona fides in the upper crust with his extravagant mansion and parties—and his “gorgeous”, “rich”, “bright” car. He fails, though, to harness his chariot to the sun, winning neither Daisy’s love nor high society’s acceptance. Similarly, each year, millions of Americans buy a luxurious vehicle with the expensive hope that its luster will rub off on their reputations.

F. Scott Fitzgerald in his car.

The car is more than just one of many material objects Gatsby uses to demonstrate his net worth and self-worth—it becomes the central object in the novel when Daisy commits the hit-and-run that is his downfall. Caught in the wreckage are victims Myrtle and George Wilson:

…Myrtle Wilson, her life violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her thick dark blood with the dust… When they had torn open her shirtwaist, still damp with perspiration, they saw that her left breast was swinging loose like a flap, and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath. The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.

Fitzgerald’s editor questioned the need to describe Myrtle’s death so violently, but he defended it as essential and real. There is realism, too, in his portrayal of her husband George, the hapless mechanic who begs wealthy Tom Buchanan to sell him his used car. George mistakenly sees the automobile as the way up and out rather than as the financial albatross it often becomes for struggling families. When his wife is run down, the two become fictional representatives of America’s real life poor, disproportionately vulnerable to death by walking.

“Fiction”, wrote Stephen King, “is the truth inside the lie”. These four truth-tellers are just a handful of those who’ve pointed out car culture’s dark undercarriage. Are there others you would add to a syllabus for “Complete Streets Lit”?

Anne Lutz Fernandez, a former marketer and banker, is co-author of Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on our Lives (Palgrave Macmillan).

Just months ago, Queens Assembly Member Michael DenDekker was reaping widespread scorn for his proposal to require every cyclist in the state, even those just off their training wheels, to obtain a license. He also floated the idea of enforcing non-existent helmet laws with the widespread use of cameras. (He eventually withdrew the bike license legislation.)

Now he’s claiming that in retaliation for his bike bills, a “rogue cyclist” vandalized his car, identifiable due to its special State Assembly license plate. In response, he’s trying to pass a state law making it a felony to damage the property of someone known to be an elected official.

Assembly Member Michael DenDekker

At a press conference today, DenDekker showed security footage from his home, which you can see above, that shows a cyclist deliberately breaking the mirror off the side of his car before riding away, allegedly the only such incident in the area that night. He theorized, though he admitted he lacked much evidence, that it was a response to his proposed anti-cyclist legislation.

All elected officials suffer such incidents as “retaliation for our positions on legislation,” he claimed, going so far as to state that the foundations of democracy were shaken when elected officials were subject to the threat of violence.

And then DenDekker went there. He compared his broken-off mirror to the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and nineteen others this January, and his assailant to a potential Jared Lee Loughner. “I believe this person is capable of doing something so violent, after you see the video,” DenDekker warned.

If his legislation isn’t passed, DenDekker warned, the consequences could be dire: He’s considering not renewing his special State Assembly license plate, reverting to the regular seven character plate next year instead. This will, of course, be a loss to everyone in his district: “We put those license plates on so that when we’re at public events, our constituents can know we’re there.”

We’re just wondering if DenDekker will ditch his parking placard, a form of ID with more tangible benefits, as well.

"Americans love their cars," the media tells us. But public opinion data indicates that auto-dependence has lost its luster. Image: Smashing Magazine

Americans love their cars. A Google search for this statement returns 2.8 times as many hits as “Americans love their pets” and 6.3 times as many as “Americans love their guns.” Yes, there will always be automotive enthusiasts and drivers fond of their cars. But our car culture is both shifting and conflicted: The last time they were surveyed by Pew, Americans saying they saw their cars as “something special” — more than just a means of transportation — had dropped from 43 to 23 percent. Americans may need their cars in our transit-starved and poorly planned landscape, but with mind-numbing traffic and volatile gas prices, the luster is off the chrome.

Teens can’t wait to grab the car keys. The press persists in romanticizing a teen’s first trip to the DMV as the ultimate coming of age ritual. But it’s their middle-aged parents who are more likely to be champing at the bit, fed up with schlepping their kids and steeped in nostalgia about the freedom they felt when they first drove. But this generation is different. Already connected by smartphones and computers, and graduating into a terrible job market, young people are less car-happy than their parents were at the same age. Today’s teens are delaying getting their licenses and purchasing vehicles, and college students are more interested in living in urban centers where they can be less car-dependent.

The economy depends on the auto industry. The popular, business, and political media alike echo the fallacy that a healthy US economy depends on a healthy auto industry. This chorus helped justify the 2009 bailouts of GM and Chrysler. But the auto industry knows that the dependency is reversed: it needs economic growth, tax breaks and subsidies, and vibrant credit markets to sell cars. A nation more reliant on transit and active transportation would be one in which households had lower debt and more discretionary income to spend on housing, leisure, and other products, enriching a wide swath of industries. It would also be a nation, in the next downturn, less hostage to how a single industry’s fate might affect entire communities and supply chains.

