Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (10 page)

Then there is the matter of climate. Our movement from door to door is a principal cause of the global climate crisis, exacerbated by our stubborn attachment to archaic, wasteful, and inefficient transportation modes and machines.
¹⁵
But are cars the true culprit? What about other modes of travel? Airplanes, for instance, are often singled out as the most carbon-intensive form of travel in terms of emissions per passenger mile (or per ton of cargo). By some estimates, carbon emissions from one round-trip jetliner trip between New York and Los Angeles generates more
than 10 percent of the average American's total carbon footprint for an entire year.

But that's not the whole story—a case of statistics masking, rather than illuminating, a larger truth. Total passenger miles by air are miniscule compared to cars: in any given year, 60 percent of American adults never set foot on an airplane, and the vast majority who do fly take only one round trip a year. If air travel were the only source of transportation emissions, our climate future would be bright rather than blighted. Unfortunately, air travel is not our primary problem, contributing only 8 percent of U.S. transportation-related greenhouse gases. Cars and trucks, by contrast, pump out a combined 83 percent of transportation carbon.
¹⁶

Furthermore, airlines—whose margins have been continually squeezed by fuel costs and competition—out of necessity have become far more efficient in terms of the energy expended moving one passenger one mile. Some of these gains came through better engineering, but just as much arose from more efficient booking systems that keep planes profitably (and uncomfortably) full. Overall, airliners have become 74 percent more efficient than they were in 1970—to the point that it is worse for the climate to drive long distances in an average American car than it is to fly. Driving your SUV or even a mid-size car from New York to LA is worse for the planet than flying there.
¹⁷
This is true in part because car fuel efficiency has improved far more slowly than planes, but also because of Americans' increasing propensity to drive alone, which has made car travel
less
efficient and more carbon-intensive per passenger mile in recent years.

So cars pose the biggest threat on the climate front, with all the costs that global warming imposes on our infrastructure, homes, and lives through increasingly severe storms, droughts, rising sea-levels, and pressure on food supplies. If the price of gasoline
and the vehicles that burn it actually reflected the true costs and damage they inflict, the common car would be as extinct as the dinosaurs. Gasoline would cost way more than $10 a gallon. That's how big our secret subsidy is.

And that's not even counting the most dramatic cost we accept and subsidize: cars waste lives. They are one of America's leading causes of avoidable injury and death, especially among the young.

The materials, techniques, and technology to shrink or fix each of these categories of car shortcomings exist today, and all of them would be cheaper in the long term than allowing the status quo to persist. But the
will
to accept or even see the shortcomings of the car is another story.

Oddly, the most immediately devastating consequence of the modern car—the carnage it leaves in its wake—seems to generate the least public outcry and attention. Jim McNamara, a sergeant with the California Highway Patrol, where officers spend 80 percent of their time responding to car wrecks, believes such public inattention and apathy arise whenever a problem is “massive but diffuse.” Whether it's climate change or car crashes, he says, if the problem doesn't show itself in a big bang all at once—as when an airliner goes down with dozens or hundreds of people on board—it's hard to get anyone's attention. Very few people see what he and his colleagues witness daily and up close: what hurtling tons of metal slamming into concrete and brick and trees and one another does to the human body strapped within (or not strapped, all too often). Short answer, McNamara says: nothing good. Nothing you want to see on a full stomach.

In contrast, a typical driver's experience of car violence is radically different, little more than a glance at a wreck on the roadside, some broken glass and bent metal briefly visible in a flash, only to disappear in the rearview mirror a moment later.
Mostly it's the machine that's visible in such moments; any human damage is hard to see, as bloodstains and bodies are quickly draped by innocuous sheets of yellow or orange plastic, while the living are immediately removed for treatment or shelter. What may have caused the wreck, the how and why and who of it, is rarely apparent to passersby. So, more than anything, a roadside wreck is experienced by the vast majority of drivers as a nagging but unavoidable inconvenience—just another source of detours and traffic jams, a bottleneck to be passed with relief. Increasingly popular and powerful smartphone traffic apps eliminate even those brief close encounters with the roadway body count, routing savvy drivers away from crash-related congestion. The typical car wreck is becoming all but invisible to everyone but those who are killed or maimed and those whose job is to clean it up. Many are aware at some level that troubling numbers of people are injured and die in cars, but most remain unfazed by this knowledge.

