INTRODUCTION: THE THREE-MILLION-MILE COMMUTE
1. Over the years, the stretch of I-405 closed for Carmageddon has been considered one of, and sometimes the worst, commute in America. The most current list from traffic data company Inrix, from March 2015, puts that section of I-405 at eighth worst in the country. Los Angeles has five of the top ten worst commutes in the country:
1. Los Angeles: Riverside Freeway/CA-91 Eastbound
Corridor: CA-55/Costa Mesa Freeway to McKinley Street
Corridor Length: 19 miles
Free-Flow Travel Time: 20 minutes
Worst-Hour Travel Time (Friday, 4:00–5:00 p.m.): 81 minutes
2. Chicago: I-90/I-94 Eastbound (Kennedy/Dan Ryan Expressways)
Corridor: I-294/Tri-State Tollway to Ruble Street/Exit 52B
Corridor Length: 15.9 miles
Free-Flow Travel Time: 17 minutes
Worst-Hour Travel Time (Friday, 5:00–6:00 p.m.): 72 minutes
3. New York: I-95 Southbound (New England Thruway, Bruckner/Cross Bronx Expressways)
Corridor: Conner Street/Exit 13 to Hudson Terrace
Corridor Length: 11.3 miles
Free-Flow Travel Time: 13 minutes
Worst-Hour Travel Time (Friday, 4:00–5:00 p.m.): 63 minutes
4. Los Angeles: I-5 Southbound (Santa Ana/Golden State Freeways)
Corridor: East Caesar Chavez Avenue to Valley View Avenue
Corridor Length: 17.5 miles
Free-Flow Travel Time: 18 minutes
Worst-Hour Travel Time (Friday, 5:00–6:00 p.m.): 63 minutes
5. Washington, D.C.: (I-95 Southbound)
Corridor: I-395 to Russell Road/Exit 148
Corridor Length: 23.9 miles
Free-Flow Travel Time: 23 minutes
Worst-Hour Travel Time (Friday 4:00–5:00 p.m.): 86 minutes
6. New York: (Long Island Expressway/I-495 Eastbound)
Corridor: Maurice Avenue/Exit 18 to Mineola Avenue/Willis Avenue/Exit 37
Corridor Length: 16 miles
Free-Flow Travel Time: 16 minutes
Worst-Hour Travel Time (Friday, 4:00–5:00 p.m.): 53 minutes
7. Chicago: (Eisenhower Expressway/I-290 Eastbound)
Corridor: Maurice Avenue/Exit 18 to Mineola Avenue/Willis Avenue/Exit 37
Corridor Length: 16 miles
Free-Flow Travel Time: 16 minutes
Worst-Hour Travel Time (Friday, 4:00–5:00 p.m.): 53 minutes
8. Los Angeles: (San Diego Freeway/I-405 Northbound)
Corridor: I-105/Imperial Highway to Getty Center Drive
Corridor Length: 13.1 miles
Free-Flow Travel Time: 13 minutes
Worst-Hour Travel Time (Friday, 4:00–5:00 p.m.): 53 minutes
9. Los Angeles: (Pomona Freeway/CA-60 Eastbound)
Corridor: Whittier Boulevard to Brea Canyon Road
Corridor Length: 21.7 miles
Free-Flow Travel Time: 22 minutes
Worst-Hour Travel Time (Friday, 5:00–6:00 p.m.): 61 minutes
10. Los Angeles: (Santa Monica Freeway/I-10 Eastbound)
Corridor: CA-1/Lincoln Boulevard/Exit 1B to Alameda Street
Corridor Length: 14.9 miles
Free-Flow Travel Time: 14 minutes
Worst-Hour Travel Time (Thursday, 6:00–7:00 p.m.): 49 minutes
2. The expansive, spare-no-expense drawing boards of the early sixties had called for two other north–south freeways to be built to relieve any bottlenecks on the 405. But those projects had been scrapped long ago as impolitic, impractical, or unaffordable.
3. Based on the 3.0156 trillion vehicle miles reported for 2014 by the Federal Highway Administration in Traffic Trends, December 2014.
4. This is a daily average calculated from the finding that U.S. freight movement is greater than $20 trillion a year. From Mapping Freight: The Highly Concentrated Nature of Goods Trade in the United States by Adie Tomer and Joseph Kane, Brookings Institution, November 2014.
5. “Foreign Sources of Crude Oil Imports to California 2014,” California Energy Almanac.
6. Urban Mobility Scorecard Annual Report, 2015, published jointly by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute and Inrix, August 2015.
7. Injury Facts 2015 Edition, the National Safety Council’s annual statistical report on unintentional injuries and their characteristics and costs.
8. American Society of Civil Engineers’ “Infrastructure Report Card, 2013.”
9. The gasoline tax is 18.4 cents; the federal diesel fuel tax is 24.4 cents.
10. American Road & Transportation Builders Association.
11. Figures culled from “A Financial Model Comparing Car Ownership with Uber X (Los Angeles)” by Kyle Hill, Medium.com, August 31, 2014, and Your Driving Costs: How Much Are You Really Paying to Drive?, 2015 edition, American Automobile Association.
12. “On the Performance of the U.S. Transportation System: Caution Ahead” by Clifford Winston, Journal of Economic Literature (online), Brookings Institution, September 26, 2013.
13. “The Future Economic and Environmental Costs of Gridlock in 2030” by the Centre for Economics and Business Research, published by Inrix, July 2014.
14. According to traffic flow analysis by Inrix, as reported in “$1.1 Billion and Five Years Later, The 405 Congestion Relief Project Is a Fail,” Los Angeles Weekly, March 4, 2015.
15. University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.
16. “Uber Won’t Kill Car Sales, but Ride-Sharing May Affect What We Buy” by Zach Doell, Kelley Blue Book, July 28, 2014.
CHAPTER 1: MORNING ALARM
1. Just to be clear, this is not an homage to phones made by Apple or any other brand; the same tasks could be accomplished with a variety of other smartphones (or tablets or computers). This just happens to be the phone I’m using at the time of this writing and, more to the point, Apple Inc. began in 2012 to make public considerable details on its major suppliers as part of a corporate transparency and sustainability initiative. These disclosures make it possible to piece together a large part of the iPhone’s journey from raw material to complete product. That was the same year Apple was singled out for criticism over poor working conditions at its top Chinese supplier, Foxconn (which happens to be a top supplier for many of Apple’s competitors, too). The supplier information is on the Apple website, https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/our-suppliers/site.
