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This is the letter for week 131 of a weekly climate strike that went on for 4 years in front of San Francisco City Hall, beginning early March 2019. For more context, see this story. For an annotated table of contents of the topics for all the strike letters, see this story. Meanwhile…
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
Why do we allow dinosaurs to roam San Francisco? It’s crazy!
That’s why this week’s topic is Dinosaurs — Unsafe In San Francisco!
We need to get dinosaurs out of SF
Why?
- Many dinosaurs move far too fast for human safety. Dinosaur-human collisions kill humans.
- Many dinosaurs are too massive to move safely around us and unintentionally cause great harm.
- Combine large mass with high acceleration and you’ve got substantial dinosaur force being thrown around in shared public places, endangering us all.
- Dinosaurs leave their waste all over the place.
- And they frequently kill humans because it’s in their natures to do so.
That’s why we can’t have dinosaurs roaming the streets of San Francisco! It’s a crisis!
Wait.
Did I say DINOSAURS? I meant CARS.
How are cars like dinosaurs?
Some of them move far too fast for human safety. Many (SUVs, big rigs, etc.) are too massive to move safely around us. Combine mass with acceleration (F = m x a) and you’ve got substantial force being thrown around in shared public places, endangering us all. Cars leave their waste all over the place.1 And they all too frequently kill humans because it’s in their natures to do so.
Cars kill, but you let them drive (pun intended) city policy
Cars kill, unequivocally; in SF, they kill a very high number of people per mile driven.2 But how do cars drive city policy? Let us count the ways:
- the Upper Great Hwy
- JFK Drive
- Vision Zero getting nowhere
- housing (roads for cars but no space for housing)
- parking (space for parking is still a major consideration for every change, every project)
- the Tenderloin (how long did they have to fight for less lethal speeds in their neighborhood?)
- Slow Streets (that we are holding on to by putting our bodies on the line every time we use them)
- lack of transit (even before Covid route cancellations, there were huge areas of SF with little to no transit from a lack of lines or frequency or both, almost entirely in the southwest, south, and southeast parts of the city)
- lack of enforcement
SF is a Transit First city? Really? Prove it.
Cars aren’t a right, they aren’t even a privilege; they are killers
Cars aren’t in the state or federal constitution, and licenses aren’t automatic or required for civic life. Car ownership is costly in every way possible: money, percent of income, as an economic tax on the poorest, CO2 production, other pollution, health outcomes, traffic deaths and maimings, noise pollution, lead burden, and impact on international situations from the murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa to the rule of the fossil fuel companies.3 Roads kill communities and small businesses, and destroy more sustainable and equitable infrastructure (like railroads and transit). And then cars directly kill.4
The obvious solution is to get rid of cars5
Dear Editor,
Cars are killing us. According to the National Safety Council, over 42,000 Americans died from car crashes in 2020, a sharp increase in American car carnage. But let’s say you avoid getting run over — cars also kill by air pollution. According to The World Counts, 8.9 million people are killed by air pollution each year, and the total is rapidly rising. What if you don’t get lung cancer or asthma or respiratory failure — cars also kill by climate change. According to the EPA, transportation makes up 29% of American greenhouse gas emissions, making it the biggest contributor of any sector. Cars kill. San Francisco is a Transit First city. Isn’t it time SF took that title seriously and did something to get cars off the roads?
FOOTNOTES
1. CO2, CO, NOx, SO2, O3, hydrocarbons, benzene, formaldehyde, heat, airborne particulates from incomplete combustion or mechanical decomposition (including soot and metal fragments), oil, anti-freeze, Cu (from brakes), Pb (from leaded gasoline — still in the soil downwind of freeways to this day), rubber, plastics, glass, battery acid, and then there’s oil spills, pipeline break spills, transportation spills, refinery off-gassing and burns, damaged and destroyed ecosystems from spills and drilling and transportation and refining, noise, and so much more.
2. “Vital Signs”. MTA. Accessed 26 October 2021. https://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/fatalities-crashes and “City Performance Scorecards: Traffic Fatalities”. City and County of San Francisco. Accessed 26 October 2021. https://sfgov.org/scorecards/transportation/traffic-fatalities.
3. Tess Riley. “Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says”. The Guardian. 10 July 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change.
4. Hunter Oatman-Stanford. “Murder Machines: Why Cars Will Kill 30,000 Americans This Year”. Collectors Weekly. 10 March 2014. https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/murder-machines/.
5. George Monbiot. “Cars are killing us. Within 10 years, we must phase them out”. The Guardian. 7 March 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/07/cars-killing-us-driving-environment-phase-out.