The contrast couldn't be greater with public perception of airliner crashes, which always generate a high-visibility tsunami of fear, headlines, and spare-no-expense investigations. As counterintuitive as it may seem when comparing passenger-laden airliners with the crash of one car carrying one person, this disparity in attention cannot be justified by the numbers. Quite the contrary: in the fourteen years following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, there were eight crashes on American soil of passenger planes operated by regional, national, or international carriers. The death toll in those crashes totaled 442. That averages out to fewer than three fatalities a month.
¹⁸

The death toll on America's streets and highways during that same period since 9/11 was more than 400,000 men, women, and children.
¹⁹
The traffic death toll in 2015 exceeded 3,000 a month.

When it comes to the number of people who die in car wrecks, America experiences the equivalent of four airliner crashes every
week
.

The response to that automotive death toll is telling. In the twelve months between June 2014 and May 2015, Americans took 779 million plane trips. That's a big number, and air travel is a vital part of the mobility picture; but when it comes to how Americans move, it's barely a rounding error. Americans take 1.1 billion trips in cars every
day
.
²⁰

When it comes to car crashes, there are none of the nationwide safety bulletins or mandatory pilot training that so often result from aviation crash probes. No sweeping investigations of a single wreck nor attempts to find ways to prevent similar tragedies in the future, as is compulsively done in the aviation arena. There are just routine reports by local coroners and police officers providing bare details of what happened, and not a word of guidance on how to avoid the next one. Most crashes—including fatal ones—are not even reported in the news media. Those that do make the news just describe the damage to person and property but almost never report the cause, if one is ever formally determined. There are, of course, lawsuits, America's go-to response to anything that causes injury or death, but almost all of them are resolved quietly by insurance companies. The only exception is when they involve safety defects in the machine, not the driver, in which case there is often intense media coverage and public concern, although in the fifty years the feds have had the power to recall cars for safety reasons, such defects have caused only a tiny fraction of the deaths and injuries experienced on the highways every day.

A normal day on the road, then, is a “quiet catastrophe,” as Ken Kolosh, the statistics chief for the National Safety Council, calls it. He ought to know: he makes his living crafting the annual
statistical compendium of every unintentional injury and death in the country. Kolosh is America's amiable and understated Dr. Death, poring over those coroners' findings, police reports, and disparate databases from state and federal agencies to construct a picture of how we kill ourselves. It's his job to spot the trends, to note such curiosities as the accelerating number of accidental poisonings (mishandled prescription drugs, mostly) and the fact that the battle to reduce drunken driving has stalled for decades. And, quiet or not, Kolosh says, the numbers that cross his desk show that, despite gradual declines, the automotive casualty count remains nothing short of catastrophic.

Car crashes are the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of one and thirty-nine. They rank in the top five killers for Americans sixty-five and under (behind cancer, heart disease, accidental poisoning, and suicide).
²¹

One out of every 112 Americans is likely to die in a traffic crash.
²²
Just under 1 percent of us.

The economic costs and societal impact from motor vehicle death and injury each year amounts to $836 billion. The direct economic costs alone—the medical bills and emergency responder costs reflected in all our taxes and insurance payments—represent a tax of $784 on every man, woman, and child living in the U.S.
²³

The numbers are so huge they are not easily grasped, and so are perhaps best understood by a simple comparison: if our roads were a war zone, they would be the most dangerous battlefield the American military has ever encountered.

First, there is the annual death toll from motor vehicle crashes in the U.S.: 35,400 dead in 2014, by Kolosh's count. That number is greater than the annual U.S. military death toll during each war America has ever fought except the Civil War and the two world wars.
²⁴
That means U.S. highway fatalities outnumber the
yearly war dead during Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, the War of 1812, and the American Revolution.

Now consider the annual U.S. injury toll from car wrecks—just the ones serious enough to require emergency room trauma care: 2.5 million.
²⁵
Those wounded on the highways exceed the numbers of wounded
and
dead in World War II, World War I, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, the War of 1812, and the Revolution
combined
. That's not just the yearly casualties from those wars. One year of car crash injuries and deaths in the U.S. is greater than all the dead and wounded from the
entire duration
of all those wars combined, with numbers to spare to cover all Union Army dead and wounded from the Civil War as well.

