American Cars

a self-righteous rant about driving in the land of the free

Hello dear readers,

I didn’t send out much in June. My intention is still to send out a newsletter every week, and I’m slowly planning and assembling some whoppers.

Things are still extremely hectic and busy, but for the first time in I don’t remember how long, it’s mostly in a really good way. I’m working on a few articles about the enfolded social and ecological crises in the Chesapeake Bay, on a grant application for a solidarity project that might actually come to fruition, and on several other big things that have to do with abundance, stability, and the dissemination of radical ideas.

I don’t want to let another week go by without a newsletter, so I’m taking a break from one of the articles to write a short rant. In honor of this glorious holiday weekend, to pay my respects to the innermost heart of this great nation, it’s about cars, or more exactly, driving.

If you don’t like the evil vibes of a rant, you don’t need to read this, it’s okay. Newer subscribers might be interested in newsletters from earlier years that they missed.

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Here’s some ethical/political analysis that still feels relevant:

and here’s a more sentimental travel narrative:

many of my newsletters aren’t particularly time sensitive, so if you ever want to scroll back and check any of the old ones out, remember that you can always just go to the website: petergelderloos.substack.com

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So I guess I’ve spent a lot of time driving. My current job is driving old folks, and two of my prior waged jobs involved driving a dump truck and driving box trucks. Back in Harrisonburg, I drove a taxi (before the idiotically myopic, naïvely techno-optimistic scab culture of the United States allowed shitbag companies like Über to drive the taxi companies out of business, contributing to the progressive railing of professional drivers in this country and the spread of surveillance infrastructure). I’ve also had points of comparison, living in Catalunya for 16 years, seeing how Germans drive, spending a significant amount of time in South America. And just a few weeks ago I drove down to Virginia to do some more research for the articles, visit my mammaw, see some dear friends, and show R my old stomping grounds. Oh my gawd is there any swampy creek more enticing than the ones you’ll find on the Northern Neck? Any place more holy than the Blue Ridge when the mists are rising off it?

Anyway, we’re not here to talk about beautiful things, we’re here to spew venom.

I’m listening to Carmina Burana, the whole Carmina Burana, so if you’re up for it, get ready for some righteous, hyperbolic ¡rage! followed by sublime joy and at-oneness. What better communicates the existential experience of the highway?

Without further ado:

Americans Can’t Drive

What. the. fuck. is wrong with American drivers? Seriously. It’s like an American steps into a car and, no matter what kind of person they are before they get in there, they suddenly forget that there are other people in the world. Further research might even show they lose all perception of personhood, their own and that of others, given the tendency towards self-destructive and other-destructive behaviors in equal measure.

What’s the point in turning on my lights when it’s raining? I can see just fine.

Why on earth would I use turn signals? I know where I’m going.

One might argue that it’s the big cars, that gringo predilection for senseless murder and their holy obligation to skullfuck the planet’s climate by burning as much oil as possible so Jebus comes back. And while it’s true that Americans, given the choice, really love to buy cars that are much more likely to kill pedestrians and much more likely to kill other drivers, and while it’s true that SUVs aren’t designed to give their drivers clear reference points, good visibility, and an accurate sense of the dimensions of their vehicle, the problem isn’t the cars.

You can drive a box truck that is sleek as fuck, with perfectly positioned mirrors and an obvious reference point for every corner of the vehicle. Or you can have a big bus with too many curves, mirrors small and close in, and a big rear, meaning you’ve got huge blind spots and can’t perceive exactly where your front and rear fenders are. In other words, you can have good and bad design, and believe me, I’ll gripe about bad design, but it’s not the vehicle that causes the accidents. In the latter case, instead of hitting a parked car backing out of your space or running over an unseen pedestrian in a crosswalk on a right turn and saying, ‘Oopsie daisy!’, you just do the fucking work, learn your vehicle’s delimitations and blind spots, and understand how it turns.

The problem’s not the cars: it’s the Americans. It’s a safe assumption that someone in a big SUV has no fucking clue how to drive their vehicle. Watching them try to park, watching them try to navigate around one another when each of them has a full foot of margin on each side, convinced they’re about to scratch their precious paint jobs. Seeing a road wide enough for four vehicles abreast, with one car parked on the street and two cars in motion approaching each other, how they’ll stop, terrified, sure that there isn’t the room for them to get past each other without colliding…

The landlord of the duplex across the street who ran into our properly parked car because he was attempting an extremely complex maneuver—turning into the driveway—and who then tried to claim that the accident wasn’t his fault because the car was there on the curb next to the driveway and he had to turn into the driveway (AM I TAKING CRAZY PILLS? HE HIT A STATIONARY OBJECT!!!)

