War on Cars

Road transport developed in relative freedom, outside the control of a safety culture that put the preservation of life beyond all other values.

This sets it apart from other modes of transport. Passengers travelling by train, boat or plane have high expectations of safety. Of course, accidents do occur, but stringent protocols mean these are relatively rare events. Even for dangerous jobs like construction work or oil drilling, safety is of paramount value. Workers are kept safe by a mix of training, protocols and equipment, planned by experts in recognition of the risky nature of the work.

But from a very early point in the development of the motor car, the industry decided to focus the attention of lawmakers away from the inherent dangerousness of cars to the actions of the person behind the wheel.

The car industry wants you to blame the lack of safety on individual driver behavior and not on the design of roads, the design of cars, or anything else. Every time you blame some bad driver, you are buying into their narrative. The true fault is the fossil fuel companies, auto manufacturers, and your government. The protocols and regulations surrounding car usage, should be just as stringent as those around trains, planes, and all the other big dangerous forms of transportation. Anyone who drives a motor vehicle should be doing it as seriously as a commercial airline pilots are supposed to.

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This is what I’m talking about.

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Making unnecessary loud noises is violence, and in a just society it would be treated as such. Making loud noises in dense urban environments causes a great deal of harm to hundreds, or even thousands of people, and we should treat it with a level of seriousness relative to the harm caused.

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LTNs (low traffic networks) improved my sleep and brought birds back to my area.

If we also changed our streets lights back to yellow light, this would also reduce harm to local wildlife.

Bird songs has been said to be therapeutic. I don’t have papers to cite, but it’s not hard to imagine hearing birds in the morning instead of mini earthquakes from large trucks passing by would improve your mental health.

I received an interesting card in my mailbox today about a class-action lawsuit against two major gas manufacturers.


If you feel you meet the conditions for the lawsuit, you can join in here.

It’s pretty rare that I see some new evidence to support the war on cars.

From this new book:

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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214367X24002175

For instance, we find that, in a typical week, relying on a car for more than 50 percent of the time for out-of-home activities is associated with a decrease in life satisfaction.

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More people died in S.F. from traffic crashes than homicides in 2024

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/more-people-died-sf-crashes-homicides-19998860.php

“Tumlin said nearly every municipality is struggling to bring down road fatalities. But while local officials and traffic engineers “know exactly what is needed” to prevent deaths on city streets, Tumlin said they have largely failed to find partners among regulators and manufacturers.”

God forbid we calm or slow car traffic by one millisecond to save lives.

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(Fuck a Paywall)

More people died in S.F. from traffic crashes than homicides in 2024

Nora Mishanec, Danielle Echeverria

9–11 minutes


A large memorial was erected on the corner of Ulloa Street and Lennox Way in the West Portal neighborhood of San Francisco, where a family of four was killed in March when an SUV crashed into a bus stop as they waited for a bus to go to the zoo.

Jessica Christian/The Chronicle

For the first time in recent history, San Francisco recorded more traffic fatalities than homicides in 2024, a stunning sign that the city has failed to make its streets safer despite years of efforts.

Forty-one people were killed in San Francisco traffic this year, the worst on record since 2007. Among the victims were a family of four — a Portuguese mother, a Brazilian father and their two young children — whose deaths at a West Portal bus stop in March transfixed the city and briefly galvanized efforts to improve pedestrian safety.

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By contrast, the city in 2024 recorded the lowest number of homicides since 1960, with police investigating 34 murders this year. The decline was part of a national trend that saw homicides fall to pre-pandemic levels in most major U.S. cities. But the drop was unusually pronounced in San Francisco, where experts attributed the decline in part to an aging population and less social upheaval following the pandemic.

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Meanwhile, traffic fatalities remain at what U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg called “crisis levels” in a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report earlier this year. Policy groups have blamed the trend in part on bigger, heavier vehicles that better protect passengers but pose a far greater danger to pedestrians and bicyclists than smaller cars.

“It’s been an absolutely devastating year,” said San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Transportation Planner Shannon Hake. “We are seeing more crashes related to very large vehicles, very fast vehicles.”

One person was killed in a vehicle accident on Crossover Drive near 19th Avenue in San Francisco in the afternoon on Christmas Day.