Widen the category to include a year's worth of U.S. motor vehicle injuries that required some medical consultation, and those 4.3 million injured
²⁶
far outnumber the military dead and wounded in every war and conflict in which America has ever participated, Confederate casualties included.
²⁷

One year of driving in America is more dangerous than all those wars put together. The car is the star.

F
riday, Febuary 13, 2015, was a normal day on America's roads, all 4,071,000 miles of them,
¹
a web of asphalt, concrete, and unpaved dirt that binds our nation and neighborhoods, linking Wall Street to Main Street, port to warehouse, shopper to store—and driver to doom.

A young entertainer walked home rather than drive drunk, only to be run down by a drunken driver. A graphic artist drove oh-so-carefully in the snowy darkness, only to collide head-on with a car barreling down the wrong side of the interstate. And there was the crazy mundanity of a mattress dropped on a freeway, a soft object, a thing that cushions—except when a car strikes it at high speed. Then it sets off a fatal chain reaction, a deadly game of pinball in which the balls weigh two tons and the bumpers are concrete medians.

America's roads that day, like every day, bore casualties around the clock:
²

A death every 15 minutes.

A trip to the emergency room every 12.6 seconds.

An injury serious enough for a medical consult every 7.3 seconds.

And there was a crash of some kind, somewhere—involving
death, injury, or property damage, or a mix of all three—every 2.8 seconds. It's happening right now: in the time it takes to read this sentence, two more car crashes occurred on America's roads and streets.
³

The day began with a wreck in New Hampshire so bad, it closed a frigid highway in both directions: a wooded stretch of Route 16 in the town of Milton, just short of the Maine state line. The road had to be scrubbed of cars and trucks so the first responders could descend on the twisted wreckage, trying to stanch the blood, then extract the occupants and attempt to resuscitate those who showed no signs of life but who might yet be saved. Next came the investigators, followed by the coroners, then the tow trucks and, finally, the cleanup crews to carry off the post-crash debris and the detour signs, letting the inexorable flow of traffic resume. Four hours later, a bit past midnight, no sign remained of the three women and the family dog who perished in a head-on collision. The crash occurred while it was still Thursday, but its aftermath spilled over into Friday the thirteenth.

Most days in America begin with a lane or street or highway closed somewhere because of a fatal crash the night before.

Victoria Rose had been driving south on the two-lane highway toward her home in Revere, Massachusetts, when her 2005 Jeep Liberty SUV drifted across the centerline and into northbound traffic. This would be the first of many such “over-the-line” wrecks this day, a common sort of accident. The fifty-seven-year-old died instantly when she collided head-on with a Subaru Outback station wagon that had been cruising quite legally and properly in the northbound lane. That driver, Allison Smith, an environmental expert with the nonprofit New England States Committee on Electricity, survived only long enough to be cut free from her mangled car and rushed to a local hospital, where the thirty-one-year-old died within minutes. One of her passengers,
Vanessa Cox of Boston, athletic department administrator at Brandeis University, also died in the hospital emergency room. A third person in the Subaru, Lucy Pollard, a prep school teacher and Allison Smith's wife, survived with serious injuries, as did a passenger in Rose's Jeep. A small dog riding in that car had to be euthanized at the scene.

Wandering over lane lines, either off the road to the right or into oncoming traffic to the left—“road departure” and “lane departure” are the official terms—can be a hallmark of distracted driving or dozing at the wheel. But, as is often the case, establishing with certainty the cause for Rose's fatal swerve has been difficult for investigators. Those most able to explain were killed.

Friday the thirteenth was full of such unexplained drifts into destruction. Jillian L. “Jilly” Rebel was a victim of one. A forty-year-old worker at a local gas station and convenience store, Jilly was well-known in her community for her cheery greetings to customers and her love of all sorts of animals. On Friday the thirteenth she drifted across the centerline on I–80 in Lackawannock Township, Pennsylvania, at 2:30 in the afternoon. Her PT Cruiser hit the grassy median, skidded, and rolled four times before crunching to a halt. With her seat belt left unbuckled as she drove—another common theme this day—she hurtled out of the car to her death during the roll.

