Date: Tue, 31 Mar 1998 10:33:57 -0500
From: "Charles Brown" <charlesb-AT-CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us>
Subject: M-TH: Re: Traffic and transportation thread


    I don't have a comment directly on the issues in the ongoing debate and discussion about roads and traffic,etc. I do have a comment about automobiles and mass transportation.
      I am in Detroit, Motown, the former auto captial of the world. and still a major auto production center.  We have two giant assembly plants withn the City limits and maybe 5 more in the metropolitan area. That's not counting several engine plants, and many suppliers plants. Windsor, Canada is right across the river,  We need auto production jobs.
       However, cars are the most dangerous instrumentalities in the common environment of the masses. The one thing I concentrate on warning my child about is that he watch out for cars, because the most likely way that he would be  prematurely killed is by a car.
    This does not begin to address the environmental impacts.
       In the thirties GM conspired to have ripped up Detroit's (and Los Angeles')  trolley car system.  If all the engineering, urban planning, transport technological-scientific revolution etc., etc. etc. mental energy had been directed toward other forms of mass transportation, we could have as much convenience with safer forms as we have with cars.
      I often think there was a propaganda /psychological element to the bourgeois preference for individualized or privatized vehicles over socialized . This parallels the deconstruction of the giant factories where working get a sense of their mass strength from the assembly of large numbers in one place. A mass gathering of people in a transportation system every day gives the same constant reminder.  The automobile form alienates each worker into an individual, after work when everybody could talk about all the shit done to them at work.
       We can still be more safe and socialized in mass transit. This should be the socialist program.
     



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