The last mile in the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf supply chain for me—a literal mile—is my short walk to Main Street, where I can find the Ethiopian Yirgacheffe beans that both Isais and I favor.
It’s a quick cup for me, and then I have to walk to the bus stop, where one of Long Beach Transit’s big red hybrid buses will take me (after one transfer) to San Pedro and a conference on the Port of Los Angeles. The agenda for the conference is all about shipping tech of the future, although the buzz will be all about the crippling port congestion of the present. Busing will take a half hour or so longer than driving my own car, but I won’t have to worry about parking, and I can catch up on some reading en route. A reasonable trade-off, with the added bonus of getting a bit of exercise from walking two miles to the bus stop and taking another little notch off the old carbon footprint. The typical household in the U.S. generates the equivalent of 48.5 tons of carbon emissions a year,1 which is roughly five times the global average—with the single largest chunk coming from transportation.
Figuring out how to get around Southern California by public transit used to be an arduous, frustrating experience—one I’d rarely consider and often regret when I did. Many transit agencies’ online guides are atrocious or fragmented. But today’s smartphone mapping apps provide a Rosetta stone for bus, trolley, and train travel in many cities in the country with real-time directions, pickup and arrival times, and no peering at incomprehensible bus-stop schedules that make the Zimmerman Telegram decoding project seem like child’s play. This may be the single most useful and life-changing capability of the smartphone, enabling every flavor of mobility imaginable, from Waze’s traffic jam avoidance to a cornucopia of ridesharing and car lending, to a wave of new personal courier and delivery services, to walking and biking routes that can be very different and significantly better than driving directions. One out of four smartphone owners uses the device to get public transit information, and one out of ten does so frequently.2 This may help explain why mass transit ridership was higher in 2014 than in the previous fifty-eight years (though, admittedly, Americans’ use of transit is far, far lower today than it was a century before the age of the smartphone).3
Most of my walk to the bus stop is northbound along the Pacific Coast Highway, which sounds more picturesque than it is. Many parts of State Route 1—PCH to locals—offer glorious views of cliff and coast up and down the state, but my urban stretch is too far inland to provide even a glimpse of the ocean. It’s a congested four-lane highway here, and my route takes me across the concrete-lined San Gabriel River that divides Los Angeles County from Orange County and serves as a transition between a mostly residential zone to two big retail, restaurant, and entertainment complexes.
For no good reason, the sidewalks vanish for a quarter mile south of the bridge, forcing pedestrians into the bike lane or the weeds that surround a barren stretch of land where only oil rigs bob like giant, creaky birds pecking for seed. This is the casual way walking is discouraged outside city centers: through thoughtlessness rather than intention, the product of a hundred years of car-centric planning. Thousands of people move from homes in Seal Beach to restaurants, movies, and stores just across the river in Long Beach, but almost nobody walks the short distance because it is so deliberately unwelcoming. It makes for a tense journey as cars whiz by at 50 miles per hour or more, notwithstanding the posted speed limit of 40 miles per hour. The sidewalks reappear on the bridge itself and continue on the north side, but then the bike lane vanishes without warning a bit farther up the highway, turning into a third lane of car traffic. Cyclists who don’t know to avoid this trap suddenly find themselves in the mix with speeding cars about to turn into their paths, a potentially deadly defect in detail and design that is also all too common throughout the region (and much of the country).
Today I see a bike rider miss serious injury by inches as I walk along this area. The car that nearly hit him while making an ill-advised lane change does not fare so well, barely avoiding the bicyclist but then rear-ending an SUV with a loud crunch. Traffic is blocked as the drivers stop and get out to assess the minor damage and to make the ritual exchange of shrugs, grimaces, accusing stares, and insurance information.
This is a mundane, everyday event, the sort that city dwellers barely notice anymore, like the near misses pedestrians regularly experience in crosswalks. But this one I do remember because of what the bicyclist says to me. I was walking right by him and so offered a commiserating shake of the head at his close call, at the obliviousness of some drivers, and at this zero-sum game of an intersection. He had lugged his bike out of the street onto the sidewalk and was standing astride it, running a hand through his long hair, calming himself. “That’s the third time this has happened to me,” he tells me in a shaky voice.