2. “Carbon Footprint of a Single Newspaper Equals One Kilometer in a Car,” Pulp & Paper Canada, March 29, 2011.
3. From Consumer and Mobile Financial Services 2013, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, March 2013, and 2013 Fiserv Consumer Trends Survey Shows Growth in Mobile, Tablet Banking, Fiserve, Inc., June 2014.
4. As of 2013, per Kidscount.org.
5. 6 Facts About Americans and Their Smartphones, Pew Research Fact Tank, April 1, 2015.
6. “Is 30 Percent of Traffic Actually Searching for Parking?” by Paul Barter, Reinventing Parking, October 7, 2013, http://www.reinventingparking.org/2013/10/is-30-of-traffic-actually-searching-for.html.
7. The information on the assembly of the home button components is from Apple’s Supplier Responsibility Report, https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/accountability/.
8. Allegations of poor worker treatment at Foxconn gained high media exposure through a 2012 stage play entitled “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” which was presented as nonfiction and reported as such by numerous media outlets, including The New York Times and This American Life. Both media organizations later branded the allegations as fabrications. (See Episode 454, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” This American Life (online), January 6, 2012; and “Mike Daisey Apologizes for Falsehoods in Monologue About Apple,” The New York Times, March 26, 2012.)
A subsequent audit requested by Apple and performed by the Fair Labor Association found overtime and wage violations were routine at the massive factory complex, which Apple and Foxconn vowed to remedy. (See “Independent Investigation of Apple Supplier, Foxconn: Report Highlights,” Fair Labor Association, March 2012, via www.fairlabor.org.)
9. Other components include: a barometric sensor and accelerometer from Germany; the Corning “Gorilla Glass” from Kentucky; the five different power amplifiers from California, Massachusetts, Colorado, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania manufacturers; the motion processors from Silicon Valley; the Near Field Communications controller chip from the Netherlands; signal controllers and microphone parts from Ireland; the Sony cameras, LCD display, random access memory, antenna switch, and touch-screen components from five separate suppliers in Japan; the antenna tuner from North Carolina; the flash storage chips from Korea; the audio chips and touch transmitter from Texas; the touch-screen films from 3M plants in the U.S.; the e-compass from Taiwan; the Simplo battery from Jiangsu, China; and a variety of other connectors, controllers, and modules sourced from cities across China and Taiwan.
10. Rare earth minerals in the iPhone: rareelementresources.com.
11. “Mining Your iPhone: Recycling iPhones Yields Gold, Silver, Platinum, and More” by John Koetsier, Venturebeat, April 3, 2013.
12. “The Humble Hero,” Economist, May 18, 2013.
13. The most authoritative account of the development and impact of the modern shipping container is The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson, Princeton University Press, 2006.
14. International Shipping Facts and Figures, Maritime Knowledge Center of the International Maritime Organization, March 6, 2012.
15. “Shipping and Climate Change: Where Are We and Which Way Forward?” Policy Brief, International Transport Forum, October 2015 (revised).
16. “iPhone 6 Plus Environmental Report,” Apple Inc., September 2014.
17. Dairy industry white paper, Blu Skye Sustainability.
18. California Sustainable Wine Growing Alliance.
19. “Six Products, Six Carbon Footprints,” Wall Street Journal, October 6, 2008.
20. “Estimated U.S. Energy Use in 2014,” Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, flow chart published online in 2015.
21. “Total U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Economic Sector in 2013,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (online).
22. “Estimated U.S. Energy Use in 2014.” Livermore’s data shows that the transportation sector consumes 27.1 quads of energy a year (out of total national consumption of 98.3 quads). Of that, 21.4 quads are “rejected,” i.e. wasted—78.9 percent of the total transportation energy picture. One quad is a fantastic amount of energy, equal to 1015 BTUs, or 252 megatons of TNT. By comparison, the most powerful nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal in 2015 is 1.2 megatons.
23. Industry data from the American Trucking Association.
24. See “The Boomerang Effect,” Economist, April 19, 2012, and “Why Apple Will Never Bring Manufacturing Jobs Back to the U.S.” by David Goldman, Money.CNN.com, October 17, 2012.
25. Capturing Value in Global Networks: Apple’s iPad and iPhone by Kenneth L. Kraemer, Greg Linden, and Jason Dedrick, University of California, Irvine; University of California, Berkeley; and Syracuse University.
26. “Why Apple Will Never Bring Manufacturing Jobs Back to the U.S.” by David Goldman, Money.CNN.com, October 17, 2012.
27. “Professional Trends: Supply Chain Management Schools,” educationnews.org, http://www.educationnews.org/career-index/supply-chain-management-schools/.
CHAPTER 2: THE GHOST IN THE CAN
1. “Facts at a Glance—2013,” Industry Statistics, Aluminum Association, December 2014, and “Aluminum Can Infographics Gallery” at aluminum.org.
2. Based on 2015 production of 53 million tons of primary aluminum and a market price of 77 cents/pound.
3. If storage were the only consideration, the cheapest, strongest shape for a single-serve beverage container would be a sphere, which would use the least material and distribute weight and pressure evenly throughout the inner surface of the can, avoiding the engineering weak points of corners and seams. But they would be a nightmare to pack in a case or carton: stacked, 26 percent of the space inside the shipping container would be dead space. (They’d also be clumsy to handle for consumers, and would be prone to rolling off tables.)
4. Study Finds Aluminum Cans the Sustainable Package of Choice, Aluminum Association, May 20, 2015.
5. From a sustainability perspective, aluminum cans are still not “green,” as they are still single-use containers for which energy and transportation must be expended to recycle. A less wasteful option is to reuse containers.
6. According to the Aluminum Association.
7. According the Aluminum Association, aluminum can scrap as of February 2015 was worth $1,491 per ton on average versus $385 per ton for the plastic most commonly used for beverages (PET) and the zero dollars per ton recyclers are willing to pay for glass.
8. Federal mandates call for light-duty vehicles—passenger cars and pickups—to achieve average fuel efficiency rates of 54 miles per gallon by the year 2025. As of the 2013 model year, the average had reached 24.1 miles per gallon. “Light-Duty Automotive Technology, Carbon Dioxide Emissions, and Fuel Economy Trends: 1975–2014,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, http://www.epa.gov/oms/fetrends.htm.