The America car industry can return to its former glory. This theme, sounded in Eminem’s paean to the resurrection of Detroit in recent Chrysler ads, is a media favorite. It resounds in stories about car companies that succeed because they “build the cars that consumers want”. The reality is that profitability in an industry so mature, when most families already own multiple vehicles, requires money be made mostly on auto loans and extended warranties. Toyota, which rose to #1 in an era when the press blamed Detroit’s troubles on its having the wrong products, has been making more on car loans than on selling cars. The auto industry’s next heyday, if there is one, will be as a finance business, not a manufacturing or transportation business as it was at its, and the American economy’s, mid-20^th century glory days.

We can’t fix the car system because poor people will suffer. Raise the gas tax? Institute congestion pricing? Eliminate oil subsidies? Limit risky offshore drilling? The news media regularly regurgitates the idea that these policies would make driving more costly and that this would necessarily hurt the working poor most of all. Of course, no group suffers under our current car system more than the poor, who devote a heftier chunk of their budgets to transportation than the rest of us and who are disproportionately victims of auto sales fraud, predatory lending, discriminatory insurance pricing, and racial profiling in traffic violations. Simple solutions like redirecting oil and auto subsidies to transit improvements and exempting the poor from new gas taxes would increase equality of mobility.

These myths about our car-dependent transportation system, and the industries that benefit from it, too often go unquestioned by journalists and opinion leaders. Advocates for transportation equity and for a modern transportation system must challenge these assumptions. Rather than let ourselves be paralyzed by these truisms or lulled into thinking these myths harmless, we must tackle these obstacles standing between us and a better transportation future.

Catherine Lutz, a Brown University anthropologist, and Anne Lutz Fernandez, a former marketer and banker, are the authors of Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on our Lives (Palgrave Macmillan).

Car-free New Yorkers have plenty to worry about these days, what with their crazy notions of personal safety under attack from seemingly all sides. But police in Woodbridge, Virginia are upping the ante by ticketing pedestrians hit by drivers. Via Grist and TBD, photographer Jay Mallin tells the tale: two men, hit on the same day on the same road, both airlifted to the hospital, both cited for “careless interference with traffic.”

This story should be shocking, but it stands to reason that in an environment designed almost exclusively for driving, those outside the main will at best be disrespected or, more likely, treated with contempt. Former Streetsblog Network editor Sarah Goodyear, who wrote about the Mallin video for Grist, recently summed up Tom Vanderbilt’s theories on the topic of cyclists as the hated “other.” The same prejudices, of course, are directed at those on foot. “You can’t cross the street anywhere you want,” said Officer Jonathan L. Perok, spokesman for Prince William County Police. Regardless of whether the nearest crosswalk is anywhere in sight, or if the walk signal button works, or if you are elderly or physically disabled or can’t afford a car.

Mallin also quotes Vanderbilt, who says that to the average traffic engineer, pedestrians are like “little bits of irritating sand gumming up the works.” With this mindset as a given among figures of authority, to be ticketed for “jaywalking” while laid up in a hospital bed is not nearly as surprising as it is unjust.

In fact, the cynical among us might rightly point out that if the two men in Woodbridge had died from their injuries, it would have saved the cops the trouble of issuing any tickets at all.

Dodge Charger: “Man’s Last Stand”

Chrysler stokes the gender wars with this ad suggesting that the American male may seem to have been tamed by the boss and neutered by the wife, but all that the rebel within needs to bust out is a $38K fully loaded Dodge Charger. The road is his last refuge, the one place where he can still be a manly man. He’ll “eat fruit” at home, but he won’t be a fruit in control of the kind of growling, ferocious muscle car that had its heyday back when men last really had it good. (For a rejoinder, click here.)

Toyota Sienna: “Mommy Like”

How does a mom, stressed from commuting to work and shuttling the kids to soccer practice day in and day out, get away from it all? Why, of course, by spending more time in her vehicle! In this commercial for the Sienna minivan, Mommy steals some quality time alone—in the backseat where the kids usually get to have all the fun. The message? Auto dependence’s problems are solved not by driving less but by buying more, including a new car chock-a-block with luxury options to distract us from the aggravation and tedium of the average 18 ½ hours Americans sit in a car each week.

Lexus: “The Next Big Thing”

Billions of dollars of ads touting safety have helped convince Americans that the phrase “safe car” is no oxymoron, notwithstanding the roughly 380,000 crash deaths over the past decade. Here’s a Lexus ad that takes to a dizzying new level the myth that car technology will solve—any minute now—the problems that the car itself has created. Its suggestion that “a real driver in a real car reacting to a real situation without real consequences” is a real possibility fosters a false sense of safety among drivers that encourages dangerous risk-taking. It also deflects the push for meaningful regulation in areas such as roof crush and crash incompatibility.

Hyundai Sonata: “Turboface”

It’s nothing new for a car company to produce a commercial that encourages speeding as an expression of freedom. But this Hyundai Sonata Turbo ad, set not on expansive wilderness roads but on compact city streets, makes the laughably miniscule disclaimer — “Professional driver on a closed course. Do not attempt”—more ironic than ever.

Hyundai Sonata: “Horizontal Bungee Jumping”

Another ad from Hyundai that finds risk-taking amusing, while also playing into the notion that we can protect ourselves from all those other bad drivers out there (in this case, the crazy young ’uns on the road)–if we just buy the right car.

