I agree with the commenters who have pointed to Sarah’s failure to build enough time into her trip planning as just as important a contributor as the car in causing her anxiety.

I think that MOST rude behavior on the part of drivers (and MANY automobile collisions)is directly the result of people getting a late start to their trip, or expecting to encounter no traffic on their trip. If you expect to run into congestion and plan for it, you aren’t freaked out by the stop-and-go. If you expect smooth sailing and hit a roadblock, your blood pressure skyrockets.

The problem is that knowing this isn’t really helpful. The fact is, people have been running late and driving distracted ever since cars were invented. We can hope for technological advances to help with these issues, like GPS and the web to see traffic ahead and route around it, etc, but the basic problem is as others have pointed out — the car is an inherently lethal device whose operator has a small but significant change of getting distracted or losing control, and when that happens, the chances are high that one or more people will be injured or killed.

I am glad people have brought up guns. We have a 2nd Amendment Right to bear arms. We don’t have a constitutional right to a car. And we certainly don’t have the right to a huge car. I think we need laws to greatly reduce car mass and dimensions. This would reduce congestion, pollution, and the force of impact in collisions, even without reducing the percentages of people using motor vehicles.

Or perhaps this is more a reflection on the drivers I’ve been riding with.

From a drivers perspective – cyclists routinely break traffic laws that are meant to aid in safe sharing of the road. When I pull up to a two-way stop sign, I typically check ahead of me and in the direction a car would be driving and once again ahead of me, only to quickly glance in the direction opposite traffic – the number of times I’ve almost hit cyclists coming the wrong way down a street like this is uncomfortable. To the inevitable criticism that I should always look the other way as well – no, a driver does not have unlimited capacity to know whats going on around them – it’s easy on a quiet street at night but incredibly difficult at a busy intersection during rush hour, with tons of cars, cyclists, and peds. Additionally, cyclists (usually but not exclusively delivery drivers) often wear black, and have no reflectors on their bikes – to that I just say, wtf? Pedestrians walking into the street without looking (usually on cellphones or pdas) are an increasing danger as well.

From a pedestrian’s perspective – Yes, cars speed, don’t slow down sufficiently when “rolling” through stop signs or making turns into a crosswalk, etc. Cyclists do the same thing – and often when going the wrong way on one-way streets, catching you by surprise.

From a cyclists perspective – the same holds for cars v pedestrian, but in addition pedestrians jaywalk, and run in the street or the bike path. Cars also block the bike paths.

The fact is that when you’re a pedestrian or a cyclist, you need to be on the defensive against cars. Yes, you have the right of way, but unless the car cedes that to you it doesn’t do you any good.

There needs to be more enforcement of right-of-way laws and reflector / light laws. Those delivery drivers without lights on their cycles should be ticketed (at least here in NYC where lights are mandated) and the restaurants they work for should be mandated to provide working lights. Cars should be ticketed for not ceding way to bikes or pedestrians, in all circumstances. Cyclists should be ticketed for not ceding the right of way to pedestrians, in all circumstances, and for riding down streets the wrong way and on sidewalks.

Makes you think… is the line between licensing guns and cars so clear?

Cars have some useful purposes besides killing random people. Guns do not. You can raise legitimate concerns about whether it’s appropriate to consider intentions only, but it doesn’t erase the distinction.

Regarding the whole “You ARE the car,” this reminds me of when I calculated the brain-to-body weight ratio (a common quantification of animal intelligence) of a human being, a human being on a bicycle, a human being operating an automobile, and a dog.

The only reason brain to body mass is a useful measure of animal intelligence is that body mass is a proxy for how much brain mass is needed just to regulate basic bodily functions.

Even then, it’s not that good of a proxy. For one, fat cells do not require extra brain mass to process; unsurprisingly, 50 kg humans don’t have twice the intelligence of 100 kg humans? For another, tree shrews have higher brain to body mass ratios than humans.

Now, cars are like fat. They mostly take care of themselves. You need some brain function to use them, but not nearly in proportion to their weight; 2,000 kg of car is not nearly as difficult to handle as 2,000 kg of thermoregulation or heart function.

Overall, this is just too contrived, and the only reason you’d try to compute this is to score cheap points. So, do drivers get smarter if they carpool? Do they get smarter if they bag the SUV for a subcompact? Are train operators really that much smarter at rush hour than at night when their trains run nearly empty?

“I ask those who say things like “I havent driven in 5 years!” to get behind the wheel of a car so you can better protect yourself when walking or biking.”

Protect myself? This isn’t war (even though it seems like it on my morning commute).

I’ve mentioned it before but the opposite is just as true:

Pedestrians and cyclists put themselves in grave danger when they are not familiar with what it is like to drive a car. When you never drive, you forget how poor visibility is inside a car. Drive at night, and suddenly the pedestrian wearing brown appears where you swear there was nobody just a second earlier. You might be on a long, flat, perfectly straight road cruising at 40mph and suddenly you have to swerve because there’s a bike that was impossible to see. Of course, the cyclist feels his tiny reflector is good enough.

When walking and driving, you hear things, and you have great visibility. If it’s night, cars are super easy to spot with their bright lights, but the opposite is not the same.

I ask those who say things like “I havent driven in 5 years!” to get behind the wheel of a car so you can better protect yourself when walking or biking.

Thanks for the perspective. I haven’t ridden it myself and I shouldn’t have used such hyperbolic language.

In fact, I still love operating a manual transmission. Most of my real-world friends are always shocked to hear me say that I enjoy the activity of driving, just not the lifestyle. Granted I only get to do it about twice a year (and even then it’s usually quite against my will…). If there was some kind of track I could drive around somewhere out in New Jersey, I would be there from time to time, just like I enjoy visiting batting cages every once in a while, or going bowling.

Regarding the whole “You ARE the car,” this reminds me of when I calculated the brain-to-body weight ratio (a common quantification of animal intelligence) of a human being, a human being on a bicycle, a human being operating an automobile, and a dog. The human on a bicycle is mathematically indistinguishable from a regular human being on foot (since adding 20 lbs to the denominator doesn’t do anything to the order of magnitude of the result), but the human being operating an automobile came in below the dog.

And it doesn’t surprise me. Start looking for the similarities: That look of blunt, unfounded confidence that is shared between a dog chasing a tennis ball and an automobile careening down a high-speed corridor (Prospect Park West?); that guilty sense of accomplishment when a dog poops on the floor or an automobile runs a red light (Tee hee hee! I got a way with it! Now I get to wait for the red light at the NEXT block! I’m so brilliant!). Neither really pay taxes, either, if you think about it.

Wow. The similarities run way too deep…

And this is why it continues today. No other option end of story.
Did you send any letters to the people who could change things?

One really easy way which usually keeps me 5 mph under the speed limit. I just look at my speed limit and say “Look at that I am doing 4 times faster than if I was biking or busing.” I then sit back and listen to the radio.

I would be stressed out anywhere I went if I didn’t leave lots of time to get there.