Courtesy of Ben Yip

A driver killed in a fiery Christmas Day crash near Golden Gate Park and a pedestrian killed Friday on the Great Highway became the latest fatalities in a deadly year that highlighted just how far the city must go to achieve its goal of eliminating traffic deaths. While 2024 illustrated limits of street engineering in the face of reckless and distracted driving, transportation officials are optimistic that speed cameras and greater traffic enforcement will improve safety in the coming year.

Frustration with the lack of progress tackling traffic deaths bubbled to the surface at a recent San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency board meeting, where city employees and public commenters expressed disappointment with the city’s unending streak of pedestrian fatalities.

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“How many more people need to die so that I can walk safely across the street with my three young children?” said René Picazo, an Ashbury Heights resident.

Small changes, halting progress

Despite more than a decade of investment, the city has struggled to make progress toward reducing traffic fatalities, with recent years seeing a steady stream of heartbreaking and high-profile crashes.

Traffic is seen moving along King Street next to a sign on Fourth Street alerting pedestrians to wait for the pedestrian signal at a Muni stop in the middle of Fourth Street.

Lea Suzuki/The Chronicle

More than half of San Francisco’s traffic fatalities this year were pedestrians. The victims included two 94-year-old men who were killed within days of each other in the Richmond District.

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More Reading

“We know how to eliminate traffic deaths, but we need state and federal governments to work with us, and we need San Francisco leadership to be collaborating as well,” SFMTA Director Jeffrey Tumlin told the Chronicle in an interview.

Tumlin said nearly every municipality is struggling to bring down road fatalities. But while local officials and traffic engineers “know exactly what is needed” to prevent deaths on city streets, Tumlin said they have largely failed to find partners among regulators and manufacturers.

“Safety regulations for motor vehicles are mostly designed to protect vehicle occupants rather than people outside the vehicle,” he said.

In a year-end report, SFMTA said its “quick-build” projects had shown promise, reducing car crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists by an estimated 32% in areas where the projects were implemented. But, agency analysts noted, the small-scale interventions were not enough to combat what they said was a citywide — and nationwide — increase in reckless driving, a drastic drop in traffic enforcement and the rise of heavier cars.

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“It feels like we are treading water,” said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who has advocated to significantly ramp up traffic enforcement, which plummeted during the pandemic. “Quick-build investments seem like a big deal, as do a lot of other things we’ve done over the past 10 years, and yet this is a historically bad year for crashes and fatalities.”

Some motorists believe pedestrians must take more responsibility, pointing to cases like that of the 64-year-old man fatally struck while lying down in a Mission District street in November. Street safety advocates disagree, noting that even small interventions like high-visibility paint, metal signs and plastic posts have proved effective at guiding traffic and protecting pedestrians and bikers. Experts say dangerous driving is due to a combination of cellphone distractions, anxious drivers and ride-sharing vehicles that stop and start frequently.

A study by the Department of Public Health’s Vision Zero team found that about 170 pedestrians suffer severe injuries on San Francisco streets each year on average. The number of pedestrians treated for severe or critical injuries at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital has fallen slightly in recent years, though researchers noted that could be due to a drop in foot traffic since the start of the pandemic.

Overall, San Francisco has struggled to prove that millions of dollars in street safety investments can provide results, even as transportation officials argue that the city is doing better than its peers.

A shocking crash

Across San Francisco, outrage over road deaths coincided with backlash over attempts to improve street safety.

No neighborhood was more emblematic of that contradiction than West Portal, where an elderly driver mowed down a couple with their two small children while they awaited a bus to the San Francisco Zoo.

A large memorial in West Portal honored Matilde Moncada Ramos Pinto, 38, her husband, Diego Cardoso de Oliveira, 40, and their sons, 3-month-old Cauê and 2-year-old Joaquim, who were killed as they waited for a bus to go to the zoo.

Jessica Christian/The Chronicle

In the aftermath of the crash, neighborhood residents were bitterly divided over plans to dramatically redesign streets near the site of the tragedy. Opponents of the plan argued that the area’s street design was unrelated to the high-speed collision, in which the driver told investigators that she sped down the wrong side of the road after mixing up the brake and gas pedals.

