Rationality at Bay

Recently I stumbled on an advertisement by Nissan for its Infiniti automobile. In the ad a man hops out of his driverless car ala Google and jumps into the Infiniti and roars off taking curves at high speed. The obvious intent of the ad is to portray the driverless car as boring, while the Infiniti provides the thrill of driving at breakneck speeds, as the auto ads would have it.

In short, a transportation system is presented as a playground for visceral delight.

This may not seem to be that serious a matter to some, but it is. Approximately 40,000 people lose their lives each year because of automobile accidents. Countless others are grievously injured, not infrequently for life. Property damage is immense and the cost of accommodating roadway needs of an ever increasing automobile population is unsustainable, not to mention the immense cost to our environment.

One of the most promising means of addressing this multifaceted unsustainable mess is to pack more vehicles in the same roadway space. The small driverless car with suitable electronic sensors and controls can allow cars to travel safely much closer together and thereby significantly increase the carrying capacity of existing freeways and surface streets, while, at the same time increasing safety. Google and others have been developing the driverless car for a number of years. Reporters have ridden in them on the freeway between San Francisco and San Jose at rush hour, one of the busiest roadways in the nation. They were amazed at the way these cars were able to continuously monitor their traffic environment and to brake much more smoothly than most humans.

As it is, we have in the automobile a mass transit system not infrequently in the hands of an inept, emotionally out of control, angry, deeply disturbed, or panicked driver in control of a vehicle of unknown condition. It should be obvious that this is no way to run a mass transit system. No such system would be tolerated and the only reason it is not so viewed is that corporations have continuously sold it as an individual’s thrill-generating device for getting from point A to point B as fast as one can and in a style that will impress others. This was demonstrated when General Motors manipulated the destruction of the old Red Line light rail system that served much of Sothern California in order to create a larger market for their cars. With the small driverless car we would retain the ability to go where we want when we want, but with an efficiency and safety far beyond what we now have.

The fact that an existing automobile company would attack this development in its infancy on the grounds that it was, in a thrill-seeking sense, boring should tell us volumes about the odds that reason faces in an image-soaked communication system we call the media. The same motivation and its dire consequences lie behind the resistance to red light cameras that photographs drivers and their vehicles that run red lights at traffic signals, even though these are targeted on a major cause of death and injury. This resistance has been so intense that some cities have removed them. This is the kind of idiocy that also fuels the many conflicts between religion and science, e.g. the denial of evolution in favor of religious accounts of human origin and development. Some schools in the South actually use the Bible as the basic text for teaching in this matter. This kind of idiocy must be stopped before it becomes policy in the hands of Far Right conservatives and the corporate wealth that so cynically uses them as its major political constituency.

Real consequences await the illusions of those who deny reason and evidence.

Bob Newhard