If you drive, you need to read this article.

[upstart_crow]

This is everything, EVERYTHING, I have been trying for over a decade to tell people with driving privileges about: how underfunded public transportation, inadequate facilities, and ableist street design endangers lives. Only, because I'm a guilty of being a non-driving adult, few people pay any attention to me

Comments

[impressioniste]

I am so very tired of shitty drivers who deliberately break the law. I treat driving like the privilege that it is.

I was a non-driver for ages. I only learned a few years ago, unfortunately out of necessity. I feel like I have far more respect for it than many people who have been doing it since they were 15 or 16 and just take it for granted that it's their somehow God-given right to rule the road with their several-thousand-pound mobile instrument of potential death.

[marrael]

This was almost too painful to read. When I was a lonely college student without a car living by myself in Lexington, Kentucky, I could have a mall/supermarket *within spitting distance* but no way to get there if there happened to be a highway between me and it. If I relied on the bus, it could take over an hour to reach the place only because I didn't want to risk life and limb to pick up groceries or the occasional need for the bookstore. The stupidity of it all made me want to cry. Even if I KNEW and KNOW the reasons for it (Fast Food Nation--the book--actually did a good job explaining US car culture), it didn't/doesn't make the utter shitastic FAILURE of city-/transportation-planning in most US cities any less painful.

[dichroic]

I think the listening is even worse because so many of the people affected are less-privileged - poor, and/or of color, and/or female. In the Phoenix area, the public transit system is bad enough that anyone wanting to catch a bus would need to drive to the bus stop (in theory it would be possible to walk or bike a few km; I for one cannot do that in 115-degree F heat). The people who rely on the bus system most tend to live in areas like the mostly-Latino Guadalupe. The bus stops are more frequent there, admittedly, but then there's still the problem of getting where you need to go. But Guadalupe (often called the Barrio by locals) doesn't have the tax base that, say, Scottsdale has, so I don't think they get much of a voice in decisions about e.g. the (extremely limited) light rail system the Greater Phoenix area has recently finally put in

[thunderpigeon]

This is horribly sad.

I don't think I can say any more without ranting.

[veronica1985]

I was appalled when I first heard about this. Sending that poor woman to jail? Are you f**king kidding me? She will be punishing herself for the rest of her life! Her children need their mother... this is not right