Cars

On his "Fast Lane" blog this week, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood gave a shout-out to the 2 Mile Challenge, an initiative by the Clif Bar people to encourage people to bike instead of drive. LaHood started by saying that with gas at $4 a gallon, there’s no reason to use a car for the 40 percent of urban trips that are less than two miles, yet 90 percent of the time, that’s what people do.

Gerontologists in a laboratory at the University of Southern California exposed a group of mice to the same atmospheric conditions that humans encounter when driving along the freeway. Horrifyingly, they discovered that the mice’s brains showed the kind of swelling and inflammation associated with diseases such as Alzheimer’s. The researchers didn’t super-dose to get these results: the mice were exposed to freeway air for the equivalent of 15 hours a week -- less than the 18.5 hour average Americans spend in their cars. Jokes aside about getting those darn mice off the road, the study suggests that driving less can reduce our risk of brain damage.

Dear sustainability advocate: I know you are tired.

Our local paper recently ran the story of Edith Cameron, killed in a car crash on a road we sometimes use. We anxiously scanned the column looking for that something that one of the drivers involved must have done wrong—the thing that we surely would never do, like hit the road without a seatbelt or after downing a few beers.

You may have heard last week that a former Shell executive predicted that gas prices would reach five dollars a gallon by the end of next year. John Hofmeister is now the head of Citizens for Affordable Energy, which advocates for increased coal, gas, and oil production in the U.S. He’s also the author of a book called “Why We Hate the Oil Companies: Straight Talk from an Energy Insider.”

Over the next few months, electric cars will start rolling out of showrooms and onto American roads. They’ve been a long time coming.

Rowena learned about the true cost of cars the hard way. Raised by her mom, a Filipina immigrant, in a happy if carless home in northern California, Rowena marveled upon graduating from college and getting a steady job that she could afford to lease her very own car.  For a small down payment and $199 a month, she was in a beautiful new Honda.

Last Christmas, an Oregon couple driving with their baby in the backseat followed erroneous GPS instructions and got stranded on wilderness roads in a Cascades snowstorm. Twelve hours later, they had given up hope and taped a farewell video. While a rescue party fortunately was able to save them, they no doubt wished they hadn’t allowed their belief in modern electronics to override their own clear eyes and good instincts.

The fat lady hasn’t sung yet, but the country’s auto dealers have been exempted from the financial reform bill now in its final stage in Congress. Given that the purpose of the bill is to protect Americans from harmful manipulation by the people selling them financial products, this is a pretty stunning development. The nation’s auto dealers either provide or broker most of the $850 billion worth of currently outstanding car loans across America. That’s a pile of financial product: It’s more than household credit card debt and second only to home mortgages.