Subaru: “Baby Driver”

A good parent buys the right car to protect their good children from all those bad drivers out there (in this case, the crazy young ‘uns on the road whose parents failed to give them the best car or the best advice). This is just one of the latest and most pathos-laden of ads following a remarkable trend of exploiting kids to sell cars to adults and to peddle car culture to kids. Reality bites back, though: there remains nothing more deadly to teenagers than crashes, and those with their own cars are more likely to die in them than those who share their parents’ vehicles.

Toyota Highlander: “Kid Cave”

Here’s another kid-driven beaut. “Just because you’re a parent doesn’t mean you have to be lame,” needles Nathan in this SUV commercial from a campaign founded on the power of pester marketing. Toyota is no doubt relying on surveys showing that the majority of parents say their children had meaningful input into the decision to buy the last family vehicle, especially their kids around Nathan’s age: 6-8 years old.

Chevrolet: “Chevy Runs Deep”

This one just looks like a car ad. It’s really part of a political campaign to justify the bailouts and delegitimize further industry safety and other regulation. And if you are old enough to remember Reagan’s similar “Morning in America” ads, you’ll recognize stroking people’s sense of national self-worth as a tried-and-true sales technique. Combining wistful nostalgia for the country’s economic glories of the past and bright-eyed optimism for its eco-friendly techno-future, this Chevrolet ad reminds us that our past, present, and future all depend on a healthy US auto industry, even if the cost in dollars and lives seems high.

Our independent spirit makes most Americans reluctant to believe that we are susceptible to the persuasion of advertising. And while we may not be immediately swayed by any one maker’s single pitch to run out and buy a particular model, the marketing formula works, over the long run, to feed a culture based on owning and driving cars. A dollop of family love, a dash of freedom, a heap of faith in progress and America: it’s the well-tested recipe that keeps the American car buyer coming back for more.

Adding a few more lanes should do the trick. Photo of the 405: Atwater Village Newbie

After yesterday’s electoral drubbing, the Obama administration will have to deal with a starkly different Congress when they make their expected push for a multi-year transportation bill early next year. We know that some influential House Republicans, like John Mica, don’t necessarily believe that bigger highways will solve America’s transportation problems. And we know that some pro-transit voices in Washington originate from the right. But no one expects the GOP ascendancy to make transportation reform any easier.

For a taste of the right-wing line against transportation reform, check out the election week issue of the Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard. Inside, editor Fred Barnes (under fire recently for accepting speaking fees from the GOP) mounts an attack on just about every federal transportation policy other than highway spending. There’s nothing really conservative about Barnes’s screed — it could have come straight from the pen of an asphalt industry lobbyist. Wondering what a transportation bill would look like if it were reshaped according to what highway boosters believe should be the “core program”? Read Barnes and find out.

He starts by ridiculing Ray LaHood’s speech at the 2010 National Bike Summit, where the transportation secretary said that Americans “want out of their cars, they want out of congestion, they want to live in livable neighborhoods and livable communities.” Barnes disagrees:

LaHood was half right. People hate traffic congestion. But they want to get out of their cars about as much as they want to get stuck behind a bicyclist who rides at a donkey’s pace before running through red lights and stop signs. What people mainly want is to stay in their cars and have LaHood do something to reduce congestion.

Like finance the construction and maintenance of highways and bridges to facilitate the flow of autos and trucks. That, rather than promoting “livability” or “the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of nonmotorized,” is the job of the Department of Transportation. Always has been.

This is, basically, his entire argument: People just want to “stay in their cars.” We have zero interest in getting around any other way. According to Fred Barnes, we are perfectly content to drive and drive and drive, as long as we don’t have to put up with all the other people driving. If you believe that, then his cheerleading for highway construction makes a lot of sense.

If being inside our cars is what we’re really all about, by all means lets throw more money down the sinkhole of highway expansion. That will guarantee more quality time inside our cars. Then, a few years later, when we’re in our cars but not enjoying it so much because the new lanes are jammed with traffic again, we’ll repeat the whole expensive process.

But if we’d rather spend more time with our families and loved ones — or, you know, doing actual work instead of commuting — maybe we should try a different way of building our transportation system. According to public opinion research by Transportation for America, 57 percent of Americans would like to spend less time in their cars. Even with our highway-centric system, we’re already voting with our feet: These days, Americans are driving less and opting to walk, bike, and ride transit more than we were at the beginning of the decade.

A cursory internet search reveals that, when Barnes says the job of U.S. DOT has always been to build highways and only highways, he’s just making stuff up. The U.S. DOT mission statement does not mention any particular mode. The department’s job is, in fact, to “serve the United States by ensuring a fast, safe, efficient, accessible and convenient transportation system that meets our vital national interests and enhances the quality of life of the American people, today and into the future.”

