Author: Hank Garfield

A Convenience and a Catastrophe

Hank Garfield

The private car is a convenience for its owner, and an ongoing environmental disaster for the planet.

We’ve known this for a long time, of course. Yet because we Americans live in a First World country whose transportation infrastructure has been built for cars, we rarely stop to think in any comprehensive manner about the destructive habits of our car-driven way of life. Those Americans who do care about the environment invest in electric or hybrid cars, as if carbon emissions were the worst of the problems caused by ubiquitous car ownership.

A study in the 1990s by the Heidelberg Institute of Global Health in Germany details how the automobile impacts the environment during all three stages of its existence, from manufacture through its operational lifetime to its disposal. Last year, a new study was published in the Journal of Transport Geography entitled “Car Harm: A global review of automobility’s harm to people and the environment.” Its research and conclusions are sobering.

The study divides the harm done by cars into four broad categories: violence (car crashes and intentional violence such as bombings, drive-shootings and road rage); ill health (air quality, isolation, sedentary lifestyles); social injustice (unequal distribution of harm and access to resources); and environmental degradation (resource extraction, pollution, land use, climate change). It’s hard to argue with the thesis stated in the study’s introduction:

“Cars are the default mode of transportation in thousands of cities, suburbs and towns around the world… While some people benefit from the default position of cars, nearly everyone – whether or not they drive, is harmed by it.”

The study contains some eye-opening statistics. Currently, there are about 2 billion motor vehicles in use worldwide, about 1.3 billion of which are cars. (The study defines a “car” as a vehicle used to transport people and small amounts of cargo, including sedans, SUVs, pickup trucks, vans and taxis.)  But those 1.3 billion cars are distributed unevenly among the world’s 8 billion people. Although China now has more total cars than the United States, we own cars at four times their per capita rate. The Netherlands, a small, flat, bicycle-friendly country, has more cars than Nigeria, which has 12 times as many people.

The harm done by cars is also uneven. It falls hardest in places where car ownership is not widespread. Lead batteries from cars are dismantled in poor countries whose citizens lack the mobility provided by cars but nonetheless suffer the harmful effects of automotive lead exposure. Rubber for tires comes from plantations in Liberia where workers earn slave wages so that we can drive to weekend sporting events.

Traffic crashes kill 3500 people per day worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, traffic crashes are the leading cause of death for children over four and adults under 30. Africa has the highest crash death rate per capita, Europe the lowest. In the United States, crash deaths per capita declined in the early years of this century but have since begun to climb again.

Those crash deaths include victims outside of the car, such as pedestrians and cyclists, who have become much more vulnerable with the proliferation of SUVs. A 2023 study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that “pickup trucks, SUVs and vans with a hood height greater than 40 inches are 45% more likely to cause fatalities than shorter vehicles with a hood height of 30 inches or less.”

The devastation wrought by cars is not limited to the cars themselves but is distributed throughout the whole automotive infrastructure. Limited-access highways and their attendant exit ramps, interchanges and service areas consume acres of land that serve no productive purpose and cause problems through chemical run-off and radiation of heat back into the atmosphere. Parking lots, built for the express purpose of temporarily storing cars, are even worse offenders.

None of this is news. We have it within our means to address all these issues. Yet many of us would rather just keep driving and owning cars, and damn the consequences. “The current status quo,” the JTG report concludes, “prioritizes the movement and storage of cars above the safety, health, dignity, and wellbeing of people and the environment. It took just a few decades for nearly every city on Earth to be remade from a pedestrian-centric place to an automobile-centric place. Perhaps in a few more decades, [we] will have once again remade cities – this time into safer, healthier, and more just environments.”

When Driving Isn’t An Option

Hank Garfield

One-third of Americans don’t or can’t drive. In Maine, according to the Moving Maine Network, some 83,000 adults don’t have a driver’s license. One might think that this represents a potent constituency for change in our transportation system.

It should. But public policy tends to be made by people with access to automobiles, usually their own. The one-third figure makes non-drivers a significant minority, but a minority nonetheless. Voters are much more likely to approve a new highway than they are to support expanded bus service and bicycle lanes.

We who are physically able to drive and have the financial wherewithal to own vehicles tend to dismiss the needs and desires of those who can’t drive. A few weeks ago, I picked up a new book titled When Driving Is Not An Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency. I also got to meet and briefly chat with the author, Anna Letitia Zivarts, who describes herself as “a low-vision mom and non-driver.” She was born with a neurological condition called nystagmus, which renders her unable to operate a motor vehicle.

I can’t honestly describe myself as a non-driver. My license is current, and my credit card information is on file at Budget Rent-a-Car, which I use about a dozen times a year. Zivarts has a term for people like me: “choice” non-drivers. I could, if I wanted to, take out a car loan and make monthly payments and buy insurance and go in for regular oil changes and buy new snow tires every Maine winter. Been there, done that.

Those car rentals, depending on the season, cost me about a hundred dollars a day. The most up-to-date estimate from the American Automobile Association of the average annual cost of owning a vehicle is above $12,000. This means that I could rent a car 120 times a year – every three days – before it would cost as much as owning one.

