My reaction to the Daytona 500 crash shows that I’m too numb to traffic violence

A special Amtrak train transports fans to the annual NASCAR race at Northern California's Sonoma Raceway. Track management cut this train in 2017. (Photo courtesy of Registry of Corvette Race Cars)

While I’m a big sports fan – I talk about my favorite teams, like the Cal Bears and Tijuana’s Xolos, all too often in my articles – I doubt anyone’s surprised to hear that car races don’t top my viewing priorities.

But on President's Day, my arrival to the Petworth neighborhood’s venerable DC Reynolds establishment (whose spicy chicken sandwiches and buy-one-get-one-free happy hours reflect the best of our city, but whose impending April closing its worst) coincided with the conclusion of NASCAR's marquee Daytona 500 race.

I’d come from Silver Spring’s Denizens Brewing on WMATA’s last limited-stop 79 bus of the evening and, though I wasn’t watching the TV closely, did know that the crowd’s adoration of our wall-loving, virus-eradicating president had failed to stop Florida’s rains from taking the cars off the track the previous day. The wet conditions that sidelined professional drivers didn’t shut the state’s deadly streets, however, so everyone had returned and the speedway appeared abuzz as the delayed automobiles neared the finish line.

Then, all of a sudden, the bar erupted as if a shortstop let a ground ball through their legs or a penalty kick had been called.

Sipping on my cold-fashioned, I looked up and saw pretty much the only part of a car race you’ll see on ESPN's highlight reels: a violent crash. As the drivers desperately jockeyed for position, a vehicle lost control, slammed into the trackside wall, went airborne, and emitted smoke and sparks.

Seconds later, the race was over, and ordinary-looking postgame coverage began. Standings scrolled across the screen. The winner celebrated by pumping his fist and driving in donuts, savoring a moment he’ll likely treasure for life.

The next shot, however, displayed something we may never see again at a NASCAR track: a scene that induced schadenfreude in an urbanist.

The cameras zoomed in on the totaled vehicle, which bore Koch Industries’ logo and was decked out in the company’s trademark blue. While the people of Nashville had succumbed to this petroleum-rich corporate empire, the asphalt of Daytona had proven too much for it.

I couldn’t resist. I pulled out my phone, snapped a picture of the TV, and shared a tweet emphasizing how much the scene summed up the self-inflicted state of U.S. mobility.

The evening then proceeded as usual for the patrons of DC Reynolds. People engaged in energetic, forgettable conversation. I filled my stomach on brussels sprouts and one of those aforementioned chicken sandwiches and soon enough was on the H2 bus back home, the crash nowhere in my thoughts.

The next day, during a routine, mindless scan of the online news, I saw a headline that shouldn’t have been surprising, but was: Ryan Newman, the driver of that ill-fated Koch-blue car, was hospitalized in serious condition.

Realizing the extent of my insensitivity the previous night, I immediately deleted the tweet. But I know this didn’t resolve the real issue – my, and all of our, normalization of traffic violence.

***

In pursuit of their Vision Zero quests, our leaders could actually learn a few lessons from NASCAR’s efforts to make their product safer. 

For example, the cars – in contrast to those on public roads – are equipped with speed-limiting technology, a measure taken after a massive 1987 crash at Talladega Superspeedway. Barriers protect the people in the stands from the chaos on the pavement. And media outlets typically call crashes that occur during races what they are – crashes – not “accidents.”   

   

But as Daytona made apparent, none of this really mitigates the simple danger of having so many machinated hunks of metal traveling in close proximity at high speeds – a fact that no technology, advertisement, or social perception can change.

The obvious solution is to get around using safer modes of mobility, and to minimize the extent to which people using those safer modes must interact with automobiles. But given that we haven’t done enough to make that solution happen – for example, NASCAR’s Sonoma, CA venue cancelled a special 2017 race-day train for fans due to “insurance issues,” while doing little to control cars either on or off the track – we do what we can internally to deal with this omnipresent threat to our existence. The ensuing normalization of violence has made the problem even harder to solve.

