old Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds
ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION OP-EDS

Tuesday, February 19, 2002

Car czars won't yield to transit alternatives
MICHAEL LEWYN
FOR THE JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

In most of America, including Atlanta, the car reigns supreme.

According to a 2000 report by the conservative Georgia Public
Policy Foundation, more than 90 percent of metro Atlanta commuters
drive to work.

Government exists primarily to serve the driver. For example, Gov. Roy Barnes wants to spend $2.4 billion on the Northern Arc (a highway
designed to shift development to Forsyth County and Cherokee
counties, which have no public transit whatsoever) but recently
refused to extend $10 million to MARTA to prevent bus service
cutbacks.

Common sense dictates that drivers such as me would feel secure in
our supremacy, perhaps even secure enough to give nondrivers a few
crumbs from the table. But not all drivers are so magnanimous. For
example, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby complained a few years
ago: "The car-haters aren't fooling around, and they're not going to
give up until Big Brother takes the T-bird away."

And last year in Atlanta, the Georgia Highway Contractors
Association ran advertisements claiming that evil environmentalists
were "preventing us from driving cars and forcing us to live
downtown."

And what evidence is there of this vast anti-auto conspiracy?
Certainly the streets of Atlanta contain no such evidence; the
clogged interstates prove that no one is "preventing us from driving
cars" or "forcing us to live downtown."

Jacoby writes: "Don't underestimate the intensity of the zealots'
antipathy toward private cars. 'We need bicycles and we need buses,'
demands environmental crusader Bill McKibben."

So evidently, our fearless conspiracy fighters believe that if you
support allowing anyone to ride a train, a bus or even a bicycle, you
are an anti-auto "zealot." To be fair, reasonable people can disagree
about the cost-effectiveness of some of the rail projects undertaken
in the name of increasing transit ridership. For example, the Georgia
Public Policy Foundation report criticized proposals for large-scale
commuter rail on economic grounds --- but the same report endorsed
express buses.

But the blunderbuss of more radical transit critics swings against
any alternative to driving, even the humble bus. When MARTA proposed
to eliminate two-thirds of Sunday bus service last year and to
eliminate all service to Roswell, the anti-transit zealots did not
argue that the consumer choice they (pretend to) glorify should
extend to buses as well as cars. Instead, they endorsed MARTA's anti-
transit jihad.

For example, a Georgia State professor wrote an Atlanta Journal-
Constitution op-ed column calling for the elimination of public
transit entirely outside unspecified "high-density corridors."
Fortunately, MARTA only partially heeded these arguments,
implementing a more modest package of cutbacks.

Despite their pseudo-libertarian rhetoric against conspiracies to
force people out of their cars, anti-transit pundits and activists
are basically auto-totalitarians: They wish to create an absolute
dictatorship of the automobile, a society where government, by
building roads such as the Northern Arc to develop places without
transit and then slashing bus service in the places that already have
transit, makes it impossible to work without a car.

As for the millions of Americans too poor, too young, too old or
too disabled to drive --- those Americans might as well not exist.
And as for the environmental extremists who just don't like spending
their lives in 2,000-pound metal boxes, "The time has come to run
these plodding idealists off the road," wrote Heritage Foundation
pundit Steven Hayward.


January 21, 2001

Parents' attempts at 'protection' do children no favors in long run
MICHAEL LEWYN
FOR THE JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

One night not long ago, I was chatting with a middle-aged woman
about the virtues and vices (mostly vices) of raising children in
suburban Atlanta.

I said something like: "I wouldn't want to raise kids in Atlanta,
at least not in the areas where my relatives live. When my mom was
10, she was able to take her grown-up relatives on a streetcar tour
of Atlanta. But my suburban nephew and niece are going to be
prisoners of their parents' cars until they are 16. They can't take
buses anywhere because there are no bus routes where they live, and
they can't walk to a bus stop or a shop because there are no
sidewalks and nothing within walking distance."

The woman responded: "This is a different time. The world is so
dangerous that you can't expect these children to walk outside." In
other words, my dowager acquaintance believed that every suburb and
neighborhood is chock full of child molesters, and that the only way
to protect children from evildoers is to keep them locked up in their
parents' houses and cars until they turn 16 --- at which point their
parents will whisk them from a world of infantile helplessness to a
world of auto ownership and unlimited mobility. What's wrong with
this argument?

Plenty. First of all, the woman's argument requires one to believe
two contradictory positions. On the one hand, America's streets are
so dangerous that no one under 16 can ever be let out of the Holy
Trinity of Home, Car and School. On the other hand, the same streets
(and nearby expressways) are so safe that as soon as the same
children turn 16, they may not only be released from the Home/Car/
School bubble, but may (indeed, must, in order to free their parents
from carpool work) be given a 2,000-pound metal box that they must
drive at 50 or 60 mph, despite the dangers of carjackers and bad
driving. Both propositions cannot be true. If children are endangered
by perverts on the streets, they are even more endangered by
criminals and drunken drivers on the highways.

Indeed, auto-dependent lifestyles have killed far more American
children than pedophiles. In 1998, 1,772 American children15 were
killed in auto accidents while they were passengers in cars
(presumably cars being driven by their parents or their friends'
parents), according to federal statistics. Another 316,000 were
injured.

Each year, 100 American children are abducted and murdered by
strangers, according to federal crime statistics. Only 6 percent of
all sexually assaulted children are molested by strangers, and 77
percent are assaulted in their parents' home.

In other words, the only strangers most American children need to
fear are strangers in cars. So Americans who "protect" their children
by keeping them off the streets may well be making their lives more
rather than less dangerous. Indeed, isolated suburban children may be
in more danger from criminal strangers than are urban children.

Common sense suggests that a 10-year-old who is used to going
outside will be far more likely to intelligently distinguish friend
from foe than a 10-year-old whose experience of the world is limited
to Mommy's car and the voice of the family TV.

Auto-dependent children also suffer from a more long-term danger:
obesity and obesity-related diseases. As children walk less, they
exercise less. And when children exercise less, they become fatter
and more prone to heart disease, cancer, diabetes and other obesity-
related diseases. According to the Department of Health and Human
Services, "walking and bicycling by children 5-15 has dropped 40
percent between 1977 and 1995," and by an odd coincidence the
"percentage of young people who are overweight has doubled since
1980."

Of children 5 to 15 who are overweight, 61 percent have one or
more cardiovascular disease risk factors, and 27 percent have two or
more."

So by locking children in their homes, Americans are preparing
them for a lifetime of heart disease and other health problems. So to
those of you who wish to isolate your children in a protective
bubble, I quote the fifth century poet Rutilius Numatianus: "Because
of their fear, they shun what is good. . . . Whatever their reasons,
I find them strange."