“Really?” I ask. “You mean this week?”
He shakes his head. “Today.”
The car is the star. That’s been true for well over a century, an unrivaled staying power for an industrial-age, pistons-and-brute-force machine in an era so dominated by silicon and software. Cars conquered the daily culture of American life back when spats, top hats, and child labor were in vogue, and well ahead of such other game changers as radio, plastic, refrigerators, the electrical grid, and votes for women.
Cars—all 1.2 billion of them worldwide4—may not be the most vital component of our sprawling transportation landscape, or the most economically potent; the goods movement fleets and flotillas hold those crowns. Our beloved internal-combustion–powered, 3,977-pound metal boxes on wheels aren’t even the most irreplaceable slice of the transportation pie no matter how attached we are to them or helpless we feel without them.5 They are still very much the same beast as Henry Ford’s Model T, refined, safer, improved (though not as much as you think), yet still of the same basic, terribly inefficient DNA. Our cars are so rooted in that past they have never shed their deep connections to the age of horse transport, with the car’s shape and dimensions still based on horse-drawn carriages and engine output still measured in the archaic eighteenth-century metric of horsepower. Horsepower! Do we measure power plants and nuclear reactors and computer processors by how many horses they “equal”? The surprise, from a technological perspective, is that the conventional car wasn’t replaced by any number of more modern designs or technologies long ago, just as cell phones eclipsed landlines and then smartphones dethroned dumb ones.6 The same story holds for coal-fueled cargo ships, steam locomotives, dirigibles, telegraphs, phonographs, typewriters, vacuum tubes, and film cameras.
And yet the car remains the star. It’s how generations of Americans have experienced transportation. It’s how we intuitively measure distance, not in terms of miles but in car time: Oh, that store is just fifteen minutes away. Cars are intrinsic to our culture. We associate them with personal freedom, and we incorporate them into all our big moments from the start of life to the end. We gaudily decorate our cars for the post-wedding cruise into married life. We drive our newborns home from the hospital in a flurry of photos and Facebook posts, and gift expectant mothers with car seats at their baby showers in preparation for that first ride. We go to work in them, we take our meals in them (19 percent of them nationwide, by some estimates),7 we date and mate in them. We lavish them with polishes, waxes, personal decor, religious symbols, and political slogans, then show them off like prized Thoroughbreds. And at the end, we have built fleets of lustrous black cars for our last rides to the cemetery.
The car’s outsized footprint even governs where and how we live. America has organized its built landscapes around cars to enable their movement, their parking, their convenience, and our dependence on them. The country has enough parking spaces to cover every inch of Delaware and Rhode Island combined—as many as eight spaces for every car in the country, which adds up to about 30 percent of open space in the dense cores of our cities.8 Our emotional involvement with our cars is no less outsized. We spend billions on new lanes and high-tech traffic control centers just in the hope of shaving a few minutes off our travels—billions for mere minutes—because movement impeded, even for the meager interval we’d happily invest in awaiting a restaurant table or a beer at the ball game, is psychologically unbearable if it takes place in a car. Researchers have documented this phenomenon time and again: the brain perceives each minute of a travel delay—waiting for a bus, looking for parking, being stuck in traffic—as two to three times longer than a minute spent moving freely. Humans are conditioned, perhaps even hardwired, this way. This may explain why voters so often prefer spending on such projects as Carmageddon and their often fruitless promise of faster travel rather than investing in buses and subways that, by definition, may be more resource-efficient but also involve that hated, psychically torturous wait time caused by schedules, stops, and stations.
Before cars, streetscapes were designed primarily for walking. The rules of the road were simple: pedestrians ruled. When streetcars came along, they were open: passengers could just jump on as they passed. Now most thoroughfares are designed for driving, and if anyone is jumping, it’s to jump out of the way. In many locations, sidewalks are either forbidden (walking on freeways is illegal in most states except in emergencies, and death-defying even then), omitted (as a cost savings), or in disrepair (Los Angeles’s notorious city sidewalks being exhibit A, a literal walk of shame as even the mayor has conceded).9 In some states, pedestrians are legally required to avoid conflicts with cars rather than the reverse, and laws and custom so favor automobiles that driving into someone on foot is often treated as a traffic offense rather than an assault, if a citation is issued at all—even in cases of pedestrian injury or death.
