problems with cars

One of the reasons I keep coming back to Buenos Aires is that it's a city where you can easily live without a car. Much like New York, much like many of the great cities worldwide that developed before the auto became so common. Seoul, no; Barcelona, si.

The posh districts of the Capital Federal, where foreigners such as myself are likely to live, are relatively close together and are generally close to the subway system. But it turns out that the subway system is quite limited. So most of the public transport is via these crazy buses that run in very perplexing routes and get very full. And these buses really barrel around -- just two days ago, there were two bus-on-bus collisions in the morning rush hour, one of them very serious -- sixty injured, two or four killed.

And so Buenos Aires is more of a car town than I thought. I'm in a pretty central area, and of the four apartments in this building occupied by locals, three of them have a car. Traffic here is just terrible -- maybe not quite as crowded as New York, but the drivers here have much worse habits. (I was going to say "skills", but that would be too generous.) There is a kind of aggressiveness on the roads, a devil-may-care attitude about safety, that just drives me insane. I can't tell if it's a symptom of latin machismo, or italian carefree-ness, or some combination, but whatever it is, it's my least favorite thing about this town.

This week there has been a great deal of attention on the news to the road conditions, because of the aforementioned bus accidents, but more importantly because of another accident where an 80-year-old driver barreled into a crowded sidewalk on Avenida Rivadavia, one of the biggest streets here, killing one and seriously injuring four or five others. Worse, the dude kind of kept going -- he crashed into the sidewalk, then veered back onto the street and kept driving, dragging someone under his car. Nice, huh? And of course the local news had no qualms about showing the trail of blood on the street. Maybe that's macho as well, I don't know.

So there's been lots of discussion about whether eighty year olds should be driving, and how to make sure that those who shouldn't be driving aren't. Which leads me to the subject line of this post.

Here's one of the worst problem with cars, or rather with a society physically organized around car-based transportation -- Driving a one- or two-ton vehicle around at high speed is not something that should be done by anyone at any time, but because it's such an integral part of functioning in our societies, not being able to drive is a serious handicap. If you can't drive, because you're old, or you're sick, or you're intoxicated, you're a second-class citizen. And people don't want to be second-class citizens, and so they drive even though they shouldn't be. So you get eighty-year-olds and drunks killing people on the roads.

It's easy to blame the drunks, but it's harder to blame the eighty-year-old. No one wants to admit to diminished capacities. And ninety-nine percent of the time, driving is easy, very manageable. It's just that one percent or that one-tenth of one percent of the time when you need good reflexes, peripheral vision, and depth perception.

On a personal note, my father is now 75, and he lives in rural Washington state. He's in excellent shape physically, but he's 75 and he just doesn't drive as well as he once did. Not at all. My older sister and I joke morbidly that the only way he's going to die before 90 is behind the wheel. But driving has been such a part of his life, and it's so essential where he lives, he'd have to really, really deteriorate before he could submit to be chauffeured around by his wife.

This is a long-term problem, not a short-term one. Sure, you can test people more, you can have roadblocks for drunks. But still, people are going to want to drive. And also, just on a fairness measure, you don't want to create second-class citizens out of those who can't drive. There just needs to be other ways of getting around. And more importantly, things need to be organized differently, more densely, to enable effective public transportation. Like I said, long-term problem -- none of us are going to live long enough to see it resolved.