In 2014, I was working in a small office in St. Charles when I mentioned to some co-workers that I was attending a St. Louis Cardinals game that night. They expressed concern about the dangers of me driving from my South County apartment to the downtown Busch Stadium, concerns which spiraled out of control when I told them I was only going to drive as far as a MetroLink park-and-ride and then take the city’s rapid transit system to the game. A few years later, I was flying to San Diego and some co-workers (same office, different co-workers) expressed concern about the dangers of air travel.
In both situations, I was unfazed by this concern and calmly noted empirical facts: respectively, that my daily commute (30 miles each way) is far more dangerous than riding MetroLink, a system with sporadic violence but which is far less frequent than injurious car accidents, and that statistically, I was more likely to be killed in a car accident on the way to the airport than killed in a plane crash. In neither case were the numbers themselves questioned on a literal level, but car accidents were treated as an inevitable cost of living. Citing car accident data would be like countering the dangers of smoking cigarettes by observing that more people die of heart disease—yes, it’s true, but it’s not like the threat of lung cancer somehow makes one invincible against the threat of a heart attack.
Yesterday, on a stretch of road so near my house that I occasionally walk my dog through it, a car barreling down the street at an estimated 100 miles per hour flew into a house, killing its driver and narrowly avoiding hitting a toddler inside the house. I do not know the context for the accident, nor do I care to speculate, nor do I care to even indict the departed other than to note that for the family merely existing inside its house, the actions of an outside force were nearly a death sentence.
In a historical context, while motor vehicle fatalities have increased somewhat over the last few years, the rates of death are nowhere near the all-time highs—modern vehicles are equipped with improved safety features and now-standard equipment like seat belts were once uncommon. But the motor vehicle fatality rate is still roughly three times higher than it is in Europe, and there is no reason to believe that it should start to decline any time soon. Vehicles have exploded in size—pickup trucks, for instance, once prioritized bed space (you know, the practical reason for one to own a pickup truck in the first place) and now seem to prioritize height, cab size, and overall vehicular mass. Despite the increased presence of convenient ride-sharing programs, impaired driving remains a major concern, including the somewhat paradoxical reality that legal marijuana (which is mostly harmless) leads to illegal impaired driving (sensory deprivation being the biggest physical drawback of marijuana). Infrastructure is literally crumbling—partially because of general austerity and partially because of the toll large vehicles take on them, roads are increasingly littered with potholes. And of course, there are the cell phones—the dangers of texting and driving, which is illegal in most states (but not Missouri!) but relatively difficult to enforce create major distractions in increasingly large vehicles on increasingly dangerous roads. And while the deaths of drivers are not increasing exponentially, the dangers for pedestrians are.
In 2021, 7,388 pedestrians were killed in road traffic accidents. In Germany (about one-fourth the population), that total was 344, and that number nearly slashed in half from 2011, whereas in the United States, the number nearly doubled. The United States has not treated this as a serious problem—in the St. Louis area, local County Council doofus Ernie Trakas has proposed a ban on people standing in the streets, an idea which not only targets the homeless but also has clearly chosen the side that cars have won in the battle against pedestrians so pedestrians must go home.
Urbanism, for me, is a little bit like religious skepticism—I broadly agree with the conclusions of those who practice it, but man can they ever be excruciatingly annoying in trying to convey their messages. Those who are the loudest about boosting public transportation often make arguments tinged in classism, willfully blind to the fact that those who have the most pressing need for cars tend to live further away from their jobs, not to mention the fact that those in rural areas, for whom public transportation is almost never an option, usually make less money than their urban or suburban counterparts. So I want to be clear about something—personal automobiles are never going away entirely, nor do I think should they. There are some major urban areas where one can easily live without a car or without even using Uber or a taxi, but for most people, this is not a realistic option. I live in an inner suburb of St. Louis, and it would take me 17 minutes to drive from my house to Busch Stadium, and it would take me over four times as long using exclusively public transportation and my own two feet. Using only non-gas-powered vehicles (walking and MetroLink), it would take me two hours and 45 minutes. And I’m not exactly in the sticks—in most counties in America, there isn’t bus service, much less light rail. Some urbanists live in delusion, strident in their belief that willpower is the only reason that every corner of the United States does not have access to New York City Subway-quality mass transit. I choose to support improvement.
Last year, I visited New York for the first and hopefully not last time, and it was a revelation just how efficient and convenient the New York City Subway was. My wife and I bought week-long passes on our first day in the city and effortlessly traversed the city. From our South Manhattan hotel, we floated wherever we wanted in the city. We headed up to the Bronx while playing with our phones almost the entire trip. We got drunk at a bar in Brooklyn and got to our beds with minimal effort. We crossed New Jersey off our states-to-visit list for a few extra bucks on an every-bit-as-convenient PATH train. And on the two occasions in which we found ourselves in an automobile—taxis to and from LaGuardia Airport (to be fair, how do you go to New York and not take a taxi; you don’t know that it definitely isn’t the Cash Cab)—I found the experience extremely stressful, and that was as a passenger with a fully qualified driver behind the steering wheel. A majority of New Yorkers do not own a car for a reason—a robust, publicly-funded transit system means that, unlike in most of the country (including St. Louis, which has a decent but limited system), driving is the less convenient option.
The residual effects of NYCS are plentiful. Just consider the last few months of weather news—extreme heat mixed with extreme, less predictable thunderstorms and terrible air quality. This is likely only to get worse as climate change continues to intensify. Meanwhile, the New York City Subway is electrically powered—far better for air quality than fossil fuels. In a country where obesity and generally unhealthy personal behavior is increasing, paradoxically while fitness industries are growing, even taking the subway incentivizes a fair amount of walking, certainly more than a world where businesses tend to have private parking lots. I ate and drank to my heart’s content and if anything lost some weight on the trip because my total step counts for the day were exploding—obviously, some of this can be attributed to general vacation browsing, but it’s safe to say that the average New Yorker walks quite a bit more on their daily commute than I do, where I walk to my car, drive to my office, and then walk from the parking lot to my desk (my only saving grace in this is that I, office worker, drive a Prius C and not a Silverado). Like I said earlier, I drank a bunch and I didn’t have to worry about driving home, and even if you aren’t a drinker and this itself doesn’t do much for you, riding a train also means you can text your friends or surf the internet while you travel, things you cannot do safely while driving an automobile. Also, consider the catharsis of not having to worry about spending money on car maintenance, car payments, or gasoline—the cost of monthly transit passes pale in comparison.
The biggest safety concern with increasingly gaudy trucks on the roads is not the trucks themselves (though they are a safety concern) but the ripple effect of drivers feeling that they need to get larger cars so that they will not be run off the road. As impractical as enormous pickup trucks are, the status quo seems to be forcing smaller cars instead into obsolescence. The political solution has largely been to widen lanes and restructure roads to accommodate larger vehicles, but the vehicles just keep getting larger. I assume there is eventually a point at which the market will no longer desire massive trucks—say, once they’re the size of a standard city bus—but I also would have assumed long ago that this point would soon be reached. The safer, more practical solution would be to decrease the number of cars on the road by making mass transit feel more comfortable. It would encourage physical fitness. It would keep existing roads intact longer. It would be environmentally friendly. And in the short-term, it would be much safer. A world in which all of the largest parking lots in a city belong not to the sports stadiums but instead to park-and-rides on the city’s edge in which visitors can then absorb themselves into the far less stress-inducing car-less lifestyle would be the ideal. And even if it seems impractical, and overnight it surely is, expecting the world to survive the further proliferation of enormous car culture is arguably every bit the fantasy of turning dozens of Americans cities into New York.
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