You can make a difference to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event, in your town or your city! How? Reuse, repurpose, and recycle this information. You can push your local politicians to act. It will make a difference!
This is the letter for week 83 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 to see topics for all the strike letters, see this story. Meanwhile…
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
Cars: how do they kill us? Let us count the ways.
This week’s topic is Reclaiming Our Space (From Cars).
Cars? Really? What’s the problem with cars?
Well, let’s quickly consult with some experts. First up, Hanna Marcussen, Oslo’s vice mayor for urban development:
“…in many ways not restricting cars is limiting freedom of other people. Cars make it more difficult for children to play in the street or elderly people to cross the road.”1
Then there’s JH Crawford, a world expert on car-free cities:
“Today’s housing crisis stems from a lack of land. Get rid of cars and the problem is solved immediately.”2
Finally, we would hear from Devlin O’Connor (30), Tess Rothstein (30), Russell Franklin (56), Gregory Blackman (65), Kevin Manning (66), Gashaw Clark (25), Katherine Slattery (26), Heather Miller (41), or a host of others if they hadn’t been killed by cars while biking in San Francisco, often on roads the city has long known are extreme safety hazards.3
Okay, but it’s like with any weapon: Cars don’t kill people, people kill people
That would be convenient, as the NRA and tobacco industry have already created a playbook for profiting from mass murder. But it’s not only that cars hit and kill people en masse. Oh no, no, no, cars do so much more than just that.
- Particulate air pollution from cars also kills4 and sickens.5
- Cars physically shed a host of pollutants that damage and kill, from copper that destroys aquatic ecosystems6, 7 to lead (Pb) that winds up in artificial turf fields8, from the plastic that is now found even in clouds9 to the oil leakage that contaminates groundwater.10
- Let’s not forget the original greenhouse gas, CO2.11 Thirty percent of U.S. CO2 emissions are caused by transportation.12
- Cars are given first consideration and all available spaces in cities, doing great damage to small businesses, civic engagement, and public life.13, 14, 15
- Cars are increasingly used by domestic terrorists.16, 17
- Cars break up, degrade, and destroy ecosystems, migration paths, waterways, habitat, and the conditions necessary for successful breeding in plant and animal species.18, 19
All these reasons and many more20 are why communities need to control, reduce access for, and get rid of cars. Mackinac village never allowed cars in the first place and is safer and better off for the prohibition.21 Why? Because cars are bad news.22
Fine. So how do we reclaim from cars the spaces that belong to all of us?
We do this by making driving as difficult, slow, and expensive as possible and at the same time making the alternatives as easy, cheap, and quick as possible. Vision Zero was a good start but it won’t work if it’s not funded23, built, or enforced.24 So how do we do it?
- Fund, build, and enforce Vision Zero. Now.
- Get red light cameras and cameras at designated dangerous intersections up and functioning. Make placement based on data, and functioning automatic to avoid bias.
- Eliminate all parking except for taxis, buses, emergency service vehicles, the disabled, and temporary loading zones.
- Make the Slow Street closures permanent, put in speed bumps and permanent soft poles and enforce the speed limits and restrictions on them.
- Reduce the speed limits throughout the city. Maximum speed anywhere should be no higher than 20 mph.25
- Put in traffic circles and median plants, narrow the roads, put in speed bumps and speed tables everywhere, create sidewalk bulbs at intersections, and give businesses parking spaces to use for outdoor sales and dining citywide. Take back the roads.
- There is no “right to drive”. Make licensing harder and license removal easier. Which means:
- Fix public transit!! We need a ton of options, way more bike lanes, buses that can deal with the likelihood of pandemics in our future (ventilation, seating, security), and a transit first commitment across the board.
