Vehicularization

It's amazing how much effort we're expending on the news and the reporting of Toyota's sticky pedals...all for the prevention of a few dozen deaths, tops. Tops! I find it amazing because at the same time I routinely watch all my Elk Grovian neighbors speeding through our neighborhood streets as if every pedal was stuck to the floorboard. It is highly likely that you are one of them, simply based on the numbers.

We'll spend tens of millions in full page newspaper apologies advertisements and lost stock values and feigned CEO caterwauling and mechanic's overtime pay addressing this "safety" issue, and then, when your Toyota is finally fixed you'll go out and drive it like a complete shithead. You'll speed along our collector roads and a few of you will find yourselves involved in pedestrian fatalities or will have taken the curve too fast and will wrap yourself around a tree, into a garage door, or into a living room. You'll accelerate your beautiful Toyota vehicle quickly, increasing your gas consumption, while braking excessively, increasing your brake wear.

Indeed, far, far more of us will lose our lives to the way we drive than the problems with what we drive, yet we focus our attentions on these [mostly] trivial things that don't really matter. But we live in an autocentric nation and we build places to live that mandate vehicularization, and foolishly assume suburban Elk Grove is safe because of the way we've built it. It's safe! And safety is everything! Keep our children safe! Safe schools! Safe cars! Safe parks! Yet, the single most preventable thing we could do to promote safety in Elk Grove we refuse to do -- build roads and environments that don't promote driving like assholes. Suburbia fails for precisely this reason; traffic accidents are the most preventable cause of death while we make the ridiculous claim that suburbia is safe.

But, we value the ability to speed through wide residential streets more than the value of our neighbor's or our own lives. We live so far from the places we need to go that to speed to make up all that lost time is rationalized. We collectively accept the consequences of these actions. No big deal, we say.