9. According to the Steel Recycling Institute.
10. “Steel vs. Aluminum: Which Wins for Fuel Efficiency AND Cost?” by Stephen Edelstein, GreenCarReports.com, October 13, 2014.
11. Red mud is one of the biggest waste problems facing the mining industry, with 80 million tons of it created annually, which must be kept segregated in giant holding ponds. If let loose, red mud can render lifeless any natural environment it touches—as demonstrated by a fatal spill in Hungary that swept through farms and a village, killing 10 and injuring 120 people in 2010. Sources: “Reducing the Environmental Impact of the Aluminum Industry” by Dr. Tim Johnson, Tetronics.com, and “Toxic Red Sludge Spill from Hungarian Aluminum Plant ‘An Ecological Disaster’” by David Gura, National Public Radio, October 5, 2010.
12. “Review of Maritime Transport: 2014,” United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, annual report.
13. Hall’s patents prevailed in the U.S. while Héroult’s patents were recognized in all other countries.
14. Oxygen is by far the most common element, not because of its presence as a life-giving gas in the atmosphere, but because so much more of it is chemically locked inside rocks and water, representing nearly half the earth’s mass. Silicon is the next most abundant element, constituting 28 percent of the planet, and although we think of it these days as the expensive stuff of computer chips and solar cells, silicon is more commonly a principal ingredient in rocks and sand. Third-place aluminum weighs in at 8 percent of the earth’s mass and is contained in nearly two hundred different kinds of rocks, common and precious alike, including sapphires, rubies, and emeralds.
There are only a few other common elements: iron makes up 5 percent of the earth’s mass; calcium, 4 percent; potassium and sodium, 3 percent each; and magnesium, 2 percent. The ninety other naturally occurring elements combined make up less than 1 percent of the earth’s mass.
15. Powders and salts containing aluminum have been known and used for medicine and commerce for thousands of years, although no one suspected the metallic element at their heart. The ancient Greeks used one aluminum compound to sterilize and cleanse wounds; another, aluminum potassium sulfate—commonly called alum—was used for 5,000 years as a mordant to fix dyes to fabric. English wool merchants in the Middle Ages went to great lengths and expense to import the fine white powder from the Middle East because dyed wool fetched a far better price than plain wool. But the metallic element in this powder remained hidden. This is why aluminum is sometimes referred to as the most “modern” of metals—which is to say it’s the metal humanity only recently figured out how to exploit, as opposed to the ancient forging of copper, tin, silver, and iron mastered thousands of years ago, primarily to make better weapons of war.
16. “Primary Aluminum Smelting Power Consumption,” World Aluminum Organization, July 31, 2015, http://www.world-aluminium.org/.
17. “Steel vs. Aluminum: The Lightweight Wars Heat Up” by Jim Motavalli, CarTalk.com, February 3, 2014.
18. Life Cycle Assessment—Energy and CO2 Emissions of Aluminum-Intensive Vehicles by Sujit Das, Oak Ridge National Laboratories, January 15, 2014.
19. Aluminum Association.
20. Alcoa.
21. U.S.-based Ball announced in 2015 its intention to purchase UK-based Rexam. The proposed merger was under scrutiny by European antitrust authorities.
22. The Aluminum Can Advantage: Key Sustainability Indicators 2015, published May 2015 by the Container Manufacturing Institute and the Aluminum Association. The report puts America’s consumer recycling rate of aluminum cans at 66.7 percent in 2014.
23. “Me, My Car, My Life . . . in the Ultraconnected Age,” KPMG Reports, November 2014, and “Study: Nearly 35 Percent of US Households with a Vehicle Have at Least Three,” GreenCarCongress.com, February 12, 2008.
CHAPTER 3: MORNING BREW
1. Americans drink more soda, bottled water, and beer by volume, but a higher proportion of American adults—nearly two-thirds—say they drink coffee every day more than any of these others beverages. Source: Gallup Polls.
2. “Coffee Grinds Fuel for the Nation,” USA Today, April 9, 2013.
3. WorldsTopExports.com.
4. International Coffee Organization.
5. Top 10 Commodities, data from 2012, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Statistics Division.
6. The Sustainability Consortium, Christy Anne Melhart Slay, commodity mapping project.
7. Based on 2014 data from The Current State of the Global Coffee Trade, International Coffee Organization, August 20, 2015.
8. Assuming two coffee drinkers in the household making one pot a day in a typical electric drip coffeemaker, they would use about a pound of coffee a week.
9. “Origin and Genetic Diversity of Coffea arabica L. Based on DNA Molecular Markers” by P. Lashermes, M. C. Combes, J. Cros, P. Trouslot, F. Anthony, A Charrier, Proceedings of the 16th ASIC Colloquium (Kyoto), 1995.
10. The World of Caffeine: The Science of and Culture of the World’s Most Popular Drug by Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer, Routledge Books, London, 2001.
11. Data provided by Christy Anne Melhart Slay and Philip Glasgow Curtis of the Commodity Mapping Project at the Sustainability Consortium, headquartered at the University of Arkansas.
CHAPTER 4: FOUR AIRLINERS A WEEK
1. “Cool Climate Network, Renewable & Appropriate Energy Laboratory,” University of California, Berkeley, http://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/calculator.
2. U.S. Smartphone Use in 2015 by Aaron Smith, Pew Research Center, April 1, 2015.
3. Record 10.8 Billion Trips Taken on U.S. Public Transportation in 2014, American Public Transportation Association, March 3, 2015.
4. “Annual Sales of Light Duty Vehicles Are Expected to Exceed 122 Million by 2035,” Navigant Research, July 2014 press release.
5. According to the EPA, the average vehicle weight for model year 2012 was 3,977 pounds, a 150-pound decrease from the model year 2011.
6. Hybrids remain a tiny minority of the U.S. fleet, less than 3 percent, and all-electrics are but a rounding error. U.S. Energy Information Administration.
7. Culinary Institute of America professor John Nihoff, quoted in “Car Cuisine,” by Jaclyn Schiff, Associated Press report at CBSNews.com, November 9, 2005.
8. Eran Ben-Joseph, professor of landscape architecture and urban design at MIT, and author of Rethinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking, MIT Press, 2012.
9. The City of Los Angeles estimates that 40 percent of city sidewalks are in disrepair, and Mayor Eric Garcetti announced early in his tenure that fixing them would be a priority.
