The debate over the true cost of cars
published June 9, 2003
written and photographed by Nick Hoff / San Francisco
"Let's go, let's go, let's go!" chant the thousands of bicyclers in San Francisco's Justin Herman Plaza. Gathered for the monthly Critical Mass ride, this gleeful mob will pour into city streets after work, stopping traffic, angering motorists, and generally having a good time. Since Critical Mass' founding a decade ago, the group has emerged in hundreds of cities, from Warsaw to Taipei.
Though some are just along for the ride, many cyclists have anti-car sentiments they wish to make known. "End Petrotyranny," reads the hand-written sign pinned to the back of one rider. "The war and our car use is completely connected," he says as he waits for the March ride to begin.
"The auto is bad technology--gasoline, pollution, isolation, war," rattles off Critical Mass co-founder Chris Carlsson as he taps on the drums and cowbell that festoon his bike. A wire sprouting from his black hat dangles a dollar bill that jumps to his rhythm.
Then, true to the group's anarchist principles, the riders lumber off spontaneously with no predetermined route or leader. It's time to take back the streets from those hurtling steel boxes, if only for an evening.
Critical Mass and its like-minded brethern are the public face of the anti-car movement, doing whatever it takes to discourage, annoy, and guilt-trip drivers off the road. For them, the car is the root of most evil, poisoning the environment and chewing up communities. The two- and three-car garage, the parking lot, and the elevated highway have usurped front porches, dense shops, and vibrant downtown hubs. Whether cars are wee Minis or hulking Hummers, they are "big, greedy, and aggressive," in the words of Charles Komanoff, an activist who works with www.cars-suck.org and the Bridge Tolls Advocacy Project. "They make everything the same, and they crowd out everything else."
| Though contemporary anti-car protest has its roots in 1960s activism, today rebellion foments in policy institutes, environmentalist organizations, fringe political groups, and academia. In the form of Arianna Huffington's anti-SUV ads and the What Would Jesus Drive? campaign, it even threatens to go mainstream. For the most part, today's activists have spurned old-school revolutionary rhetoric. They are confronting the beast on its own terms: Armed with economic analysis and appeals to free markets, they hope to slay the dragon of American auto-dependence and usher in an era of clean mass transit and dense, vibrant urbanity. |  |
The theoretical backbone behind opposition to automobiles is the search for the "true cost" of driving. To reverse the transformation cars have imposed on our cities and communities, the argument goes, drivers should pay for the havoc cars wreak. If transportation were priced fairly, anti-car activists claim, people would choose places to live that favor dense, urban areas and relegate the car to occasional family trips and Sunday drives. Although anti-car papers debate the "true cost" of driving--a figure proving to be rather slippery--some critics claim that the anti-car argument is riddled with economic errors and that the debate goes much deeper to basic issues of freedom and coercion.
Driving us into the ground