I may have thought I was conscious of – and perhaps even enlightened about – this cultural flaw, envisioning a transportation system that would make traffic violence a thing of the past. But my crash reaction at DC Reynolds reminded me that, after nearly 30 years living in American society, I’m just as much a part of the problem as anyone.

How can I do better?

Can car companies play a constructive role in mobility’s future?

A gas station at the end of the rainbow, as seen from an Orange County Transportation Authority bus. Do auto and oil companies have any reason to encourage people to use safer, more sustainable forms of mobility? (Photo by me)

At this year’s TransportationCamp DC, the annual “un-conference” at which attendees craft their own mobility-themed sessions, I learned a lot about ways to get things done, such as redesigning bus systems, rolling out (de)congestion pricing, changing federal transportation policy, making streets safer and more usable for people not in motor vehicles, and managing the complex relationship between homeless people and public transit providers.

Given the impact decisions made in the near future will have on our mobility and quality of life for generations to come, it was no surprise that the January event was sold out, with more than 100 people waitlisted.

But among the event’s primary sponsors, who ensured that this year’s Camp – the status of which was in real doubt for a time – took place, stood an entity much more unexpected: Ford Motor Company.

The company’s investment in TransportationCamp DC was part of its Ford Mobility initiative, which it advertises as an effort that, among other things, is “helping cities address the mobility issues that residents care most about: safety, commute, livability, transit, and micromobility.” As part of the initiative, Ford-owned firms operate scooter-share systems, help transit providers track their vehicles, and provide real-time transit arrival data to riders – goals which the event’s collaborative environment furthered.

However, a couple days later, Ford aired a commercial during college football’s national title game that was emblematic of the challenges auto-dependency and its associated stereotypes have inflicted on cities. The ad portrays smiling people traveling by SUV through a dense urban environment. While their gleeful-appearing movement is somehow uninhibited by traffic congestion, at one point they pass a jam-packed bus full of riders wearing expressions as if they’re being hauled off to prison.  

Was this stereotypical ad just a pain point in a genuine auto industry effort to overhaul itself into something more than a drive-or-be-stranded monolith? Or was it proof that the industry is trying to string the mobility-seeking public along until it’s too late to avoid a more sinister endgame?

Honestly, I don’t know. But below, I’ll lay out cases for both possibilities, with the goal of helping us achieve a positive outcome regardless of what’s actually going on.    

Scenario 1: Auto industry leaders understand that their financial future depends on leading the way into a sustainable, people-oriented future, but companies are struggling to fix their old ways

The promising future envisioned at the TransportationCamp sessions I attended could well align with the auto industry’s best interests. Given the realities of climate change, the threat cars pose to people both inside and outside vehicles, and the inadequate and inequitable nature of auto-dependent connectivity, in this scenario car companies have realized that if they don’t find a way to align their financial goals with more efficient, productive mobility, they will go bust. Catalyzed by the industry’s near-collapse in the late-2000s, this culture of change is continuing to evolve in earnest today.

However, just as some bus systems have remained static for decades despite changing travel patterns and new development, inertia also plagues the auto industry in this scenario. Longtime employees are used to producing the ads we’re so familiar with, intended to get people to spend lots of money on vehicles far bigger than they actually need. Accordingly, engineers and financiers continue to produce those vehicles and insist they’ll make the companies money. 

But evidence suggests that this inertia may be eroding. In recent years, the industry has poured substantial money into forms of mobility that don’t conform with the one person, one (or two) car(s) model.

These investments are not limited to support for collaborative opportunities like TransportationCamp. For example, Ford owns Spin Scooters and GM invested $500 million in Lyft, which operates numerous bikeshare systems across the country after acquiring Motivate. While they have not always been successful – in early 2019 Ford shut down Chariot, a fixed-route Bay Area minibus system it owned, while GM has had to scale back its Maven carsharing service – the fact that car companies continue to try suggests that they’re determined to find a mixed-mode model that works well for both their finances and the public.   