10. A New Direction: Our Changing Relationship with Driving and the Implications for America’s Future, U.S. PIRG Education Fund, Spring 2013. The report cites these factors in support of the Millennial Generation’s move away from the car:
• The Millennials (people born between 1983 and 2000) are now the largest generation in the United States. By 2030, Millennials will be far and away the largest group in the peak driving age thirty-five- to fifty-four-year-old demographic, and will continue as such through 2040.
• Young people age sixteen to thirty-four drove 23 percent fewer miles on average in 2009 than they did in 2001—a greater decline in driving than any other age group. The severe economic recession was likely responsible for some of the decline, but not all.
• Millennials are more likely to want to live in urban and walkable neighborhoods and are more open to non-driving forms of transportation than older Americans. They are also the first generation to fully embrace mobile Internet-connected technologies, which are rapidly spawning new transportation options and shifting the way young Americans relate to one another, creating new avenues for living connected, vibrant lives that are less reliant on driving.
• If the Millennial-led decline in per capita driving continues for another dozen years, even at half the annual rate of the 2001–2009 period, total vehicle travel in the United States could remain well below its 2007 peak through at least 2040—despite a 21 percent increase in population. If Millennials retain their current propensity to drive less as they age, and future generations follow, driving could increase by only 7 percent by 2040. If, unexpectedly, Millennials were to revert to the driving patterns of previous generations, total driving could grow by as much as 24 percent by 2040.
11. A conventional internal combustion car loses most of the energy produced by burning gasoline through waste heat and mechanical inefficiency, using about 20 percent to move the vehicle. The inefficiency is compounded because that remaining 20 percent is expended on moving 4,000 pounds of metal in addition to the human driver. So only about 1 percent of a car’s gasoline cost is actually involved in moving the person inside. (By way of comparison, a modern all-electric vehicle wastes only about 10 percent of its energy, using about 90 percent to move the car. Electric motors are vastly more efficient.)
12. “Air pollution and early deaths in the United States,” Fabio Caiazzo, Akshay Ashok, Ian A. Waitz, Steve H.L. Yim, Steven R.H. Barrett, MIT, Atmospheric Environment, Volume 79, November 2013. The study found a total of 200,000 premature deaths annually in the U.S. from combustion emissions, with the most death attributed to transportation emissions. Second, with 52,000 premature deaths, were emissions from power plants. Industrial emissions accounted for 41,000.
13. Shared Autonomy by Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanley Research, April 7, 2015.
14. “A Financial Model Comparing Car Ownership with Uber X (Los Angeles)” by Kyle Hill, Medium.com, August 31, 2014, and Your Driving Costs: How Much Are You Really Paying to Drive?, 2015 edition, American Automobile Association.
15. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calculates that 27 percent of annual carbon emissions in America are from transportation. Only the generation of electricity accounts for more: 31 percent of the total. In reality, transportation emissions could easily be the greater, as these figures specifically exclude the massive carbon emissions from cargo ships that bring us 90 percent of our consumer goods.
According to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 80 percent of the energy expended for transportation is wasted. This means most of the oil burned in the U.S. inside cars and trucks achieves nothing in terms of movement, but contributes considerably to the creation of smog, lung disease, global warming, consumer costs, dependence on foreign oil, and profits for the oil industry.
16. Cars and light trucks (mainly pickups) make up 60 percent of U.S. transportation-related carbon emissions. Medium and heavy trucks contribute 23 percent. Rail and ships contribute 2 percent each, and everything else that moves and burns fossil fuels takes up the remnant. (This total for ship emissions is misleading, too, for it includes few cargo ship emissions, which occur in international waters and are generated by non-US sources. Even though the shipping is on behalf of the U.S., bringing goods to Americans, the emissions aren’t counted in our tally or any other countries. Those emissions, immense as they are, don’t exist when it comes to the accountants’ view of global warming.) From: “U.S. Transportation Sector Greenhouse Gas Emissions, 1990-2013,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, October 2015.
17. “Making driving less energy intensive than flying,” Michael Sivak, University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, January 2014.
18. As of October 2015.
19. National Safety Council data.
20. Air and vehicle trip data is from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
21. Centers for Disease Control, Leading Causes of Death reports.
22. National Safety Council, Odds of Dying.
23. The Economic and Societal Impact of Motor Vehicle Crashes, 2010 (revised), National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, May 2015.
24. “Fact Sheet: America’s Wars,” U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, November 2014, http://www.va.gov/opa/publications/factsheets/fs_americas_wars.pdf.
25. Centers for Disease Control, based on 2012 accident data, released October 7, 2014.
26. National Safety Council.
27. “Fact Sheet: America’s Wars,” Department of Veterans Affairs.
CHAPTER 5: FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH
1. Public Road and Street Mileage in the United States by Type of Surface, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, U.S. Department of Transportation. Figures are for 2013: Of the 4,071,000 miles of roads, 2,678,000 are paved and 1,394,000 are unpaved.
2. These numbers are averages, based on most recent data from the National Safety Council. In reality, some days of the week and hours of the day have higher accident rates, while others have lower.
3. Data sources: National Safety Council for fatality and crash statistics; Centers for Disease Control for emergency room visits.
4. The seminal study of crash causation was the Tri-Level Study of the Causes of Traffic Accidents published in 1979 by Indiana University’s Institute for Research in Public Safety, which found human error a definite or probable cause in 90 to 93 percent of crashes. The UK’s Transport and Road Research Laboratory put the figure at 95 percent in a 1980 study. The Relative Frequency of Unsafe Driving Acts in Serious Traffic Crashes, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s study published in December 1999, concluded that in 99 percent of crashes studied, “a driver behavioral error caused or contributed to the crash.” A 2008 NHTSA study using different data put the percentage at 93 percent.
5. National Safety Council. The 27 total percent for distracted driving is specifically for cell phone use, primarily talking or texting, according to NSC statistician Ken Kolosh. Other forms of distraction would push the percentage of accidents higher still, though data is scant. According to NSC’s annual report, Injury Facts (2015 edition), data shows that at any one time during daylight hours, 9 percent of drivers on the road are using cell phones while driving. About 10 percent of drivers admit to texting or e-mailing while driving.
6. Unlicensed to Kill: Research Update, AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, March 5, 2008.
7. This is the case of Abby Sletten, whom prosecutors accused of looking at Facebook photos at the time of the crash instead of paying attention to the road. As often happens in such cases, the evidence could only at most show that the Facebook app on her phone was active, not that she was actually looking at it when she crashed.