Americans. can’t. drive.

Fortunately, for our amusement, there’s a lot of regional variety in how they blunder along.

• Virginians tend to derpy derp along, oblivious of their surroundings.

• Marylanders, I think, at 16 years old, are given a license, a key, no training, and instructions to go out and cause as much harm as possible.

• Ohioans clearly expect a great reward in the hereafter either if they drive so aggressively witnesses might expect extreme steroid and cocaine usage, or if they do their best to take up as much space as a Walmart parking lot (I s’pose there’s two religions on the subject).

• How about New Jersey. Use the phrase “traffic rules” around a New Jerseyite and they’ll jerk awkwardly, screw up their face, and ask, “rules??”

To either head off or draft a future rant, there is a difference between norms, conventions, rules, and laws, and different ways of producing each of these. “Community agreements”, however, may be an exact synonym for any of these terms, offers no new meaning and implies nothing about how the costumed norm/convention/rule/law was formulated.

When it comes to LA (and probably Atlanta), I’m not even sure we can talk about a driving culture so much as a system, an enclosed experiment in human tolerance for ecocide, totalitarianism, and pointless stupidity. Here’s how it works: lock several million people in a giant, open air laboratory where one of the highest concentrations of cultural capital in the world entices them to stay, force them to pay outrageous rents, to spend hours in traffic going to superficially enjoyable or outright degrading jobs to pay those rents, to breathe increasingly toxic air, to watch the few good neighborhoods with actual roots be slowly suffocated, to be surrounded by Californians with their inane way of speaking, and find out what happens first: mass escape; social revolution; homicidal mass nihilism; or infinite acceptance as highways grow and grow to 26 lanes and beyond.

I do have to tip my hat to rural drivers in a couple places, namely Texas (rural Texas only, mind you) and western New York, but they are the exception.

The US is the only country in the world where two cars can cause a five mile long traffic jam on a double lane highway (i.e. two lanes going in each direction). They clearly don’t know that the left lane is for passing, and they don’t appear to grasp the concept of, if I drive at the exact same speed as this other guy, and instead of falling in behind them I drive right next to them because my car is my comfort bubble and I deserve to have a comfort bubble, then maybe no one will be able to get past us… It’s fully possible they don’t even realize there are other people in all those other cars backed up on the highway behind them.

(From what I’ve seen in other high infrastructure, high GDP countries like the US, everyone knows not to clog up the passing lane. If some tourist or somebody having a bad day happens to violate this norm, other drivers will educate them by beeping, flashing their brights, and aggressive/pedantic tailgating. In low infrastructure, low GDP countries where the government cannot afford to build and maintain a well ordered traffic system, anyone who wants to drive faster will usually just drive around the obstacle, whether or not there’s a lane there.)

Now, clearly, if I could abolish automobiles and highways today I would, but while we’re saddled with them (if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor), it doesn’t have to be like this, and I have a hard time believing in people who don’t realize it doesn’t have to be like this. If anyone out there has been to Germany and paid attention to how they drive, within essentially the same traffic system – it just doesn’t have to be like this.

On other counts, though, I do worry for the souls of the Germans. The way pedestrians there flock below a “do not cross” symbol before an empty street, refusing to cross, refusing to even look left and right and see that there is not a single car that could put them in danger, refusing to use their own senses, make their own decisions. I don’t think it’s that the modern day compatriots of the Grimm Brothers believe in the existence of invisible cars. I think they just refuse to disobey the electric blinking man.

Driving the other direction, I admire how often Clevelanders will roll up to a red light, see that there isn’t anyone in their path and no cops about, and motor through. I am a little worried, though, by their notion of how left turns are supposed to work. Two people driving towards each other on the same road. Each of them wants to make a left turn at the same intersection. Consulting the arcane sciences of basic geometry and the sort of spatial awareness one has by the age of three, I would think the convention is for each person to execute their left turn in the first half (respectively) of the intersection, turning in front of the other so they can turn simultaneously with their curves never crossing paths.

Yet, when I attempt to practice this convention here, the other driver will frequently look at me like I’m a fuckwit, yell even, for not driving past them so we can interlace our left turns. Which I suppose would work just marvelously if there were multiple people coming from each direction trying to make left turns…

Anyways. There’s me in my happy place, talkin some shit.

Drive safe. Bike and carry a u-lock. Walk and carry caltrops and a gun. Fuck a Tesla.

And take care of each other.