Finally, while it is true that the Millennial generation is trending away from driving and owning cars,10 and a scattering of cities are building robust bike, transit, and walking-friendly zones for a more equal sharing of the road, this is a slow and controversial trend, still too nascent to undermine car culture primacy. For sixteen-year-olds all over the country, surviving the ordeal of the driving test and the triumphant receipt of that laminated icon remains America’s one great secular ritual and rite of passage, as resonant in its own way as baptism and bar mitzvah, confirmation and vision quest. The license marks an end to childhood, a new independence, and a kind of machine-powered freedom in which the car is not just conveyance but emblem—the star of the show.
All of this history, culture, ritual, and man-machine affection helps explain why the true cost and nature of cars have become so very hard for us to see. And what is that nature? Simply this: in almost every way imaginable, the car, as it is deployed and used today, is insane. And not in a good way. More like the deep-fried Twinkies stuffed with caviar I saw being sold for $125 apiece at the county fair this summer—insane that way. Except our cars are much more likely to kill us.
But wait. Cars are the epitome of convenience, aren’t they? That’s the allure and the promise that’s kept us hooked, dating all the way back to the versatile, do-everything, on- and off-road miracle of the Ford Model T. Convenience—some might call it freedom—is not a selling point to be easily dismissed—this trusty conveyance, always there, always ready, on no schedule but its owner’s schedule. Buses can’t do that. Trains can’t do that. Even Uber makes you wait. Whenever a car owner wants to jump in and go, the car is there waiting. No sweating and pedaling. No hours spent walking. This is how America gets to the store. This is how America gets to work. This is how pizzas come to our door. The car’s not insane, it’s amazing, right?
But there’s a catch. The price for this convenience is acceptance of vehicles that are nothing less than rolling disasters in terms of economics, environment, energy, efficiency, climate, health, and safety. Our failure to acknowledge the social and real-dollar costs of these automotive shortcomings amounts to a massive hidden subsidy. The modern car could not dominate, or exist at all, without this shadow funding.
So what are the failings of our cars? First and foremost, they are profligate wasters of money and fuel: more than 80 cents of every dollar spent on gasoline is squandered by the inherent inefficiencies of the modern internal combustion engine.11 No part of our infrastructure and daily lives wastes more energy and, by extension, more money than the modern automobile.
While burning through all that fuel, our cars and trucks spew toxins and particulate waste into the atmosphere that induce cancer, lung disease, and asthma. These emissions measurably decrease our longevity—not by a matter of days, but years. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculates that 53,000 Americans die prematurely every year from vehicle pollution, losing ten years of life on average that they would have survived in the absence of tailpipe emissions.12 There are also the indirect environmental, health, and economic costs of extracting, transporting, and refining oil for vehicle fuels, and the immense national security costs and risks of being dependent on foreign-oil imports for significant amounts of that fuel.
As an investment, the car is our most massive waste of opportunity—“the world’s most underutilized asset,” investment firm Morgan Stanley calls it.13 That’s because the average car sits idle 92 percent of the time. Accounting for all costs, from fuel to insurance to depreciation, the average car owner in the U.S. pays $12,544 a year for a car that puts in a mere fourteen-hour work week. Drive an SUV? Tack on another $1,908.14
Then there is the matter of climate. Our movement from door to door is a principal cause of the global climate crisis, exacerbated by our stubborn attachment to archaic, wasteful, and inefficient transportation modes and machines.15 But are cars the true culprit? What about other modes of travel? Airplanes, for instance, are often singled out as the most carbon-intensive form of travel in terms of emissions per passenger mile (or per ton of cargo). By some estimates, carbon emissions from one round-trip jetliner trip between New York and Los Angeles generates more than 10 percent of the average American’s total carbon footprint for an entire year.