8. “After 47-Second Hearing, Driver Who Ran Over 3-Year-Old Is Found ‘Not Guilty’” by Andrea Bernstein, WNYC.org, November 19, 2014.
9. “Epidemic of Fatal Crashes” by Bill Sanderson, Wall Street Journal, February 10, 2014.
10. “Sober Drivers Rarely Prosecuted in Fatal Pedestrian Crashes in Oregon” by Aimee Green, OregonLive.com, November 15, 2011.
11. Prosecutors have no compunction about going after reckless fire starters or gun owners who negligently use firearms or leave them unattended for children to find. And neglectful parents routinely face a range of serious charges, from negligent homicide to child endangerment, as well as civil proceedings to supervise, limit, or sever their parental rights. The main exception: if the injury or endangerment occurs during a car crash, the perpetrator is unlikely to face any serious effort by the justice system to hold him or her responsible, or to deter similar behavior in the future. Cars and drivers, no matter how awful the circumstances, generally get a pass.
12. Understanding the Distracted Brain, National Safety Council White Paper, April 2012.
13. Ibid. The video can be viewed at http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2010/12/video_grand_rapids-area_mom_of.html.
14. The National Safety Council, extrapolating distraction as a likely cause based on individual crash descriptions, puts the figure at 26 percent of fatal collisions. The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, relying on official findings of distraction by police, attributes 10 percent of fatal crashes and 18 percent of injury crashes to distraction.
15. Distraction and Teen Crashes: Even Worse Than We Thought, AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, March 25, 2015.
16. Injury Facts, National Safety Council.
17. “L.A.’s Bloody Hit-and-Run Epidemic” by Simone Wilson, Los Angeles Weekly, December 6, 2012.
18. “4 out of 5 Hit and Runs Go Unsolved in LA” by Jane Yamamoto, Tena Ezzeddine, and Keith Esparros, NBCLosAngeles.com, April 25, 2015.
19. “Fatal Hit-and-Run Crashes on Rise in U.S.” by Larry Copeland, USA Today, November 10, 2013.
20. Impact Speed and a Pedestrian’s Risk of Severe Injury or Death, AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, September 2011.
21. Mass transit streetcars were similarly shunted aside as traffic impediments once a 1935 federal law forced electric utilities to divest their ownership of electric mass transit companies. This not only removed the streetcars’ source of low-cost energy but also their political clout with the local politicians setting new traffic policies. The law drove hundreds of private streetcar companies out of business within a decade.
22. An Empirical Analysis of Driver Perceptions of the Relationship Between Speed Limits and Safety by Fred Mannering, Transportation Research, Part F (2008).
23. NHTSA Finds Nearly Half of All Drivers Believe Speeding Is a Problem on U.S. Roads, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration,” December 11, 2013. The report also found that one out of five drivers admit, “I try to get where I am going as fast as I can.”
24. The Vision Zero movement began in Sweden in 1997 as a rejection of the common practice of treating injury and loss of life like any other line item in a cost-benefit analysis of a traffic or road project. Vision Zero’s core principle holds that life and health can never be bartered in exchange for a driver’s convenience or a speedier parcel delivery. Instead, Vision Zero advocates argue that the overriding goal in road design should always be to preserve and enhance safety, health, and quality of life, with all other considerations secondary.
Los Angeles’s official explanation of Vision Zero is more pragmatic: “Vision Zero is a road safety policy that promotes smart behaviors and roadway design that anticipates mistakes so that collisions do not result in severe injury or death.”
In addition to Sweden, New York, and Los Angeles, other locations with Vision Zero programs include: The nation of Norway, and the following American cities: Chicago, Austin, Boston, Seattle, Portland, and the California cities of San Francisco, San Jose, San Mateo, San Diego, and Santa Barbara.
25. “2013 Motor Vehicle Crashes: Overview,” Traffic Safety Facts, U.S. Department of Transportation, December 2014.
26. “Seat Belt Use in 2014—Overall Results,” Traffic Safety Facts, U.S. Department of Transportation, February 2015.
27. “The ‘Arms Race’ on American Roads: The Effect of Sport Utility Vehicles and Pickup Trucks on Traffic Safety” by Michelle J. White, Journal of Law and Economics, University of California, San Diego, October 2004.
28. Pounds That Kill: The External Costs of Vehicle Weight by Michael L. Anderson and Maximilian Auffhammer, University of California, Berkeley.
29. KidsAndCars.org.
30. The Cameron Gulbransen Kids Transportation Safety Act of 2007, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW–110publ189/pdf/PLAW–110publ189.pdf.
31. This directive was issued one day before the U.S. Department of Transportation was due in court for trial in a lawsuit filed by the group Public Citizen, which sought to force the department to move forward on the 2007 law. Source: March 31, 2014 press release, “Government Finally Issues Rear Visibility Safety Rule for Vehicles, Will Save Lives After Years of Needless Delay,” www.Citizen.org.
32. “Parents Share Story of Accidentally Backing over, Killing Son,” KPTV.com, April 23, 2015.
33. Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
34. Title 49 of the United States Code, Chapter 301, Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 208—Occupant Crash Protection Passenger Cars, U.S. Department of Transportation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, January 1, 1968.
35. “Would You Buy a Car with a Built-in Breathalyzer?” by Kate Ashford, Forbes, March 25, 2015.
36. Uber.
37. CalTrans.
38. “MTA Bus Driver Charged After Running Over 15-Year-Old Girl in Brooklyn, Seriously Injuring Her Leg” by Pete Donohue and Barry Paddock, New York Daily News, February 14, 2015, and “Slap ’Em with Words: Anatomy of a Daily News Editorial on Vision Zero,” BrooklynSpoke.com, February 22, 2015.
39. “Transit Workers Ratify New Deal That Means Raises and Safety Measures but Higher Health-Care Premiums,” New York Daily News, May 20, 2014.
40. The district attorney stated that charging the driver in this case with a crime under Oregon state law requires the driver to have been aware that he was driving carelessly and nonetheless continued on, leading to the accident. Being oblivious leading up to the accident, it appears, constitutes an ironclad defense.