So there’s some flexibility here. Now, consider that the Pentagon is under the impression that climate change poses a risk to national security. Or that public health experts peg the annual medical costs imposed by traffic and pollution at more than $200 billion. Or the mounting evidence that car dependence begets obesity and higher medical costs. Or that, according to research by CEOs for Cities, travel times are longest in sprawling metro areas, while areas that pursued smart growth and livability strategies have actually reduced commute times. All of which points to the conclusion that at this moment, the U.S. DOT’s job — providing an efficient transportation system that meets our vital national interests and so forth — is indeed to advance livability and stop promoting motorized transport.

Back to the Barnes highway-building argument. Maybe you’re worried that fighting congestion by building more roads that generate more congestion is not a wise way to spend money. But Fred Barnes isn’t. He is, however, highly concerned about spending on rail:

The stimulus included $8 billion for high-speed projects, again not “paid for.” Now the administration is taking “the next step toward realizing its vision for high-speed rail,” the Department of Transportation said in June, handing out “$2.1 billion in grants to continue the development of high-speed intercity passenger rail corridors.”

On top of that, there’s talk in Washington of spending $50 billion more on high-speed trains. Where the funding would come from is anybody’s guess, but LaHood is fully on board. High-speed rail between cities is needed “so people can get out of their cars,” he said in an interview last month with Grist magazine. “They can take a train ride to see Grandma rather than doing it in a car.”

You know what else we haven’t figured out how to pay for? Highways. According to Subsidyscope, gas taxes and other fees have never covered the costs of the highway system. In 2007, fees collected from highway users barely covered half the costs of building and maintaining highways. That year, about $70 billion in highway funding came from other sources. (Even in New York, which, more than any other state, uses fees on driving to support public transit, drivers cover only 65 cents of each dollar spent on highways [PDF].) Meanwhile, the bicycle and pedestrian projects that Barnes moans about received all of $1.2 billion in federal funding in 2009, a record-setting year.

You could say that these massive subsidies for the highway system affect our behavior and induce driving. But Fred Barnes has different ideas about what affects our transportation decisions:

Last year, George Will zinged LaHood as the “Secretary of Behavior Modification” for his fervent opposition to cars. LaHood all but pleaded guilty. Steering funds from highways to bike and walking paths and streetcars, he said, “is a way to coerce people out of their cars.” His word, coerce.

But it’s hardly an answer to traffic congestion. Most people, most of the time, aren’t going to ride a bike to work or walk. They’re going to drive, even in the face of disincentives erected by LaHood.

LaHood will wear “coerce people out of their cars” around his neck forever. Which is ironic, because if anything, the Obama DOT has assiduously avoided erecting any “disincentives” to driving. The gas tax rate has been untouchable under LaHood. A mileage tax has been a non-starter. The last time U.S. DOT encouraged cities to pursue policies like congestion pricing or performance parking, which do affect driving behavior, George W. Bush was president.

Barnes wraps up with the following policy proposal:

The Obama administration, with its priority on ejecting people from their cars and its embrace of an environmental ethic that regards highways as evil, is unlikely to champion a higher gas tax. Any other tax increase you can imagine, yes. This one, no. That means Republicans will have to step up. They can insist the revenues be used solely for highways and bridges. Local governments would then be free to spend on bikeways.

A lobbyist for highway builders could hardly have said it better. The gas tax is theirs — it belongs to highways. This is the mentality that advocates for transportation reform will face off against in the months ahead, when the administration moves forward with its infrastructure push. Every dollar for transit, bicycling and safer streets will be contested. Be prepared.

Nissan's polar bear ad. It will take more than an electric car in driveway to save this species of charismatic megafauna.

For years, Chevy has been trumpeting its yet-to-be-released Volt. Journalists test drove a version of it over eighteen months ago; it’s been a perennial feature at auto shows; this summer President Obama sat for a photo op behind the wheel of a pre-production model. All of this advance marketing seems to have paid off — a Google search for “Chevrolet Volt” returns more than 800,000 hits. Compare that to about 450,000 hits for the Chevy Traverse, a popular vehicle that consumers have been able to buy, own, and drive for several years.

More than 75,000 people are Facebook fans of another phantom: Nissan’s all-electric Leaf, which they can’t test drive, much less own, yet. Drawing on environmentalist sentiment, the Leaf “Polar Bear” commercial has been viewed on YouTube more than 850,000 times. Business journalists argue about which automaker will “win” the electric car race. Pundits like Thomas Friedman fret over which country will.

So, how excited should we be when America’s first widely available electric vehicles finally arrive?

On the one hand, environmentalists, critics of resource wars, and citizens concerned about pollution’s health effects have long called for cars less dependent on oil. While electric cars for the time being must rely on the burning of mountains of coal, at least some of the energy used to power electric vehicles is both clean and domestically produced.

And it is a step forward when the automakers choose to cast the glow of cutting edge techno-genius on their brand with an alternative fuel vehicle, when in the past these companies’ “halo cars” have been high horsepower, high polluting sports cars or SUVs. The redirection of even a portion of the industry’s tens of billions of marketing dollars towards convincing Americans that modernity equals sustainability is something worth celebrating.

The pitfalls of succumbing to EV fever are, unfortunately, numerous.

