Streetsblog New York City

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.

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.

Another day, another news story, another media outlet wielding an old saw like this one: High gas prices are a political problem for the president because Americans “love their cars.” American car culture, fed by everything from our sprawled-out landscape to a daily bombardment of car ads, is also kept alive by journalists’ use of a set of hackneyed narratives. Beyond clichés, these storylines represent a collection of myths that shore up an unhealthy, unequal, and ultimately unsustainable car system.

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.

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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.

Car sales are up, auto shows are packing them in, and the GM IPO was oversubscribed, but there may be no surer indicator of the auto industry’s recovery than the renewed avalanche of car ads rumbling across every medium. And there’s no better way to get a glimpse of what a born-again car culture might look like than to stay on the couch for a spell, un-mute the TV, and watch—that’s right, on purpose—a sample of 2010’s ads selling us our car-centric way of life. Here are some of the year’s most egregious attempts to get us into the dealership by conflating car ownership with American values.

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.

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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.

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Over the next few months, electric cars will start rolling out of showrooms and onto American roads. They’ve been a long time coming.

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.

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Last Christmas, an Oregon couple driving with their baby in the backseat followed erroneous GPS instructions and got stranded on wilderness roads in a Cascades snowstorm. Twelve hours later, they had given up hope and taped a farewell video. While a rescue party fortunately was able to save them, they no doubt wished they hadn’t allowed their belief in modern electronics to override their own clear eyes and good instincts.

Their misplaced faith is hardly exceptional. If there is one true religion in the United States, it worships at the altar of Technology. Christian or Jew, Muslim or atheist, we accept this doctrine: that technology provides the main path to improving our lives and that if it occasionally fails, even catastrophically, all it will take is another technology to make everything better.

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.

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The fat lady hasn’t sung yet, but the country’s auto dealers have been exempted from the financial reform bill now in its final stage in Congress. Given that the purpose of the bill is to protect Americans from harmful manipulation by the people selling them financial products, this is a pretty stunning development. The nation’s auto dealers either provide or broker most of the $850 billion worth of currently outstanding car loans across America. That’s a pile of financial product: It’s more than household credit card debt and second only to home mortgages.

Every year, 50 million people buy a car, and 94 percent of those sales are loan-financed, to an average tune of over $28,000 for a new vehicle. At both new and used lots, a good number of those loans involve unethical and fraudulent practices. Like the mortgage industry, dealers have pushed credit and pricey products on people who couldn’t afford them, and then fudged paperwork to make it appear they could. They offered "zero interest and no money down" and extended loan terms from what was until recently an average of three or four years to seven and even eight years, leaving huge numbers of car owners "upside-down" on their loans -- which is to say, owing more than their car is worth.

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.

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The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
An Energy-Independent Future
www.thedailyshow.com

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.

With the summer "driving season" almost upon us, a startling new survey finds that about 20 percent of American motorists -- close to 38 million people -- don't know enough to pass a written driving test.

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.