Entire City Wiped Out Each Year by Drivers

This is an incredible post made yesterday on CommuterPageBlog, an excellent site blogging about commuting options within the DC Metro area. This was posted by David Ausman from Arlington, Virginia. It's good enough that I'm going to post it here in it's entirety, but all credit goes to him.

Is it just me or has anybody else noticed that about 45,000 of our fellow citizens are routinely killed in so called car "accidents" each year? If a terrorist came and destroyed an entire town of 45,000 tomorrow would we be upset? Or how about this: multiply 45,000 by one decade. Oh, I'm so sorry, we killed 450,000 of our fellows in the last ten years because we felt the urge to drive. Say, what's 45,000 times twenty years? Well, now we are pushing 1,000,000 fellow citizens getting snuffed out so that we can avoid taking a bus. My time is ever so much more valuable than the lives of one million Americans.

Let me put it another way: would you be shocked if nine fully loaded Boeing 747 jets (3750 people) crashed each and every month here forever and ever? Or would you just sit passively by and say, oh, gosh, that's okay with me. Who cares about those people? Well, that's how many of our fellow citizens die each month so that we can make phone calls while driving, open a hamburger while driving, fiddle with an iPod while driving, get drunk while driving, or vent our rage, while driving.

We think it's perfectly okay to wipe out an entire American town each and every year so that we can feel the Freedom of the Road.

Take a look at a map someday in the near future and pick out the towns with 45,000 people in them. Then imagine all of them dead...and very soon, to boot.

I wonder which one of those people had the cure for cancer or HIV? Maybe one of them would have figured out how to travel in space faster than the speed of light. Maybe one of them could have cured spinal nerve damage and Superman would have recovered. Well, we shall never know because this year we are wiping out a town so that we can drive, and next year we are wiping out another entire town so that we can drive, and the year after that, we are agreeing to wipe out another American town so we can avoid changing our infrastructure to benefit all of us in positive, healthy ways.

Now, if that doesn't make you stop and think, just for a minute, then there's no hope at all.