- Use the space now wasted on roads and parking lots for the community. Housing? Parks and bio highways? Bike roads? Public use spaces? Anything would be a boon. Because right now, roads function for the community like this:
- Lyft and Uber and all their ilk are raping and destroying the commons in their quest for plunder. SF needs to charge these companies compensation fees. Start with something like extralegal truck permits (extralegal car permits?) and add in the restricted commercial vehicle access to certain streets, plus require such companies to provide real-time information about vehicle use. Require all drivers for these companies to have commercial vehicle licenses. Oh, and treat enforcement of road violations for all “working” Uber and Lyft etc. vehicles as violations by commercial vehicles.
Cars rule because we let them. Their primacy is the result of greed and selfishness. Greed and selfishness are destroying the ability of this planet to support cities, civil societies, and life.
Why give the selfish and greedy sway over the majority of the city?
Is it because of the deeply ingrained Pay-to-Play politics of SF? If so, what are the benefits of working in that system now? The FBI is watching, and climate change is making it rapidly moot. And why are you groveling to the selfish and greedy anyway? They don’t care about the city, its people, or its future. They just want to chew it up to suck out as much profit as possible, then spit out the remnants.
Isn’t it about time you fight for San Francisco?
There are, at most, 6 weeks left in which to start the necessary big actions if we’re going to survive.26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33 In a little over a year, we have lost 10 years time in which to act. The U.S. has now been out of the Paris Agreement for 21 days, and every day out is making our situation worse. The need to act is obvious, our ability to survive is at stake, and the past “norms” are long gone and were killing us anyway. ACT NOW!
FOOTNOTES
1. Len Williams. “What happens when a city bans cars from its streets?” BBC. 16 October 2019. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191011-what-happens-when-a-city-bans-car-from-its-streets.
2. Len Williams. “What happens when a city bans cars from its streets?” BBC. 16 October 2019. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191011-what-happens-when-a-city-bans-car-from-its-streets.
3. Patrick Traughber. “A list of people killed while riding a bicycle in San Francisco”. Patrick Medium. Accessed 24 November 2020. https://medium.com/@ptraughber/a-list-of-people-killed-while-riding-a-bicycle-in-san-francisco-1456bbd017d9.
4. Alan Neuhauser. “100,000 Americans Die from Air Pollution, Study Finds”. U.S. News and World Report. 8 April 2019. https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2019-04-08/100-000-americans-die-from-air-pollution-study-finds.
5. Molly Hanson. “Traffic air pollution may be linked to structural brain changes”. Big Think. 29 January 2020. https://bigthink.com/mind-brain/health-effects-of-air-pollution.
6. “Copper in Brake Pads”. Copper Development Association Inc. Accessed 24 November 2020. https://www.copper.org/environment/impact/copper-brake.html.
7. Frances Solomon. “Impacts of Copper on Aquatic Ecosystems and Human Health”. Mining. January 2009. http://www.ushydrotech.com/files/6714/1409/9604/Impacts_of_Copper_on_Aquatic_Ecosystems_and_human_Health.pdf.
8. “Lead In Synthetic Turf”. Safe Healthy Playing Fields Inc. Accessed 24 November 2020. https://www.safehealthyplayingfields.org/lead-in-synthetic-turf.
9. Stephen Leahy. “Microplastics are raining down from the sky”. National Geographic. 15 April 2019. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/04/microplastics-pollution-falls-from-air-even-mountains/.
10. Bars Leaks. “The Environmental Consequences of Automotive Fluid Leaks”. Bar’s Leaks. 1 November 2017. https://barsleaks.com/general/the-environmental-consequences-of-automotive-fluid-leaks/.
11. “Monthly Average Mauna Loa CO2”. Global Monitoring Laboratory: Earth System Research Laboratories: NOAA. Accessed 24 November 2020. https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/. If you want to know, the CO2 ppm is now at 411.28, up from the same month last year, up from any previous time in human history.
12. “Car Emissions and Global Warming”. Union of Concerned Scientists. 18 July 2014. https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/car-emissions-global-warming.
13. Tom Vanderbilt. “The Pandemic Shows What Cars Have Done to Cities”. The Atlantic. 24 April 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/pandemic-shows-what-cities-have-surrendered-cars/610423/.