From the Lane County (Oregon) District Attorney’s press release on the case:
“The Springfield Police Department and District Attorney’s Office have concluded that Larry LaThorpe was traveling eastbound on Main Street, at or around the posted speed limit, when he unwittingly ran a red light at 54th Street. At that time, Cortney Hudson-Crawford was walking her three children in the west crosswalk southbound on Main Street. Tragically, by the time LaThorpe and Hudson-Crawford recognized the other’s presence it was too late. Cortney Hudson-Crawford and her children were struck by LaThorpe’s vehicle. LaThorpe remained on the scene and voluntarily complied with the investigation.
“Oregon courts have held that ‘mere inadvertence, brief inattention, or errors in judgment’ are not sufficient to charge a person with criminal homicide. In order for the State to prosecute a person for criminally negligent homicide a prosecutor must prove, at a minimum, ‘that the defendant should have been aware of a problem with the defendant’s driving, such as swerving, inattention, or near collisions, before the ultimate accident giving rise to the charges.’ Because the investigation yielded no such evidence, criminal charges will not be filed against Larry LaThorpe for his role in the fatal crash on February 22, 2015.”
41. “When a Tragic Accident Is Just a Tragic Accident,” Oregonian Editorial Board, OregonLive.com, May 9, 2015.
42. “Just an Accident” by Charles Marohn, Strongtowns.org, June 9, 2015.
43. “$900 Million Penalty for G.M.’s Deadly Defect Leaves Many Cold,” New York Times, September 17, 2015.
CHAPTER 6: PIZZA, PORTS, AND VALENTINES
1. Because of union rules on speaking with the media, Tom (not his real name) asked not to be named.
2. Domino’s Pizza and “Domino’s Pizza and Its Master Franchise Model” by Adam Jones, MarketRealist.com, March 26, 2015.
3. “Timeline: A History of GM’s Ignition Switch Defect,” National Public Radio (online), March 31, 2014.
4. “Dozens of Managers Were Involved in VW’s Diesel Scandal,” Wired (online), October 14, 2015.
5. This restriction is the FAA’s long-standing rule for remote control aircraft, originally created for hobbyists, but now being applied to modern drone aircraft.
6. Sales totals for the 2014 model year, reported by automakers in 2015.
Nationally, the top ten passenger vehicles according to Edmunds.com were:
1. Ford F-150 pickup truck
2. Chevy Silverado 1500 pickup truck
3. Toyota Camry
4. Honda Accord
5. Toyota Corolla
6. Nissan Altima
7. Honda CRV
8. Honda Civic
9. Ford Escape
10. Dodge Ram 1000 pickup truck
In California, the top 10 were:
1. Honda Accord
2. Toyota Prius
3. Honda Civic
4. Toyota Camry
5. Toyota Corolla
6. Ford F-150 pickup
7. Honda CRV
8. Nissan Altima
9. Nissan Sentra
10. Silverado 1500 pickup
7. The Bakken Formation is a subterranenan layer of shale rock occupying 200,000 square miles beneath parts of North Dakota, Montana, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. The oil-rich formation is about 400 million years old but the petroleum deposits were mostly unrecoverable before recent advances in hydraulic fracturing. By the end of 2013, Bakken oil production represented more than 10 percent of the U.S. supply. The formation draws its name from the farm on which it was first discovered; the owner was Henry Bakken of Tioga, North Dakota.
8. “Bakken Crude, Rolling Through Albany,” New York Times, February 27, 2014.
9. A partial list of oil train crashes since mid-2013:
July 5, 2013: A Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway train hauling Bakken crude from North Dakota derailed, spilled 1.6 million gallons of oil, and exploded into flames in Lac-Megantic, Quebec. Forty-seven people died and thirty buildings burned.
November 8, 2013: A North Dakota oil train derailed and exploded near Aliceville, Alabama, spilling 749,000 gallons. There were no fatal injuries.
December 30, 2013: A Burlington Northern & Santa Fe oil train exploded near Casselton, North Dakota, forcing the evacuation of more than 2,000 from their homes and businesses.
January 20, 2014: Six CSX oil tank cars, part of a one-hundred-car train out of Chicago, derailed while crossing the Schuylkill River in a densely populated area of Philadelphia. The bridge is near the University of Pennsylvania campus and three hospitals, but no oil spilled or caught fire.
April 30, 2014: Fifteen cars of a crude oil train derailed and caught fire in Lynchburg, Virginia, spilling nearly 30,000 gallons of oil into the James River.
February 14, 2015: A one-hundred-car Canadian National Railway train hauling crude oil and petroleum by-products derailed in a remote part of Ontario, Canada. The blaze it ignited burned for days.
February 16, 2015: A 109-car CSX oil train derailed and caught fire near Mount Carbon, West Virginia, leaking oil into a Kanawha River tributary and burning a house to its foundation. The blaze burned for most of a week.
March 10, 2015: Twenty-one cars of a 105-car Burlington Northern & Santa Fe train hauling oil from the Bakken region of North Dakota derailed about three miles outside Galena, Illinois, a town of about 3,000 in the state’s northwest corner.
March 7, 2015: A ninety-four-car Canadian National Railway crude oil train derailed about three miles outside the northern Ontario town of Gogama. The resulting fire destroyed a bridge. The accident was twenty-three miles from the February 14 derailment.
May 6, 2015: A 109-car Burlington Northern & Santa Fe crude oil train derailed near Heimdal, North Dakota. Six cars exploded into flames and an estimated 60,000 gallons of oil spilled.
July 16, 2015: More than 20 cars from a 108-car Burlington Northern & Santa Fe oil train derailed east of Culbertson, Montana, spilling an estimated 35,000 gallons of oil.
10. State of California.
11. Rockefeller Foundation Infrastructure Survey, 2011.
12. 40 Years of the US Interstate Highway System: An Analysis of the Best Investment a Nation Ever Made by Wendell Cox and Jean Love, for the American Highway Users Alliance, June 1996.
13. “Bridging the Gap,” Economist, June 26, 2014.
14. The Global Competitiveness Report: 2014–2015, World Economic Forum (online).
15. Mapping Freight, Brookings Institution.
16. American Society of Civil Engineers.
17. After years of withering criticism and fears of a deadly disaster should one of the tunnels collapse, New Jersey governor Chris Christie reversed course in the fall of 2015 and agreed to begin planning for what will be a ten-year tunnel replacement project. Under a tentative agreement, New York and New Jersey will bear half the cost, and federal funds will cover the other half.