First, estimates of the portion of the car market that electrics will account for by 2020 range from one percent to six percent. If driving does not increase, that will mean fewer emissions. Still, news story after news story and ad after ad touting electrics can, like any greenwashing, mislead us into believing that their positive impact will be profound. This could relieve what pressure there is on the automakers to offer a more eco-friendly fleet overall, on car owners to drive less, or on policymakers to invest more in transit.

Meanwhile, recent real world tests by automotive journalists suggest that GM’s claims that the Volt could achieve 230 mpg have been exaggerated by a factor of five to eight and that it may be a stretch to call it an electric vehicle. In other words, while Leaf marketing greenwashes the Nissan fleet, Volt marketing has been greenwashing the very car with which it means to compensate for its higher-selling, more gas-guzzling products.

Additionally, even assuming EV market share estimates are low and the shift to electrics will be more dramatic, our nation’s future would remain hitched to Big Oil. We should wonder who would benefit from mainstream consumer adoption of EVs — it may be the selfsame corporations that benefit from our dependence on vehicles powered by internal combustion. Some, like Chevron, already own coal-mining operations, and they can acquire more. In the meantime, coal company CEOs like Massey Energy’s Don Blankenship could make BP’s Tony Heyward seem like not such a terrible guy after all. In the end, the combined power of the energy and auto industries to influence our politicians is unlikely to be shaken.

Most critically, the fervor surrounding electric cars keeps us wedded to car culture and to our current transportation system and the politics that perpetuate it. Reducing the flow of gasoline into our tanks only ameliorates one plague from the Pandora’s box of health and social ills unleashed by our dependence on privately owned vehicles.

Even if we could fill our gas tanks with water from a garden hose, tens of thousands of people will still die and millions will be injured in car crashes each year; American workers, over a lifetime of earning, will still spend hundreds of thousands of dollars owning vehicles, money that could go to satisfy other needs or to retirement; and we would still be more sedentary than is good for us, making it difficult to reverse the obesity crisis or the resulting health and financial costs.

And as Henry Ford Jr. pointed out in a 1973 op-ed recently excerpted in the New York Times [PDF], no matter how much safer or greener we make our cars, their numbers will continue to clog our roadways, elevating our blood pressure and squeezing out productivity and profits. Of course, when he penned this, he didn’t dream we’d reach our current levels of sprawl, car ownership, and miles driven.

Even Rush Limbaugh gets it, kind of. When he attacked tax breaks on the pricey electric cars as a move benefiting only the rich, Limbaugh launched the right missile — just at the wrong target. It is the top dogs in the auto, finance, and insurance industries, not the well-intentioned buyers of these cars, who will make out like bandits. Rush also missed the bigger point about the many billions of our tax dollars that have already gone to bolster the oil and auto industries during Republican and Democratic administrations alike, a drain on our national finances that will continue if we remain so heavily dependent on automobiles.

Each advancement in alternative fuels for cars requires substantial government and household investment that could go toward improving our transportation options. By spending less on new roads, regions and communities have more money for new rails. By spending less on car loan interest, households have more money to ride the train or the bus, or to buy bikes that can be used for shorter trips.

So, pop the cork. Just make ours a split, not a magnum. We’ll toast now to those who’ve been fighting the good fight for alternative fuels and electric vehicles, pragmatists who understand just how deep car culture runs. But we’ll save the big celebration for the wins to come for those who’ve been fighting to loosen the grip of the automakers and energy companies on our tax and transportation policy and get us a better system of mobility for everyone.

It will take more than tech fixes to put an end to catastrophic oil spills and reverse the mounting death toll wrought by motorized traffic on the world's streets.

How else to explain two case studies in modern hubris that now appear to be reaching their denouements: The Deepwater Horizon catastrophe and Toyota’s sudden acceleration debacle.

It is our belief in technology that has for years reassured us, along with oil industry advertising and the promises of the U.S. Minerals Management Service, that drilling offshore -- way offshore -- could be done safely while we kept on refilling our tanks. It has reassured us, along with car company marketing and green lights from the NHTSA, that our cars -- increasingly electronically complex -- would keep our families safe while we put ever more miles on the odometer.

The automobile, not the computer or smart phone, is still the technological icon we venerate with the greatest fervor. The car is the most important, most expensive piece of technology most of us own. It is the technology of the past century, and neither BP nor Toyota would be as large or as powerful without that reverence.

Simply walk into one of our houses of worship, an auto showroom, on any Sunday. Or drop some coins in the basket and enter one of the cathedrals that are the Detroit, New York, or Los Angeles auto shows. Congregants are gathered around the gleaming new vehicles, snapping cell phone pics of spectacular concept cars and passing on the good news.

Of course, the automakers and petroleum companies don’t see this as their first mission, operating as they do on cost containment and profit maximization, not cutting edge technology as an end in itself. But their customer base has been convinced that each time they buy a new car, they are buying the future, secure in the knowledge that the world’s smartest geologists and engineers are helping fuel their experience. Never mind that the new tech they’re spending on is largely media and telecom gadgetry, not the electric or more environmentally sustainable power technologies that headline auto shows or attract tens of thousands of Facebook followers, like the not-yet-for-sale Nissan Leaf. (In fact, less than one percent of all new vehicles bought worldwide over the next five years are estimated to be electric or electric-hybrid).

