[Carfreeliving] War against the car

[Tom Radulovich]

Thanks, Cheryl!

The Wall Street Journal has been notoriously cranky for quite some  
time, but this one is quite something. Nevertheless I found two  
things encouraging in it. The first is that the author's truisms --  
increasing resource consumption equals progress, more consumption is  
always better than less, and that progress means greater automobile  
dependence  -- are put forward so defensively; fifty years ago, they  
were hardly questioned. Second, the second graders get that something  
is wrong with automobile dependence. Maybe, as the author suggests,  
they will all grow up and get over it, but maybe it is like  
recycling, where  kids who learned about recycling in school became  
little recycling enforcers at home, and kept recycling as adults.  
Recycling is another thing that was odd fifty years ago, but is  
hardly so now.

William Irwin Thompson wrote: "If a political policy is unsound, one  
discovers it through noise. Noise is an expression of the ignored and  
the unknown, of the irrelevant and the unvalued. As the noise builds  
up it reaches  a point in which it overwhelms the signal, and then  
one gets a reversal in which the noise begins to be heard as  
information and the old signals fade into a background hum, a musak  
of buzzwords and archaic rhetoric". We used to be the noise; maybe we  
are at the tipping point where we become the signal and Wall Street  
Journal editorials are the noise. Have we won yet? Let me know when  
it happens, so I can go back to reading books and working in the garden.

Tom Radulovich
Executive Director
Transportation for a Livable City
995 Market Street Suite 1550
San Francisco CA 94103
415 344-0489
www.livablecity.org
tom at livablecity.org



On Dec 12, 2005, at 10:55 AM, Brinkman, Cheryl wrote:

> I know it's the Wall Street Journal, not really a bastion of  
> progressivism, but it's still shocking to know that a presumably  
> intelligent person could engage in such simplistic thinking.
>
> I love the idea that New Orleans could have been evacuated if only  
> everyone had a car.  Houston tried that, it was called gridlock.   
> We saw friends from Houston last week, they told us about their  
> experience evacuating, 6 hours to go 30 miles, a total of 16 for a  
> normally 3 hour trip-  the kicker: they took both their cars.  Mom  
> and son in one, Dad in the other.
>
>
> Sounds like the second graders are smarter then this guy.
>


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