05 Jan Highway safety — is “car culture” to blame?
Bruce Wark is concerned about “the total costs of our car culture.”
I feel that deaths and injuries are a subset of those costs. I also feel that your argument with Tim [Bousquet] is rather narrow and that when it comes to overall transportation policy, you’re probably both on the same side. [See previous instalments here and here, on Halifax Examiner, here and here, and on twitter ad nauseam.]
Although there have been improvements in fatality and injury rates, there is still a lot of suffering associated with car crashes. The Hamm government made things worse with those absurd changes to auto insurance that widened the definition of “minor” or “soft tissue” injuries. The NDP loosened the restrictions a bit, but the big insurance companies are still in the driver’s seat if you’ll pardon the pun.
I mention this because it’s indicative of a bias I see in public policy. Over the last half century, bus and train services have been steadily withdrawn making people dependent on automobiles. This narrowing of transportation choices was accompanied by massive highway construction projects beginning in the 1950s, not just in Nova Scotia but in all provinces and in the US where interstate highways were seen as a defence against the threat of nuclear annihilation. The partnership between governments and the auto industry brought jobs and prosperity in the post-war boom years, but there’s no denying public policy has deliberately narrowed transportation choices.
This plays into another bias in public policy, a bias which sees private spending as a source of growth and prosperity, while public spending, however necessary, is a drag on the economy. So, we have a public transportation system that revolves around privately owned technology. The car is an excellent example of the intersection between private and public. Private households buy the technology as well as the convenience and comfort that go with it, but I wonder which groups benefit most from this system. Certainly not middle-income families whose earnings have stagnated since the 1980s. For these families, rising transportation costs cause real headaches as they try to juggle their bills. Low-income Canadians including many elderly on fixed incomes are shut out of the transportation system because they can’t afford cars. This is especially true in rural areas where you and I both live and it is also true in the sprawling suburbs in HRM where I used to live.
I do agree that people love their cars, a love fed by massive amounts of advertising. Traditionally in Canada automotive advertising (auto makers and dealers) has dominated the field. In the 20th century, advertising paid for the news and the auto industry was a dominant player. This situation helped strengthen the bias favouring private over public. Although the Herald may have been all for Queen, God and Highway Safety, the newspaper was not one to champion collective solutions to the problem of helping people get from here to there. I haven’t done the research, but I suspect the Herald cheered Stansfield’s highway building program. We might have had an effective publicly run bus system such as the one that still exists in Saskatchewan, but there was no Tommy Douglas here to champion it and I doubt that the Herald did either.
And this brings me to our present predicament. On the one hand, we’re stuck with a public transportation system that maximizes the emission of greenhouse gases (not to speak of the many other forms of pollution) and on the other, we’re facing the potential horrors of climate change. GPI Atlantic’s comprehensive review in 2006 is the best guide we have to the problems facing Nova Scotia’s transportation system.
Perhaps I’ll have more to say about this later. For now I’ll just lament the rhetorical trope that adds the word “culture” to any phenomenon the speaker opposes and wants more attention paid to. I probably deserve that for committing the parallel sin of alleging a “war on cars.” My bad.