Our responses to BP and Toyota’s epic failures expose the danger in our faith. Deep anxiety aroused by death and destruction in the Gulf and on the interstates is calmed by the belief that technology will save us -- if not now, soon. After all, the promise of technology is in the better life to come. A failsafe brake override resolves Toyota’s problem, reassuring us that there can be such a thing as a safe car. An engineered capping and better blowout preventers promise to restore confidence in our ability to tap into fossil fuels wherever they may be.

We haven’t quite realized that the faith in technology to save us from the problems that technology has created was sold to us by people with a deep interest in this outcome. Fortunes hinge on our capacity to treat each of these disasters as an isolated “accident,” soon and easily solved. Don’t worry. Go back to driving -- maybe some other vehicle make for a few years, stopping at a gas station under another sign for a while -- but get back to driving into the bright, new and improved car future. Even as we clearly head for the cliff of environmental ruin.

BP and Toyota also share a public perception as “foreign,” to the good fortune of American multinationals like ExxonMobil and Ford. BP may have recently made poorer choices than other oil companies, but serious threats to our way of life are endemic to the practice of drilling (especially in the peak-oil period, as hydrocarbons become increasingly hard to access, and iffy techno-fixes are developed to get us to the dwindling supplies). Toyota may have produced too many cars too fast, but 1.2 million people are killed globally each year in car crashes, a death toll that’s unlikely to be affected by whether vehicles are fueled by gas, electricity, or hydrogen.

Simply put, technological progress alone is not a strategy for a sustainable future. The capping of the Deepwater Horizon and the imminent passage of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act will leave intact the technological faith that led to the initial devastation. America is in dire need of behavioral and political change in areas ranging from public leadership to corporate responsibility to the individual choice to drive less. Only a hard turn can avert the head-on collision between America’s love of technology and our quality of life.

Anne Lutz Fernandez, a former marketer and banker, and Catherine Lutz, an anthropologist at the Watson Institute at Brown University, are the authors of Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on our Lives (Palgrave Macmillan).

Many of the home finance industry's unethical practices were mirrored by the nation's auto dealers, but the regulatory response has left the car loan market untouched.

More egregiously, their business innovations -- not advertised as such, of course -- include such activities as “power-booking” (reporting to lenders that a car is equipped with non-existent options, thereby raising the amount of the loan) and “yo-yo financing” (a form of bait and switch, in which car buyers leave a down payment or trade in their car, drive off the lot, and then are falsely told that the financing "fell through" and that they have to pay a higher interest rate, often under threat of repossession or arrest).

The list goes on. Dealers regularly get kickbacks and markups from other lenders. Car loans have been packaged and dangerously securitized, just like home mortgages. Dealers encouraged many car buyers to use home equity loans to make their purchases, obliterating whatever cushion they had when home prices plummeted. It’s a jungle on the lot for consumers, especially the poor and those with poor credit.

In a recent New Yorker article, James Surowiecki seeks to explain how the auto dealer exemption could have happened when it is so opposed to the public interest, and when powerful actors like Citibank and J. P. Morgan did not escape regulation. He sees it as mostly a public relations coup, with the dealers presenting themselves as Main Street plain folks, virtually victims of the financial system themselves. They also played up the number of jobs dealerships provide in communities across the nation (how those jobs would dry up if dealers had to make an honest living was not made clear).

But what wasn’t noted is the power of the car dealers over the press itself.

The auto industry is the single largest advertiser in America’s newspapers, magazines, and television stations. It is the economic backbone of those media, and this helps explain the minimalist coverage, and the general lack of backbone in coverage, of this issue as the bill worked its way through Congress. Over the past several months, the loophole opened, then seemed to close, and then opened again. The media could have been educating the public on what the automotive loophole will cost them, day in and day out. Instead, they kept their focus on other sources and forms of lending abuses.

And when dealers are called “small businesspeople,” that may suggest they are in the same boat with the local embroidery shop owner or restaurateur, but dealers are often the largest business in a community, and many are part of large chains, like AutoNation. The auto dealer is a little guy like the beachfront mansions of Long Island are cottages, but PR-produced confusion has worked to the dealers’ advantage.

It isn’t just the financial reform bill that has left the real little guy, the car buyer, exposed to the avarice of auto dealers. Americans are at risk of ending up indentured to their car purchases because they can't escape from the car system itself. While the car is often presented as a vehicle of opportunity, getting people to work and new life chances, in reality it locks people into a costly lifestyle, creating more inequality in America than almost anything else besides access to quality education. While that’s a topic for another post, it is a key reason why transit and bikeable, walkable communities are so desperately needed -- to create a loophole car dealers can’t drive through.

Catherine Lutz, an anthropologist at the Watson Institute at Brown University, and Anne Lutz Fernandez, a former marketer and banker, are the authors of Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on our Lives (Palgrave Macmillan).

Jon Stewart fired one of his more brilliant salvos last night, synthesizing 40 years of political posturing around energy independence and America's addiction to foreign oil in just under eight minutes of satire. Drawing on this week's speech from President Obama, who urged a vague new energy future, Stewart skewered the latest White House rhetoric with clips from the past seven presidents, dating to Nixon, as they also pledged to get us off oil.