Ten minutes later, eighty-seven-year-old Dick Morgan died at the wheel of his Ford F–150 pickup on Minnesota State Highway 19 after he, too, drifted across the centerline and collided head-on with a semitruck. Chad Hilborn, a thirty-three-year-old corrections officer coming home from a graveyard shift in Washtenaw County, Michigan, died the same way, crossing the centerline and running head-on into an approaching pickup truck, critically injuring the other driver. There were more than two dozen fatal crashes of this sort during the day: drifting out of lanes, drifting
into clearly marked barriers, drifting into fields and forests. None of these involved mechanical failures or adverse weather, nor was there evidence of drunken driving, which means avoidable errors—distraction, dozing, or speeding—were involved.

Extensive research in the U.S. and United Kingdom dating back to 1979 pins the blame for 90 to 99 percent of traffic crashes on human error.
⁴
Speeding (a factor in 30 percent of traffic deaths) and distraction (26 percent) together account for more than half of all crashes.
⁵
The single most frequent cause of fatal collisions, driving drunk (30.8 percent of road deaths) is certainly an example of human error, as are all the other acts of reckless, negligent, incompetent, and criminal driving behavior: tailgating, running red lights, refusing to yield to pedestrians, ignoring the right of way of bike riders, driving at unsafe speeds, driving drowsy (instead of pulling over when drowsy). All of these are intentional behaviors, as opposed to the commonly used but almost always incorrect descriptor “accidental.” The fatal results might have been unintended, but the behavior is no accident.

D
riving is by far the most difficult, complex, and high-risk task most people other than bomb defusers and brain surgeons will ever do. Yet driver training and licensing tests set the bar so low that almost everyone passes (eventually). So it's not really surprising that error, by commission or omission, is the primary culprit in almost all car wrecks. The surprise would be if it were otherwise.

The real surprise is that, for all its prevalence, few mechanisms exist to deal effectively with the often reckless or negligent decisions that precede fatally bad driving—either preventing it, minimizing it, or imposing consequences to deter it.

On the afternoon of Friday the thirteenth, Tiffanie Strasser waited patiently for the “Walk” signal and a green light before
stepping out to cross a busy street in Denver's lively Bonnie Brae neighborhood, pushing her two children before her in a double stroller. There was five-year-old Audrey, blind and developmentally delayed, and, next to her, three-year-old Austin, Audrey's precocious, self-appointed “big” brother, protector, and guide, who was counting down the days to his fourth birthday one week away. The family was headed for ice cream, then the library.

At the same intersection, also with a green light, was driver Joan Hinkemeyer, a seventy-eight-year-old retired professor and current gardening columnist for the
Washington Park Profile
, a monthly community newspaper. Hinkemeyer, after departing from her volunteer work at the same neighborhood library the Strassers had planned to visit, turned her car left—into the crosswalk, and into the Strassers. Tiffanie and Audrey suffered only minor injuries, but Austin was dragged several feet and suffered fatal head trauma. Hinkemeyer said she couldn't see the family in the crosswalk because of glare from the late-afternoon sun.

After a long investigation, the Denver district attorney charged her with one count of careless driving resulting in death, and two counts of careless driving resulting in injury—misdemeanors under Colorado law, punishable by a maximum fine of $1,000 and a year in jail. The maximums were only theoretical, however; lesser penalties are the norm. Prosecutors offered a plea bargain with a sentence of no jail time, two hundred hours of community service, and a driving class in exchange for an admission of one count of careless driving.

In an emotional court hearing in which Hinkemeyer apologized to the Strasser family, Austin's parents pleaded with the judge to reject the deal in favor of a maximum jail sentence and a ban on Hinkemeyer ever driving again. After setting up framed photos of her son throughout the courtroom, Tiffanie Strasser stared at the judge and asked, “How can the consequences
of killing a child in a crosswalk be some hours of community service?”

The judge did indeed reject the plea bargain but accepted a slightly modified deal, hastily worked out on the spot: one day in jail plus thirty days of home confinement and a requirement that Hinkemeyer pass a driving course in order to keep her license.