But that’s not the whole story—a case of statistics masking, rather than illuminating, a larger truth. Total passenger miles by air are miniscule compared to cars: in any given year, 60 percent of American adults never set foot on an airplane, and the vast majority who do fly take only one round trip a year. If air travel were the only source of transportation emissions, our climate future would be bright rather than blighted. Unfortunately, air travel is not our primary problem, contributing only 8 percent of U.S. transportation-related greenhouse gases. Cars and trucks, by contrast, pump out a combined 83 percent of transportation carbon.16
Furthermore, airlines—whose margins have been continually squeezed by fuel costs and competition—out of necessity have become far more efficient in terms of the energy expended moving one passenger one mile. Some of these gains came through better engineering, but just as much arose from more efficient booking systems that keep planes profitably (and uncomfortably) full. Overall, airliners have become 74 percent more efficient than they were in 1970—to the point that it is worse for the climate to drive long distances in an average American car than it is to fly. Driving your SUV or even a mid-size car from New York to LA is worse for the planet than flying there.17 This is true in part because car fuel efficiency has improved far more slowly than planes, but also because of Americans’ increasing propensity to drive alone, which has made car travel less efficient and more carbon-intensive per passenger mile in recent years.
So cars pose the biggest threat on the climate front, with all the costs that global warming imposes on our infrastructure, homes, and lives through increasingly severe storms, droughts, rising sea-levels, and pressure on food supplies. If the price of gasoline and the vehicles that burn it actually reflected the true costs and damage they inflict, the common car would be as extinct as the dinosaurs. Gasoline would cost way more than $10 a gallon. That’s how big our secret subsidy is.
And that’s not even counting the most dramatic cost we accept and subsidize: cars waste lives. They are one of America’s leading causes of avoidable injury and death, especially among the young.
The materials, techniques, and technology to shrink or fix each of these categories of car shortcomings exist today, and all of them would be cheaper in the long term than allowing the status quo to persist. But the will to accept or even see the shortcomings of the car is another story.
Oddly, the most immediately devastating consequence of the modern car—the carnage it leaves in its wake—seems to generate the least public outcry and attention. Jim McNamara, a sergeant with the California Highway Patrol, where officers spend 80 percent of their time responding to car wrecks, believes such public inattention and apathy arise whenever a problem is “massive but diffuse.” Whether it’s climate change or car crashes, he says, if the problem doesn’t show itself in a big bang all at once—as when an airliner goes down with dozens or hundreds of people on board—it’s hard to get anyone’s attention. Very few people see what he and his colleagues witness daily and up close: what hurtling tons of metal slamming into concrete and brick and trees and one another does to the human body strapped within (or not strapped, all too often). Short answer, McNamara says: nothing good. Nothing you want to see on a full stomach.
In contrast, a typical driver’s experience of car violence is radically different, little more than a glance at a wreck on the roadside, some broken glass and bent metal briefly visible in a flash, only to disappear in the rearview mirror a moment later. Mostly it’s the machine that’s visible in such moments; any human damage is hard to see, as bloodstains and bodies are quickly draped by innocuous sheets of yellow or orange plastic, while the living are immediately removed for treatment or shelter. What may have caused the wreck, the how and why and who of it, is rarely apparent to passersby. So, more than anything, a roadside wreck is experienced by the vast majority of drivers as a nagging but unavoidable inconvenience—just another source of detours and traffic jams, a bottleneck to be passed with relief. Increasingly popular and powerful smartphone traffic apps eliminate even those brief close encounters with the roadway body count, routing savvy drivers away from crash-related congestion. The typical car wreck is becoming all but invisible to everyone but those who are killed or maimed and those whose job is to clean it up. Many are aware at some level that troubling numbers of people are injured and die in cars, but most remain unfazed by this knowledge.
The contrast couldn’t be greater with public perception of airliner crashes, which always generate a high-visibility tsunami of fear, headlines, and spare-no-expense investigations. As counterintuitive as it may seem when comparing passenger-laden airliners with the crash of one car carrying one person, this disparity in attention cannot be justified by the numbers. Quite the contrary: in the fourteen years following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, there were eight crashes on American soil of passenger planes operated by regional, national, or international carriers. The death toll in those crashes totaled 442. That averages out to fewer than three fatalities a month.18
The death toll on America’s streets and highways during that same period since 9/11 was more than 400,000 men, women, and children.19 The traffic death toll in 2015 exceeded 3,000 a month.