18. Amtrak, America’s long-distance passenger rail system, has an impressive-sounding 18,500 miles of track across thirty-nine states. But most of it is old, slow, and underused, incapable of accommodating the sorts of cross-country, high-speed, 200-mile-per-hour bullet trains running throughout Europe and Asia. Nearly a third of all rail passengers in the U.S. can be found on the 450 miles of the Northeast Corridor, home to America’s only high-speed rail, the Acela Line, with a maximum speed of 150 miles per hour. That max is slow enough by international standards, but the corridor tracks are so poor that most of the Acela route drops below 100 miles per hour. Meanwhile China has eight hundred high-speed passenger trains crisscrossing the nation at twice that speed and covering more than twelve thousand miles—the world’s largest bullet train network—while such countries as Spain, Japan, Germany, and France operate three hundred to six hundred bullet trains each. America has twenty.
19. Association of American Railroads.
20. “If the West Coast Ports Shut Down, Who Wins and Who Loses?” Los Angeles Times, April 13, 2015.
CHAPTER 7: THE LADIES OF LOGISTICS
1. From the 2016 fiscal year budget request for the U.S. Navy.
2. “The Top 100 League,” Alphaliner.com, as of July 2015.
3. The shipping lines had originally planned a three-company alliance called P3 that also would have included the third-largest shipping line, the French-based CMA-CGM Line with its fleet of 474 container vessels. The alliance would have controlled nearly 40 percent of the world’s cargo carrying capacity. It had been approved by regulators in Europe and the United States, but China rejected the plan, expressing concerns about concentration of power in shipping and fears the “de facto merger” would stifle competition.
4. “Made in the USA: More Consumers Buying American,” CNBC.com, March 6, 2013.
5. “Thirty-Nine Years of US Wood Furniture Importing: Sources and Products” by William G. Luppold and Matthew S. Bumgardner, BioResources, 2011.
6. Review of Maritime Transport, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 2014.
7. U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and “Hitting China’s Wall” by Paul Krugman, New York Times, July 18, 2013.
8. Assuming the standard five-ounce can, using sales data reported in “US 2014 Shrimp, Canned Tuna Consumption Increases Seen Offsetting Declines in Other Species” by Matt Whittaker, UnderCurrentNews.com, January 30, 2015.
9. “The Alameda Corridor: A White Paper,” School of Policy, Planning and Development, University of Southern California, June 2004.
10. New York Metropolitan Transportation Council.
11. American Trucking Association.
12. According to Operation Lifesaver, a rail-industry-sponsored organization culling data from the Federal Railroad Administration, there were 2,280 collisions between motor vehicles and trains at highway-rail crossings in 2014, killing 267 and injuring 832—the highest number of crashes and deaths since 2008. Still, the long-term trend has shown great improvement. There were 9,461 collisions, 728 deaths, and 3,292 injuries at crossings in 1981.
Better safeguards led to this improved record, although only a third of the nation’s 200,000 railroad crossings have flashing lights and moving barriers. Even those measures are an imperfect solution, as those crossings—which tend to be the busiest—still account for half of the car-train collisions every year. Drivers routinely go around the barriers or ignore warning lights as if they were merely inconveniences. Underpasses and overpasses that physically separate cars and trains are the only foolproof solution (other than closing a crossing entirely) but are usually deemed too costly or impractical.
According to Operation Lifesaver, a rail safety nonprofit founded by the rail industry:
• A typical 100-car freight train weighs the same as 4,000 automobiles combined.
• When a vehicle-train collision occurs, it is equivalent to a car crushing a soda can.
• Approximately every two hours, either a vehicle or a pedestrian is struck by a train in the U.S., an average of twelve incidents each day.
• More than half of all grade-crossing collisions occur where train speeds are 30 miles per hour or less.
• About two-thirds of all collisions at crossings in the United States happen in daylight.
13. Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority.
14. Survey Results for Containers Lost at Sea—2014 Update, World Shipping Council.
15. “EPA Bans Sooty Ship Fuel off U.S. Coasts,” Scientific American, August 12, 2012.
16. “Prevention and Control of Ship and Port Air Emissions in China,” Natural Resources Defense Council, October 2014.
17. European Commission, Climate Action.
18. Global Warming on the Road: The Climate Impact of America’s Automobiles, Environmental Defense Fund, 2006. According to the report, global automobile emissions generate 10 percent of humanity’s carbon footprint, with America responsible for almost half.
19. United Nations International Maritime Organization.
20. “Air Quality Report Card,” published by the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
21. Compared to 2005, emissions at the Port of Los Angeles had dropped 87 percent for diesel particulate matter, 85 percent for particulate matter less than 2.5 microns, 87 percent for particulate matter less than 10 microns, 31 percent for nitrogen oxides, and 97 percent for sodium oxides. Source: Air Quality Report Card, Port of Los Angeles, 2014.
22. Time and cost averages were supplied by John Slangerup, director of the Port of Long Beach, based on March 2015 rates.
23. Knatz retired from the port in 2014 when the incoming mayor of Los Angeles sought to remake his predecessor’s leadership team. Knatz continues to work on port issues as a University of Southern California professor, a member of the governance coordinating committee of the U.S. National Ocean Council, chair of the World Ports’ Climate Initiative, and with other professional organizations, as well as through her ongoing work with the Ladies of Logistics.
CHAPTER 8: ANGELS GATE
1. In later years the Marine Exchange became a nonprofit operation independent of the chamber of commerce.
2. The standard measure of a container ship’s capacity is the TEU, the twenty-foot equivalent unit. So the MSC Flavia is listed as a 12,400-TEU vessel. There are a variety of container sizes in use around the world but by far the most commonly used—the standard, in practice if not in name—is the 40-footer. That container is the equivalent of 2 TEUs, so a vessel with a 12,400-TEU capacity can carry up to 6,200 standard containers.
3. According to the Tioga Group, as reported in “What’s Needed to Ease Drayage Gridlock? Cooperation,” Journal of Commerce, March 31, 2014.
CHAPTER 9: THE BALLET IN MOTION
1. Most major ports in the U.S. have transmodal freight yards somewhere close by, which unload the forty-foot standard shipboard containers into larger fifty-three-foot boxcar-sized containers, using the same sort of gantry cranes as the ports employ. This allows shorter, more efficient trains to be built for freight movement nationwide. There are several within a few miles of the Southern California ports, serviced by the drayage fleet.
CHAPTER 10: THE LAST MILE
1. UPS. This is a daily average.
2. For 2015. From “Essential Financial and Operating Information for the 100 Largest For-Hire Carriers in the U.S. and Canada,” ttnews.com.