But Zivarts’s book is not about people like me, though she welcomes us into what she calls “the non-driver movement.” It made me stop and think about many of my fellow citizens whom I see regularly on the bus, and who don’t have a choice, when beset by something like a pandemic, to retreat into the privacy of their cars.

What I am is a non-car owner, a cumbersome phrase that describes my choice not to spend money supporting an exclusionary infrastructure. Though I quit cars mostly for economic reasons, I am concerned about the automobile’s effects on climate, land use, and increasingly belligerent public behavior.

Zivarts focuses, rightly, on people forcibly excluded from the car culture for physical or financial reasons. When I gave up car ownership, I discovered that I needed to plan my days and weeks more effectively. I needed to schedule appointments with transportation foremost on my mind. I had to shop more locally and at a smaller scale. I had to look at bus routes before renting an apartment. Of necessity, I walked more. Sometimes I passed on social events because I could not get there.

This is everyday life for people who can’t drive. Yet businesses, hospitals, schools, and local governments, with the tacit approval of car owners, effectively discriminate against one-third of the population. Most businesses provide free parking for their employees but not free bus passes. (The University of Maine, where I work, is a laudable exception.) Many hospital procedures require a patient to be accompanied by a driver. Bike racks are hard to find at most shopping malls and big-box stores.

Zivarts argues for change in public policy, but more importantly, for change in public attitudes. “Car-dependent communities aren’t just failing those of us who can’t drive,” she writes. “They are failing everyone.” Just as more bicycles on the road make driving safer by forcing drivers to be more alert and aware, so do options other than driving make towns and cities more pleasant places to live.

“What nondrivers need – what we all need – is a transformation of the way we organize mobility, housing, and public space so that we have options for getting around that do not rely on driving a car,” Zivarts writes. Amen to that.

When Driving Is Not An Option is available from Island Press.

Where Have All the Small Stores Gone?

Hank Garfield

A packet of jigsaw blades fits easily into a pocket of my autumn jacket. It so happened that I needed a blade on a recent November afternoon, and I had to think a minute on the easiest way to get one.

There used to be a hardware store in Penobscot Plaza that I could walk to. There used to be one on Broadway that was easy to reach to by bus. But they are gone. With a twinge of sadness, I realized that my best option was Home Depot, out on Stillwater Avenue, one of Bangor’s busiest car corridors. I slung my bicycle onto the Community Connector bus and headed off to the nearest corporate megastore to buy an item smaller than my hand.

We had been doing a home construction project, the lovely Lisa and I, and so far, everything too heavy or too bulky to carry home had been delivered. But sometimes you need to run out and get something. This is when owning a car can seem like a necessity – or at least an awfully handy convenience.

The store is set back from the street by a massive parking lot, sectioned off by raised asphalt islands into smaller lots. There is no designated bus stop, no sidewalk or walkway for pedestrians. Nor are any bike racks in evidence. Bus passengers must navigate the parking lot on foot, and bicyclists at their peril. I locked my bike to an outdoor display of garden tools and went in to find my blades.

As I pedaled home through the car traffic, I pondered the absurdity of operating a two thousand-pound, gas-burning, space-occupying machine to obtain one pocket-sized package of saw blades. Doesn’t anybody consider this, well, wasteful?

It’s bad enough for someone like me, who has chosen not to own a car and to live with the inconveniences. It’s worse for people who have no choice: those who can’t drive, due to medical, financial, or other reasons.

In 1999, I packed my kids, the dog, the cat, and all our worldly belongings into an Aerostar van and a U-Haul trailer and moved from California to Maine. We tried to take local roads instead of the Interstate when we could. As we went through Illinois and Indiana, we began to sense the same story in every town. The brick post office and a church or two in the old town center, and then, a mile or more away, at the junction with the highway, a cluster of the same 15 or 20 corporate businesses. The same chains in every town. I hoped it would never happen to Maine.

But it has. It just took a quarter of a century longer to happen here. You can no longer walk down to Joe’s Hardware Store and buy a rake, or a set of jigsaw blades, or anything else you might need. You have been handed another reason to own and drive a car, and another alternative has been eliminated.

It’s not just hardware stores. Downtown of small cities like Bangor seem to be replete with restaurants and bars and places to buy art or antiques, but mostly devoid of outlets for the practical items of day-to-day life. I’ve had similar problems getting ink cartridges, fresh fruit, cleaning supplies, clothing, and scotch tape. The whole idea of walkable cities and downtowns is predicated on the idea that people can live, work and shop in a small area. If you must go to an outlying box store to get what you need, doesn’t that defeat the purpose? Shouldn’t city planners be considering this when they draw up zoning regulations?

Car ownership would not seem like such a necessity in an environment where Joe’s Hardware could coexist with Home Depot. But powerful forces seem to want as many of us to drive and own cars as possible. Never mind the millions of Americans excluded from such a system, or the damage our dependence on cars inflicts on the natural world. The car is encouraged and incentivized at every turn.

But we can do something about it, however small and incremental. We can patronize pedestrian-friendly businesses. We can eschew drive-throughs. As much as possible, we can avoid the big-box stores. There isn’t always a choice. That’s why we need to use the choices we still have.