14. Brad Plumer. “Cars take up way too much space in cities. New technology could change that.” Vox. Accessed 24 November 2020. https://www.vox.com/a/new-economy-future/cars-cities-technologies. Please note that the plans mentioned include those of SF.
15. Alana Semuels. “Highways Destroyed America’s Cities”. The Atlantic. 25 November 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/highways-destroyed-americas-cities/417789/.
16. Hannah Allam. “Vehicle Attacks Rise As Extremists Target Protesters”. NPR. 21 June 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/06/21/880963592/vehicle-attacks-rise-as-extremists-target-protesters.
17. Sam Petulla. “Vehicles Are Becoming the Weapons of Choice for Terrorists”. NBC News. 17 August 2017. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/vehicles-are-becoming-weapons-choice-terrorists-n768846.
18. Transportation Research Board and National Research Council. Assessing and Managing the Ecological Impacts of Paved Roads. The National Academies Press. 2005. pgs. 62 - 97. https://doi.org/10.17226/11535.
19. Jacob Hill. “The Environmental Impact of Roads”. Environmental Science. Accessed 25 November 2020. https://www.environmentalscience.org/roads.
20. Distracted drivers, road salt pollution, poisoning the political system for corporate profit like with Prop 22, and so much more.
21. Stephen Messenger. “Meet the One City in America Where Cars Have Been Banned Since 1898”. Treehugger. 11 October 2018. https://www.treehugger.com/one-city-in-america-where-cars-have-been-banned-4857076.
22. National Geographic Staff. “The environmental impacts of cars, explained”. National Geographic. Accessed 25 November 2020. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/green-guide/buying-guides/car/environmental-impact/.
23. Carly Graf. “San Francisco not on track to meet Vision Zero goals by 2024”. San Francisco Examiner. 21 October 2020. https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/san-francisco-not-on-track-to-meet-vision-zero-goals-by-2024/.
24. Carly Graf. “Police have pledged to target dangerous driving behaviors. So why is enforcement down?” San Francisco Examiner. 25 November 2020. https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/police-have-pledged-to-target-dangerous-driving-behaviors-so-why-is-enforcement-down/.
25. Bill Lindeke. “Chart of the Day: Pedestrian Crash Survival Rates by Age and Speed of Car”. Streets MN. 23 June 2016. https://streets.mn/2016/06/23/chart-of-the-day-pedestrian-crash-survival-rates-by-age-and-speed-of-car/.
26. Matt McGrath. “Climate change: 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months”. BBC News. 24 July 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48964736.
27. Heather Smith. “Climate Change: Even Worse Than We Thought”. Sierra. 8 October 2018. https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/climate-change-even-worse-we-thought-ipcc-report.
28. Michael Grose and Julie Arblaster. “Just how hot will it get this century? It’s worse than we thought”. Phys Org. 18 May 2020. https://phys.org/news/2020-05-hot-century-worse-thought.html.
29. Amelia Urry. “The scientist who first warned of climate change says it’s much worse than we thought”. Grist. 22 March 2016. https://grist.org/science/the-scientist-who-first-warned-of-climate-change-says-its-much-worse-than-we-thought/.
30. Rafi Letzter. “Today’s Climate Change Is Worse Than Anything Earth Has Experienced in the Past 2,000 Years”. Live Science. 25 July 2019. https://www.livescience.com/66027-climate-change-different.html.
31. John D. Sutter. “Vanishing”. CNN. Accessed 30 June 2020. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2016/12/specials/vanishing/.
32. Peter Castagno. “Biodiversity Loss Worst in Human History — 1 Million Animal Species Risk Extinction”. Citizen Truth. 6 May 2019. https://citizentruth.org/biodiversity-loss-worst-in-human-history-1-million-animal-species-risk-extinction/.
33. Kristen Callihan. “Earth’s Currently Ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction Is Worse Than We Thought”. OutwardOn. 7 August 2017. https://www.outwardon.com/article/earths-currently-ongoing-sixth-mass-extinction-event-is-worse-than-we-thought/.