These opinions and thhoughts belong to those who run this website. Feel free to disagree all you like.
Self-Reflection Questions
Please remember that “need” and “want” are two diffent words that mean two different things.
- Do you need a car or do you want a car?
- Would a car be convenient or is a car a necessity without which you would die?
- Do you need a truck or do you want a truck?
- Could you take a train?
- Could you take a bus?
- Could you take a train or a bus and then take a Lyft/Uber/taxi/bike/scooter/etc. or roll or walk the rest of the way?
- Could you share a ride with a friend or do you need to drive in separate cars?
- Do you need to make that light or do you want to make that light?
- Do you actually stop at all stop signs or do you roll through most of them?
- Do you think it’s weird that police officers today spend most of their time enforcing traffic laws?
- Do you understand that you have almost no legal rights inside of a car?
- Do you stop and let pedestrians (vulnerable fleshy human beings that aren’t wrapped in 4,000 lbs of steel) safely cross the street or do you pretend you don’t see them and keep driving?
- Are you stuck in traffic or are you and your car traffic to the people behind you?
- Could you walk or roll somewhere rather than drive? Could you enjoy that time with your thoughts?
- Do you ever use your phone when you’re driving, even if it’s when you’re stopped at a light or in traffic?
- Is your convenience more important than someone else’s life?
- Does your car need a TV in it?
- Is your car designed to muffle and drown out the sounds of other cars and the world? Why?
- Are car commercials realistic or do they should you a pretend ideal?
- Do you understand how heavy your car is?
- Do you understand how much force your car exerts when it’s going 25mph? 35mph? 80mph?
- Do you know anyone who’s been hit and injured or killed by a car?
- Do you care more about parks or highways?
- How many animals are killed by motor vehicles every year?
- Do you have more grass and plants near where you live or concrete?
- Would you let your children put their face next to the exhaust pipe of your vehicle and breath in the fumes?
- Do you know the toll on the planet that’s taken to mine and process everything needed for an electric car battery?
- How much money do you spend on driving every month?
- How much money does your government spend on roads every year?
- Do you feel safe letting your child ride a bike or roll or walk where you live or do the streets feel too dangerous?
- Which came first, the car or the road?
- How long have human beings survived without cars?
- If cars suddenly vanished, could you walk or roll to get groceries in under 30 minutes?
- Are there any shops where you live that you can walk or roll to?
- Can you walk or roll to nature and outdoorsy areas near you to appreciate wildlife?
- Are you the most important person on earth?
- Are bigger cars safer for the people inside? What about the people outside the car?
- Do you honk your horn when you are frustrated or only when there is an emergency?
- Do you think you would be happier if you did not need a car or truck?
- If your truck was so tall you could not see your own child and you ran them over and killed them do you think you should go to prison for your negligence and having murdered your own child? Or is it just a boo-boo whoopsie and it should be called an “accident”? Having a tall car is more important than having a kid anyway, right?
Cars are Subsidized by United States Government Welfare
In many areas car parking is a social service provided for free when people pay into a communal social tax fund.
The government offers discounts for trade-ins, subsidies for cars, tax exemptions for cars. The government helps defer the price of gasoline to help citizens and offers social services to plow and maintain roads.
The government enforces the creation of parking and parking lots.
If you enjoy driving and all of its perks then you enjoy government subsidized socialist welfare programs.
Slow Down
Not just cars, trucks, but everyone. Slow down. Physically slow down. Mentally slow down. Drive slower. Move slower. Someday you will die and nothing can stop that.
Cars and Trucks are for Lazy People
We don’t use cars, trucks, and other dangerous motor vehicles because they better us. We use them because they are easy to use.
Granted, some cars, trucks, etc. have value. Fire trucks, ambulances, food delivery, buses, trains, vehicles needed for assistive/adaptive needs; these all add value until we find better alternatives.
Driving a car a few blocks to grab Dunkin’ Donuts or a six-pack is lazy. Driving a car when you know you could take a train or a bus or a bike or roll or walk is lazy. Drive-thrus are for lazy people. Parking in your car with the engine on so you can feel warm or cool is lazy. Riding around your neighborhood in a mobile 4,000 lb air conditioned/heated steel living room is lazy. Driving 20 miles to enjoy a park is insane. Thinking you need two-day or faster deliveries to your doorstep when you shop online is lazy. Driving to the grocery store when you could walk is lazy.
America is lazy.
It’s not all your fault though. It’s not all my fault. It’s natural and primal in some ways to want to be lazy. I imagine an ancient mental mechanism still in all humans is the desire to be lazy so that we can conserve our energy if an animal were to attack us.
The system is lazy. We need to unravel decades of laziness to make better public infrastructure.
Cars and Trucks are Getting Taller, Heavier, and Deadlier
Some modern car blind zones are 16 feet. Taller cars increase the likelihood of not noticing a child is in front.
There are many dangers in life, but the destructive potential of a car, truck, or any variety of automobile is remarkable. With almost no effort a human can send thousands of pounds of metal hurling down a road. The faster a driver moves their car, the more force it exerts in a crash. On average ~100 people die every day in the USA because of car related fatalities [1], [2], [3], [4].
The ease with which a human being can operate a car belies how dangerous and destructive they can be to other human being. Cars are heavy machinery.
Consider this. The social media posts on the home page represent only a tiny fraction of the driver negligence that occur constantly. These are moments that happened to be photographed, that happened to be uploaded to the Internet, that I happened to see and felt like posting here.
Humans make mistakes. “This will never happen to me. I would never do this as a driver”, are foolish thoughts. Even a slow moving motor vehicle can flip and kill the driver or others.
More than 7,000 pedestrians were killed on our nation’s roads in crashes involving a motor vehicle in 2020. That’s about one death every 75 minutes.
Unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death for Americans aged 1-44 years old. Unintentional injuries include opioid overdoses (unintentional poisoning), motor vehicle crashes, and unintentional falls.
The transportation sector is one of the largest contributors to anthropogenic U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Self-Driving and Electric Cars Are Not The Answer
Teslas are not magic. Self-driving cars are deadlier than human drivers in many ways.
Self-driving and electric cars still create traffic, pollution, and take space away from people.