As he so often does, Stewart offers purer critique of the issue with a few short montages than the whole of the punditocracy blabbering on in other media.

Of course, Obama's call to arms is virtually identical to one given by George W. Bush in 2006, and Clinton in 2000, Pappy Bush in 1988 and on down the line to 1974, when Nixon exclaimed, "We will break the back of the energy crisis. We will lay the foundation for our future capacity to meet America's energy needs from America's own resources."

All the presidents also lay out technology fixes, alternative fuels (love Carter's "gasahol"), and aggressive timelines that become somewhat less aggressive with each successive president.

American presidents have talked the energy independence talk for four decades now, but we continue to drive the drive without changing our ways. I don't know if we will ever elect to move away from fossil fuels affirmatively, or if we will be forced to innovate when the miracle of oil energy dries up or destroys the ecosystems we love and need, but I find it hard to be optimistic.

GMAC Insurance put 20 questions before some 5,000 licensed drivers from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. CNN/Money reports that the average score was 76.2 percent, reflecting a slight dip from 2009. That's apparently the good news. Meanwhile:

Nearly three out of four couldn't identify safe following distances and some 85% incorrectly responded to questions about what to do when approaching a steady yellow light. This signals that licensed drivers lack knowledge of fundamental road rules, GMAC Insurance said.

One in four drivers admitted to "talking on a cell phone, eating, or adjusting their radios or iPods" while driving, and five percent said they text from behind the wheel -- a "surprisingly low" number that probably says more about successful social stigmatizing than actual habits. 

On average, Midwestern drivers scored highest on the test, with Northeasterners faring the worst. According to the survey, drivers in Kansas are the most informed, while the most ignorant are in New Jersey -- ranking just two spots below New York license-holders.

As a licensed driver who hasn't taken a written test since age 16, I can't help wondering how well I would do. If you're curious yourself, you can take the test here.

Sometimes it takes an outsider's perspective to see things clearly. So what would an extra-terrestrial think of humankind's dependence on fossil fuels? In light of the devastation being unleashed off the shores of the Gulf states, cartoonist and recent Pulitzer recipient Mark Fiore files this brilliant summation of the absurdly self-destructive lengths we earthlings go to for our "lizard squeezins."

The curators make a convincing case. Even if New York never let itself be quite as dominated by the car as other American cities, much of the intellectual firepower that created car culture originated here. New York's "great mistake" of surrendering to the automobile reverberated across the country, making an outsize impact on our shared understanding of how to get around. While the exhibit is sponsored by the Greater New York Automobile Dealers Association, it provides a value-neutral assessment and closes with a hint that, perhaps, a turn toward livable streets in New York could similarly reshape the nation. 

I put together this photo essay based on the exhibit to give a sense of how New York City has been an ideological staging ground for car companies, car advertisers, and car-centric planners. (Some of the images here are not the same as those on display at MCNY.)

The showroom on the ground floor of the Chrysler Building, in the 1930s. Image: skyscrapercity.com.

The exhibit's most effective pieces are those which allow New Yorkers to see familiar places and objects in a new light. The iconic spire of the Chrysler Building may still catch our eye, but how often do we think about its name, much less the fact that the ground floor was once the brand's flagship showroom?

A rendering of the new Mercedes-Benz dealership slated for 11th Ave. and 53rd St. The design will become the template for dealerships across the country: Image: e-architect.

Since New York remains the cultural capital of the country, car companies continue to flock here to burnish their image. In 1951, the Museum of Modern Art became the first museum in the world to display automobiles as art. Frank Lloyd Wright designed a Jaguar dealership for New York City with a spiral center explicitly echoing his Guggenheim Museum. Today, high-design showrooms continue to pop up in chic Manhattan neighborhoods as companies attempt to brand their cars as personal identities rather than products. 

This Volkswagen ad, by NYC firm Doyle Dane Bernbach, was voted the top advertising campaign of all time by Advertising Age magazine. Image: Ad Age.

New York City firms have played a huge role pitching cars to the rest of the nation. Madison Avenue advertisers built the image of the automobile, sending car culture across the country and the world. 

The Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair, held in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. Futurama was sponsored by General Motors and proved one of the most influential pieces of the fair. Image: morrischia.com

The 1964 World's Fair -- less high modern and more Las Vegas kitsch -- featured a tire ferris wheel, a Dodge-sponsored rocket ship, and a giant car. An updated Futurama, not shown here, was again sponsored by General Motors and was the most well-attended exhibit at the Fair. Image courtesy of the Queens Museum of Art, via the Museum of the City of New York.

New York was where the vision for a national car-based infrastructure first took root. At the World's Fairs of 1939 and 1964, Americans flocked to see displays of megalithic towers connected by super-highways to the horizon: Le Corbusier and Robert Moses meet the Jetsons. 

New York's 1909 traffic code, on display at MCNY. Image: Noah Kazis.

New York has played a pivotal role in almost every step of the technical development of our car-dependent transportation system. The first multiple-lane, limited-access roads (a.k.a. highways)? The Bronx River Parkway and the Long Island Motor Parkway. The first traffic code in the world? William Phelps Eno's 1903 code, written for New York City. 