      

Scenario 2: Car companies feel they can maximize profit by fending off competition and keeping people auto-dependent for decades to come

The prior scenario sounds promising, but we can use the same underlying facts to support the possibility of a different situation – one where the above-described problems signify the auto industry’s primary goal rather than just temporary pain points, while the more positive-looking initiatives are just a façade.

This scenario would continue a trend that started with the beginning of automobile mass-production last century. Soon enough, revenue was sufficient for several corporations that profit from driving to create National City Lines, a consortium that – while not solely responsible for auto-dependency – certainly did its part to make transit worse during the postwar era.

The likes of GM, Firestone, and Chevron aren’t investing in road diets on today’s hostile, oversized arterial roads using the same gusto with which they tore out the urban rails of our past. In fact, the design of one such Bowling Green, KY 45-mph-speed-limit arterial recently inspired a couple up-and-coming GM engineers to race each other at over 100 mph in their employer’s newest vehicle model. GM surely could have designed and installed an automobile equivalent of positive train control, the speed limit-enforcing technology Congress has mandated installation of on all national-network railroads that move passengers or hazmat freight, before releasing its Corvette Stingray onto public streets…but it didn’t.

There’s plenty of evidence suggesting that, even if car companies provide sustainable transportation a bit of charity here and there, the auto industry is using its power primarily to sustain the culture that inspired that Corvette race in Kentucky, rather than to change it. For example, while the industry received kudos for working with California to draft relatively strict emissions standards, once the Trump Administration pushed back against those standards companies decided not to voluntarily stand by the environment, but rather to jump at the opportunity to boost their profit margins. And today, firms such as Ford, which aggressively boasts about the capabilities of its monstrous F-150s, continue to do everything they can to sell their SUVs and pickups to the public.  

   

We don’t know exactly what car companies’ plans are. Can we control them?

While we know the auto industry aims to maximize profit, it’s impossible to know exactly how car companies plan to do so going forward. It’s possible that there are factions within the industry that envision both possible futures described above and, if so, we should identify those on board with Scenario 1 and do everything we can to ensure they win out. We should also avoid fixation on specific technologies and be skeptical of those who peddle trends or stereotypes too vigorously.   

But one thing is certain: good mobility consists of safely, expediently, sustainably, and affordably moving people in a manner that utilizes space efficiently. Thus, we should keep the discussion focused on those concepts and, to the extent car companies are willing to help provide environments for such productive discussion (like TransportationCamp DC 2020), we should continue to take advantage.

Parasite reminds us why mobility isn't the priority it should be

Parasite character Kim Ki-jung asks the wealthy Park family's chauffeur to drop her off at Hyewha Station, a stop on Line 4 of the Seoul Metropolitan Subway. (Photo courtesy of LERK, via Wikimedia Commons)

A wealthy, cuddling couple jokes about how people who ride public transportation purportedly smell. On a couch in the living room of a perfectly minimalist mansion (that needs only a Peloton), watching as their young son throws a trivial tantrum in an idyllic yard, they reminisce that it’s been “ages” since they’ve used transit themselves. In an earlier scene, their private chauffeur had urged a passenger to “take the Benz, not the subway” as she begged to bet let out of the car at a station.

Such discriminatory rhetoric is quite common in U.S. pop culture, normalizing our country’s auto-dependence. But this particular example of transportation classism wasn’t made in America.  

Instead, this was Parasite, the Academy Award-winning South Korean film. The transportation references are just one component of the hit thriller’s powerful commentary on Korean society’s Confucian-based social strata.

But in spite of its stark class divides, and in contrast to the U.S., South Korea provides its citizens top-notch mobility. Its urban rail and bus systems serve as models for planners around the world, and even in lightly populated areas like Jeju Island transit is a viable way for people to get around. In Seoul, where Parasite takes place, anyone who looks down on transit is certain to suffer; as they sit in traffic congestion of their own creation, they’ll watch bus after bus whiz past them in a dedicated lane.