These would be the toughest sanctions imposed this day anywhere in the nation for fatal driving, other than cases involving intoxication. A crash earlier that day in Auburn Hills, Michigan, was far more typical. A thirty-three-year-old machinist, apparently in reaction to erratic driving by another car southbound on Interstate 75, lost control of his Ford Escort, struck the concrete median wall, and came to a stop in the left lane. The disabled car was then struck by a Chevy Malibu. The driver of the Ford, John Steele, who had recently purchased a house he was immersed in renovating, suffered critical injuries and died three weeks later from complications from cerebral trauma. Eyewitnesses thought a black Ford SUV had clipped Steele's car and fled after causing the deadly sequence of events. After police issued a plea through the media for additional witnesses, the driver of the mysterious SUV came forward. Investigators determined that vehicle had no physical contact with Steele's car after all—it was just a close call. The SUV driver's consequence: a ticket for erratic driving.

Even more typical: a driver in Conroe, Texas, at 6:30 that morning turned left in front of a young motorcyclist going 55 miles an hour in the opposite direction on busy State Highway 105. There was no way for the biker to avoid slamming into the car that suddenly veered into his path. Seventeen-year-old Trenton Fortune, on his way to meet his girlfriend for breakfast before they went to their high school together, died from the impact. The driver of the car was blamed for the crash in police reports for failing to yield the right of way, but no criminal charges were filed.

There's an old joke told around the California Highway Patrol:
If you want to get away with killing someone
,
use a car.

It's not a very funny joke—just a literally true one. As long as a driver is sober, causing a crash that leads to injury or death is rarely treated as a crime, and rarely leads to meaningful sanctions, such as taking away someone's driving privileges (although such a policy might have limited impact, as a 2008 study found: one in five fatal collisions involve a driver with no valid license).
⁶
Erratic driving may cause a chain reaction leading to hospitals and graves, but such arguably negligent or reckless conduct is almost always regarded as an ordinary traffic violation or a simple “accident.” On the rare occasions when prosecutors file formal criminal charges such as vehicular homicide, they often end up reduced to misdemeanors or traffic violations. Case in point: a twenty-year-old North Dakota woman, accused in 2014 of using her phone while driving, was allegedly so inattentive to the road that she rear-ended another car at 80 miles per hour without ever braking. An eighty-nine-year-old great-grandmother in the other car died. The case against the driver started as a stiff felony prosecution but ended up plea bargained down to a misdemeanor, with the young woman receiving a year of unsupervised probation and a guarantee that her record would be expunged if she finished the year without incident.
⁷

In other cases, the lenient treatment is a function of a system deliberately constructed to excuse auto violence, as in the 2013 death in New York City of three-year-old Allison Liao, run down as she walked hand in hand with her grandmother in a crosswalk with the right of way on Main Street in Flushing. The Queens district attorney refused to prosecute the driver of the SUV that killed the toddler because he wasn't drunk or on drugs at the time; the driver was given a pair of traffic tickets instead. And even those were tossed out by a callous and disinterested
judge—abetted by an inept department of motor vehicles—who conducted a forty-seven-second hearing without even reviewing the facts of the case. The system, designed to process as many tickets in a day as possible, had neither time nor concern for the death of a three-year-old.
⁸

Such outcomes are the rule, not the exception, although in most cases stiff initial changes are rarely filed in the first place. In 2014, the
Wall Street Journal
combed through traffic and criminal justice data to show that 95 percent of traffic fatalities in New York City led to no criminal prosecutions.
⁹
A similar analysis in Oregon showed that sober drivers in fatal car crashes in the Beaver State had little to worry about, either.
¹⁰
Drivers, it seems, enjoy an exalted position in a U.S. criminal justice system that is otherwise viewed as one of the toughest in the developed world.
¹¹

No other single product has shaped the law, the landscape, and public opinion as radically as the car. As revolutionary as the horseless carriage was at redefining travel in America, other changes instigated by cars went deeper, none more than the revealing evolution of how we describe car violence. A common term of the 1920s, “motor killings,” has morphed into today's “fatal accidents.” The gulf between the two ways of describing road death—the early term, angry and accusatory, and the current phrase, blameless and bureaucratic—perhaps explains what might otherwise seem inexplicable: the American public's willing acceptance for decades of cars designed and used in such a way that they have become the number one killer of our children and teenagers and everyone else under forty.