"Cars, Culture and the City" challenges our popular understanding of the automobile. It's not that we don't know about each of these examples of New York City's history with the automobile, but our imaginations still drift westward when asked to place car culture's origins. This exhibit -- well worth a trip -- forcefully argues that the story begins in New York. 

And how does it end? Well, the exhibit closes by showing that what's coming out of New York City these days isn't quite car culture:

In addition to Madison Avenue car commercials, New York City is now sending Streetfilms to the rest of the country. This one and four others were playing on a loop. Next to them was a glass case containing a copy of PlaNYC. If New York's livable streets advocates shape the national transportation discussion half as much as their auto-centric predecessors did, America could look very different a generation from now. 

There's only one Concrete, WA, but concrete and asphalt are the welcome mats for towns across America. Image: Gord McKenna/Flickr.

That's why this letter we received from two British tourists is so refreshing. It's both a stark admonishment of how much we've given up for the car, sometimes barely noticing it, and a heartening reminder that what often seems normal to us need not be: 

We are visitors to the States from England. Our main reason for coming was to visit friends, however upon researching into transport options we were horrified to discover that the only viable option to get from NY to LA via many small towns was by car. Many of our friends have tried to justify this saying that 'America is simply too big to have public transport'. To us, this is purely INSANE. Surely a huge country should offer the best public transport in the world! Bullet trains could cover the driving distances in no time.

We are feeling quite ashamed of ourselves as we write this but inevitably we did end up driving across America. We have found the American people to be welcoming and friendly and the landscape beautiful but we have not yet seen a single 'town' in the US that we, as Europeans would class as a town. I would class them more as motorway service stations. Buildings designed for cars. People waiting in line for a drive through. People competing for car parking spaces at gyms! These are not communities as we would recognise - market squares, parks, rivers, cafes, stations, public art, gardens etc. 'Towns' are simply not towns! We feel saddened that many Americans are not afforded the community lifestyle that we enjoy in Europe.

Our purpose of writing is not to attack your country and we do apologise if we have offended. I am writing to urge you, beg with you, plead with you to keep up the fantastic work that you are doing. Despite the wonderful time that we have had in the US I simply cannot wait to get home in order to walk from my flat and pick up a newspaper and a pint of milk, on my journey I shall say hello to everyone I meet, take note of the weather and breathe some fresh air.

The days are numbered for the military vehicle that carmakers turned into the bane of pedestrians, cyclists and planet Earth. GM has announced plans to wind down Hummer production after a deal to sell the brand to a Chinese manufacturer fell apart. According to the Times, the Chinese government wanted no part of Hummer because it is "trying to put a new emphasis on limiting China’s dependence on imported oil and protecting the environment."

A Hummer H2 weighs in at more than 6,600 pounds, measuring about 17 feet long by 6.75 feet wide. Anyone with a plain old driver's license can pilot one on crowded city streets. Evidence suggests that laws should be amended to protect the public from such a risk. Now, at least, there will gradually be fewer and fewer chances to wield these civilian tanks where they don't belong.

Video of Arnold testing out the first civilian Hummer via complex.com.

(Photo: brainlink.org)

The sample bill text [PDF] was prepared by the U.S. DOT's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which invited road safety groups to join auto industry representatives, the AAA, and officials from state DOTs to help craft consensus language.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood called the legislation in a statement "another powerful tool in our arsenal to help the states combat this serious threat” of texting while driving in a statement that accompanied the sample text -- which carves out an exemption from any fines or penalties for drivers who (emphasis mine):

Receiv[e] messages related to the operation or navigation of a motor vehicle; safety-related information including emergency, traffic, or weather alerts; data used primarily by the motor vehicle; or radio.

States that adopt the Obama administration's sample language, then, would allow drivers to continue getting traffic tweets and texts from their local DOTs, a practice dubbed "mixed messages" by the Associated Press in a September investigation.

"It's not a perfect bill, but it was something that everybody in the group felt they could put their name on it and say, 'this is a good start,'" Judith Lee Stone, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, said in an interview, adding that the exemption for drivers getting traffic and weather alerts "may have just slipped by us."

If the Advocates were to write their own version of sample distracted driving legislation, Stone said, "we probably wouldn't include" the exemption. But she noted that the group has no plans to draft its own language for states working on texting bans.

The U.S. DOT noted in its release today that the sample bill "reflects current circumstances and state of knowledge, but may be revised in the future to incorporate new research findings, address evolving technologies, or to harmonize with other legislation."

A research team from the University of Utah reported in December that reading incoming text messages had a more deleterious effect on drivers' braking response times than writing texts.

A self-described "leading advocacy group for the automobile industry on a range of public policy issues," the purpose of the Alliance seems mostly to sell the public on how keen carmakers are on using technology to advance the cause of environmental stewardship (though the mythological "green" car of the future, whatever it is, remains tantalizingly out of reach). The group's presence on Kos makes the usual MSM buy look subtle.

So what's the angle here? Are car manufacturers afraid of losing the lefty base? Aren't car-ad bereft Free Republic readers just as interested in innovations like soy seating foam?