Michael Lissack 40,000 other stalled commuters. Anyone who commutes an hour a day in each direction spends seven weeks of the year sitting in his car. The social costs of the automobile are staggering. About 45,000 people are killed on the highways each year and hundreds of thousands are injured and maimed. More than 60 percent of the land of most U.S. cities is taken up by the movement, storage, and servicing of vehicles. Whole neighborhoods are razed to make way for highways. In most suburban communities at least 40 percent of police work is directly related to automobiles, as is a good portion of ambulance and hospital service. The costs of all this driving in terms of pollution, which includes everything from increased lung diseases all the way up to global warming, are beyond calculation. The cost to society in terms of money spent building and maintaining roads and paying for traffic police, courts, accidents, insurance, is also titanic. The least understood cost, al- though probably the most keenly felt, has been the sacrifice of a sense of place: the idea that people and things exist in some sort of continuity, that we belong to the world physically and chronologically, and that we know where we are. The automobile requires communities to spread out, causing prema- ture obsolescence of streetcar neighborhoods whose compactness cannot accommodate cars; higher food transportation costs as farms on the met- ropolitan fringe are displaced by suburban sprawl; higher costs for sewage construction, road maintenance, and other thinly spread services. At the same time mass transit, perhaps the most efficient, cleanest, and safest form of transporting goods and people, falls into further decay. The government’s role has been to subsidize the auto industry with multi-billion-dollar high- way programs while slashing rail services. Highways and automobiles have become integral to our lives at the exclusion of alternatives. Today, when those alternatives beckon with a promise of a better tomorrow, established interests fight to preserve their exclusivity. And the quality of our lives suf- fers without discussion and without debate. Our lack of choice reflects our lack of understanding. Back in the 1980’s, because capital is perceived as perhaps the most complex of subjects, the good citizens of West Virginia were denied even the most feeble of discus- sions for one of their worst ripoffs. When the word “finance” is mentioned
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