When it comes to the number of people who die in car wrecks, America experiences the equivalent of four airliner crashes every week.
The response to that automotive death toll is telling. In the twelve months between June 2014 and May 2015, Americans took 779 million plane trips. That’s a big number, and air travel is a vital part of the mobility picture; but when it comes to how Americans move, it’s barely a rounding error. Americans take 1.1 billion trips in cars every day.20
When it comes to car crashes, there are none of the nationwide safety bulletins or mandatory pilot training that so often result from aviation crash probes. No sweeping investigations of a single wreck nor attempts to find ways to prevent similar tragedies in the future, as is compulsively done in the aviation arena. There are just routine reports by local coroners and police officers providing bare details of what happened, and not a word of guidance on how to avoid the next one. Most crashes—including fatal ones—are not even reported in the news media. Those that do make the news just describe the damage to person and property but almost never report the cause, if one is ever formally determined. There are, of course, lawsuits, America’s go-to response to anything that causes injury or death, but almost all of them are resolved quietly by insurance companies. The only exception is when they involve safety defects in the machine, not the driver, in which case there is often intense media coverage and public concern, although in the fifty years the feds have had the power to recall cars for safety reasons, such defects have caused only a tiny fraction of the deaths and injuries experienced on the highways every day.
A normal day on the road, then, is a “quiet catastrophe,” as Ken Kolosh, the statistics chief for the National Safety Council, calls it. He ought to know: he makes his living crafting the annual statistical compendium of every unintentional injury and death in the country. Kolosh is America’s amiable and understated Dr. Death, poring over those coroners’ findings, police reports, and disparate databases from state and federal agencies to construct a picture of how we kill ourselves. It’s his job to spot the trends, to note such curiosities as the accelerating number of accidental poisonings (mishandled prescription drugs, mostly) and the fact that the battle to reduce drunken driving has stalled for decades. And, quiet or not, Kolosh says, the numbers that cross his desk show that, despite gradual declines, the automotive casualty count remains nothing short of catastrophic.
Car crashes are the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of one and thirty-nine. They rank in the top five killers for Americans sixty-five and under (behind cancer, heart disease, accidental poisoning, and suicide).21
One out of every 112 Americans is likely to die in a traffic crash.22 Just under 1 percent of us.
The economic costs and societal impact from motor vehicle death and injury each year amounts to $836 billion. The direct economic costs alone—the medical bills and emergency responder costs reflected in all our taxes and insurance payments—represent a tax of $784 on every man, woman, and child living in the U.S.23
The numbers are so huge they are not easily grasped, and so are perhaps best understood by a simple comparison: if our roads were a war zone, they would be the most dangerous battlefield the American military has ever encountered.
First, there is the annual death toll from motor vehicle crashes in the U.S.: 35,400 dead in 2014, by Kolosh’s count. That number is greater than the annual U.S. military death toll during each war America has ever fought except the Civil War and the two world wars.24 That means U.S. highway fatalities outnumber the yearly war dead during Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, the War of 1812, and the American Revolution.
Now consider the annual U.S. injury toll from car wrecks—just the ones serious enough to require emergency room trauma care: 2.5 million.25 Those wounded on the highways exceed the numbers of wounded and dead in World War II, World War I, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, the War of 1812, and the Revolution combined. That’s not just the yearly casualties from those wars. One year of car crash injuries and deaths in the U.S. is greater than all the dead and wounded from the entire duration of all those wars combined, with numbers to spare to cover all Union Army dead and wounded from the Civil War as well.
Widen the category to include a year’s worth of U.S. motor vehicle injuries that required some medical consultation, and those 4.3 million injured26 far outnumber the military dead and wounded in every war and conflict in which America has ever participated, Confederate casualties included.27
One year of driving in America is more dangerous than all those wars put together. The car is the star.