So, how could any person who lives in a place like Seoul – regardless of their wealth or status – subject themselves to such misery? Was that Parasite couple simply misguided, making bad decisions that better policies or incentives could address? Or do they represent a deeper flaw in humanity’s evolution?

   

***

Director Bong Joon-ho may have snuck only subtle transportation references into Parasite, but his 2013 film Snowpiercer (which TNT is adapting into a drama set to premiere in May) was a bit more upfront about social disparities in mobility. The film takes place in NUMTOT dystopia: a world where environmental cataclysm has eradicated humanity, save a group of survivors aboard a train that perpetually circumnavigates the planet.

Members of the elite class live in luxury at the front of the train, bombarding themselves with North Korean-style personality cult propaganda worshipping the mysterious oligarch who constructed the global rail line and never leaves the locomotive. They enjoy amenities that include, among others, a self-sustaining aquarium car where the fish are occasionally prepared into delicious-looking sushi to “keep the ecosystem balanced” (no word on if Amtrak has studied this as it overhauls its dining services). The “freeloaders,” meanwhile, live in squalid conditions at the rear and are fed processed bugs.

The back-of-the-train protagonists of Snowpiercer turn to old-fashioned activism to solve their conundrum, staging a rebellion. They have fleeting successes, but also get played by the powerful in their pursuit of equitable access. The future of this cinematic version of humanity, akin to our own transportation future, is left a mix of hope and fear when (spoiler) the train inevitably derails and the credits roll.

In Parasite, humanity’s fate doesn’t rest entirely on the management and operation of a transit system, and the poor and rich don’t engage in total war for mobility and freedom. In some ways, the dichotomy is actually reversed – transportation doesn’t cement division, but rather gives the rank-and-file access to opportunities. 

However, people use that access solely to serve and, to the extent possible, leech off privileged individuals who don’t understand or appreciate that transportation. The result isn’t too different from that of Snowpiercer, as neither side comes out ahead.

***  

Policy and planning tools could certainly nudge the transportation behavior of people like the Parasite couple. For example, Seoul – despite all its subways and buses – has a dearth of protected bike infrastructure on its primary arteries; fixing this would free up valuable space in the crowded city. The city’s leaders could also implement more car-free zones, mandating reality on existing pedestrian-dominated alleys while building on prior accomplishments like the early-2000s restoration of the Cheonggyecheon Stream and the more recent conversion of the bustling Shinchon district’s main thoroughfare into a busway.      

But, just as the political revolution in Snowpiercer didn’t achieve clear results, it will take more to change the evolutionary traits of our species that shaped the Parasite couple’s perspective on mobility.

Those millennia of lived experience have taught us that others are out to get us, and that the only way to shake them off is to stand out at their expense. It is why politicians succeed by giving people a boogeyman to blame for their problems, even if they fail to – or even make any effort to – actually solve those problems. It’s why NIMBYs see any potential change to their neighborhood as a threat to their rights and beliefs, even if the change would benefit everyone, including them.

Automobiles are a flawed transportation product, but those flaws are the perfect complement for this unsettling construct. Cars may occupy excessive space, but they give people an easy way to flaunt status wherever they go. From a driver’s perspective, other people hinder every trip – slowing them down, cutting them off, sometimes even colliding with them – but in the end, they get the satisfaction of overcoming these obstacles, enjoying a sip of life at the top without ever leaving their own little world.

***

When the Parasite couple mocks Seoul’s transit riders, they’re not talking about a literal smell or other problem with their city’s trains or buses. Rather, to them transportation is a means to reinforce a sense of superiority, rather than a means of mobility. And thus, even in Seoul and other places with excellent transportation options – places where transit powers the economy that allows the elite to prosper – things like congestion, crashes, and pollution put a damper on life.   

   

So, will humanity ever evolve to prioritize access over status? Perhaps pressure from continued climate change or economic strife – or, as suggested by the Snowpiercer train’s derailment, an upheaval even more stark and sudden – will ensure we do someday.   

     

But for now, the goal should be to discover new things and savor every experience, not to be superior. To that end, let’s ride on.