3. “At UPS, the Algorithm Is the Driver” by Steven Rosenbush and Laura Stevens, Wall Street Journal, February 16, 2015.
CHAPTER 11: PEAK TRAVEL
1. New Directions, 2013.
2. “Beyond Traffic,” U.S. Department of Transportation.
3. “The 3-D Printing Revolution” by Richard D’Aveni, Harvard Business Review, May 2015.
CHAPTER 12: ROBOTS IN PARADISE
1. Climbing Mount Next: The Effects of Autonomous Vehicles on Society by David Levinson, Nexus Research Group, University of Minnesota.
2. “95 percent of All Trips Could Be Made in Electric Cars,” GreenCarReports.com, January 13, 2012.
3. “Parking in Mixed-Use U.S. Districts: Oversupplied No Matter How You Slice the Pie,” Rachel R. Weinberger and Joshua Karlin-Resnick, Nelson/Nygaard Consulting Associates, August 1, 2014.
4. “Parking Infrastructure: A Constraint on or Opportunity for Urban Redevelopment?” Mikhail Chester, Andrew Fraser, Juan Matute, Carolyn Flower, and Ram Pendyala, Journal of the American Planning Association, 2015, 81(4).
5. “Driverless Cars and the Myths of Autonomy,” David Mindell, Huffington Post, October 14, 2015.
6. “Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers,” Occupational Outlook Handbook, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, accessed online, November 2015.
7. “The Big Shift Last Time: From Horse Dung to Car Smog” by Andrew Nikiforuk, TheTyee.com, March 6, 2013.
8. “The Driverless Debate: Equal Percentages of Americans See Self-Driving Cars as the ‘Wave of the Future’ Yet Would Never Consider Purchasing One,” Harris Poll, March 24, 2015.
The poll found that “Americans are split on whether self-driving vehicles are safe for those inside them, but majorities see them as a danger to pedestrians and fellow drivers.”
CHAPTER 13: THE NEXT DOOR
1. “Hit-and-Runs Take a Rising Toll on Cyclists,” Los Angeles Times, November 29, 2014.
2. Hammer Conversations, Seleta Reynolds and Janette Sadik-Khan, March 26, 2015.
3. According to Janette Sadik-Khan.
4. New York City’s Red-Light Camera Program: Myths vs. Realities, New York Department of Transportation, 2012.
5. Data from Houston Police Department, reprinted in “Crashes Doubled After Houston Banned Red Light Cameras,” Streetblogs USA, August 12, 2015.
6. According to Beyond Traffic: 2045, published online by the U.S. Department of Transportation in 2015, even a relatively small 5 percent ridership on mass transit has an impact on traffic congestion: “By one estimate if public transportation services in the 15 largest metropolitan areas in America were eliminated and their riders shifted to private vehicle travel, it would result in a 24 percent increase in traffic congestion and cost our economy more than $17 billion annually.”
7. Who Drives to Work? Commuting by Automobile in the United States: 2013, American Community Survey Report by Brian McKenzie, U.S. Census Bureau, August 2015.
8. “Frequently Asked HOV Questions,” Federal Highway Administration.
9. Modes Less Traveled—Bicycling and Walking to Work in the United States: 2008–2012, American Community Survey Reports by Brian McKenzie, U.S. Census, May 2014.
10. “Pedometer-Measured Physical Activity and Health Behaviors in U.S. Adults,” Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, October 2010.
11. “Physical Activity in an Old Order Amish Community,” Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, January 2004.
12. Mobility Plan 2035, Los Angeles City Planning Department, May 28, 2015.
13. The Decline of Walking and Bicycling, National Center for Safe Routes to School.
14. “City of the Future,” National League of Cities, Center for City Solutions and Applied Research, 2015.
15. Some critics complain that tolls, whether or not they are designed to discourage congestion, are a regressive tax that takes a greater proportion of the income of the poor than the rich (as opposed to a progressive tax, such as the U.S. income tax, which imposes higher rates on those with higher incomes). The critics are right about the regressive nature of tolls, but the entire system in use now—paying for roads through gasoline taxes, property taxes, registration fees, and, in many states, sales taxes—is already entirely regressive. A study that compared the impact of all these funding mechanisms for roads found that toll lanes were the least regressive tax because drivers still had the option to drive in adjacent free lanes: paying the tax was a choice, unlike the sales tax or the gas tax.
The study’s authors also argued that tolls were an inherently fairer method of paying for roads because they only targeted drivers. Sales and property taxes are less fair, the argument goes, because they impose the costs of driving on all taxpayers, even those who don’t drive. This is a complicated and debatable position, however, as even non-drivers benefit from the goods movement and delivery of services that roads make possible. Source: “Just Road Pricing,” by Lisa Schweitzer and Brian D. Taylor, ACCESS, Spring 2010.
16. “Too Big for the Road,” Governing, July 2007; “The Hidden Trucking Industry Subsidy,” TrueCostBlog.com, June 2, 2009; and “Overweight Trucks Damage Infrastructure,” Associated Press (via USA Today), September 10, 2007.
APPENDIX
1. According to the nonprofit group PursuitSafety, police car chases lead to one death a day in the U.S., and about 150 of those deaths every year are innocent bystanders. The data on this is uncertain and tough to come by, as reporting of car chases gone wrong is strictly voluntary for police departments, and PursuitSafety asserts that the official tally kept by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration is therefore incomplete.
Even the incomplete statistics have generated concern and reforms. Many police agencies around the country have adopted restrictions on car chases in recent years in an attempt to reduce the risk of crashes, particularly for innocent bystanders, but also to avoid using dangerous, potentially lethal tactics for minor crimes. In years past, more than 90 percent of police chases were in response to nonviolent crimes—the sort of crimes for which police officers would not normally use deadly force. A 2008 data base analysis by the International Association of Chiefs of Police broke down the reasons for police chases by percentages:
• Traffic violations started 42.3 percent of police car chases
• Stolen vehicle: 18.2 percent
• Driver believed to be intoxicated: 14.9 percent
• Violent felony: 8.6 percent
• Nonviolent felony: 7.5 percent
• Other misdemeanors: 5.9 percent
• Assisting other departments: 2.6 percent
Thirty-five to 40 percent of these chases ended in a crash.
Facts and Information About Vehicular Police Pursuits, PursuitSafety, March 2013.