West Portal resident Johanna Dimayuga told the Chronicle that she was inside her home when she heard a loud crash followed by a baby’s screams. She looked out her window and saw the chaotic aftermath of the collision: a destroyed white SUV leaking fluids, an overturned stroller and victims blasted in different directions by the force of the crash.

Paramedics rendered aid, but within days all four had died in what many residents considered one of the most shocking and senseless crashes in recent memory.

Dimayuga placed candles at the crash site. Soon, other people arrived with flowers. By day’s end, the impromptu memorial had overtaken the large patch of grass in front of the library, where it remained for weeks. Mourners arrived with photographs of the couple, who moved to San Francisco during the pandemic.

But despite the tragedy, San Francisco transportation officials appeared unable to build widespread public support for street safety projects amid backlash from drivers who say the city is waging a war on cars.

Malena Mackey Cabada, a campaign associate with the advocacy group Walk San Francisco, called 2024 “a horrible year for traffic-related fatalities” and urged city officials to remain committed to Vision Zero, its 11-year-old plan to eliminate roadway deaths by slowing traffic and redesigning intersections to maximize pedestrian safety.

“Zero is still the right number,” she said.

Dec 30, 2024

Breaking & Enterprise Reporter

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And now we have a car used (yet again) in a terror attack.

Cars are a pox on the Earth.

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Cars and guns.
Two of the three types of violence in almost every action movie—sexual violence being the third.
Two of the things that kill people the most, directly or indirectly.
The two things that right wing people have fetishized and prioritized since their invention.
Get rid of guns and cars, and that will get us most of the way towards saving society.

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https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/belgrade-to-launch-free-public-transport-for-all-residents-starting-january-1/ar-AA1wb8RL

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Extreme and consistently enforced fines in Vietnam are actually working to improve traffic safety.

I still don’t believe this is the right solution in the US. Mainly because our laws require a police interaction in order to give out most tickets. And then people to go traffic court and they fight it. And the fines can never be truly extreme enough to get people to behave.

The most interesting thing is that their alcohol sales went down a whole bunch because of the fines for drunk driving.

A huge thing in Philly (and I’m sure its true in NYC) is toll/red light camera/speed camera evaders using altered plates/plate covers, fake temp plates to essentially evade any repercussions for their driving. I feel like at least at that level we could do automatic pull over and tow impound and license suspension. Its just so egregious at this point.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. The penalty we need is to smash cars on site and on sight.

A car has no rights. If there is a car on a public street, parked or otherwise, and the car is not properly registered, is not street-legal, etc. Then the car should just be confiscated and demolished. No recourse. No hesitation. It just happens. Tow trucks roaming 24/7 just removing any unacceptable vehicles from the road.

If someone tries to drive away, well, they have to stop somewhere sometime. It won’t take much detective work to figure out where they live. Take the car and smash it while they sleep. If it’s in a garage, just camp and wait for them to come out. If they never come out, good.

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That plan definitely wouldn’t be selectively enforced against minorities and the poor in rural areas, preventing them from getting to work to pay their bills.

“Oh, you’re a week late getting your car registered because you couldn’t take a day off? Well then let’s ruin your ability to earn a paycheck at all.”

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Yes, this is why I don’t think the kind of enforcement they are doing in Vietnam will really work here. Creating more police encounters just leads to exactly that sort of trouble.

The reason I think the smashing will work is because smashing a “cool” car is way more fun than smashing a beater. They may actually prioritize going after the actual worst offenders.

Exactly. Giving towing companies basically carte blanche to tow any car that is in violation is a profoundly stupid idea because it incentivizes them to tow as many cars as possible, regardless of reason.

Your car registration expires in July? You would have towers driving around at midnight on June 30th looking for cars. Forgot to renew your emissions or couldn’t take off work? Let’s destroy your entire car and prevent you from driving around entirely. This is an absolutely terrible idea.

Like you wrote, they would target the poor and the most minor of infractions. Having your car completely totaled or destroyed because you’re late on your registration or car emissions is just a staggeringly bad idea.

Here in Virginia, we’ve tried to pass many laws against “predatory towing,” where your car can be towed for even the slightest violation and you end up paying hundreds of dollars to get it back. It’s a huge problem and if you gave towing companies free reign to just tow and confiscate any car that was in violation, it would incentivize them to go crazy and encourage even worse behavior on the part of the towers.

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