Phase Out Auto Industry (1)

By Rick Ruffin

``If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.'' So said Albert Einstein.

This idea isn't even that absurd. There is nothing revolutionary about this idea. It has been bandied around for decades in books and on the Internet. It is even mentioned repeatedly in the textbooks I use to teach English. This idea is simple and pure: a future without cars.

Already, all over the world, car sales are down ― way down. Here in South Korea, Ssangyong Motor is struggling to survive. In the United States, it's GM, Ford, and Chrysler that are on the ropes.

And in Japan, where Toyota Motor recently spilled its first blotch of red ink in 70 years of production, there is a new culture on the rise. It's called ``kuruma banare,'' or ``demotorization.''

If ever we are to make the transition from a society choked in concrete and gridlock to a society of open spaces, that time is now. Let's create a truly bright future. Let's phase out the automobile industry.

The answer isn't hybrids or electric cars. The answer is no cars at all. And here are the reasons.

Cars are incredibly destructive. The production of each of the almost one billion automobiles on the planet creates several tons of waste and 1.2 billion cubic yards of polluted air.

Nations go to war so that their people can drive to work. Auto emissions cause cancer, heart attacks and respiratory disease. Oil and gasoline pollute groundwater. CO2 causes global warming.

Automobiles directly cause pain, injury and death to more than one million people around the globe every year. In the United States alone, around 40,000 people and 400 million animals are killed by motorists every year.

Automobiles take up large parts of our lives, time that could be better spent. The average American spends four of his waking 16 hours in his car. A Korean woman I know once spent 18 hours driving from Seoul to Daejeon, a distance of about 120 kilometers, stuck in holiday traffic. A bicycle would have been much faster.

Cars require tremendous amounts of resources. In America more than half of the oil and rubber, a third of the steel, and about a quarter of the aluminum and electronics go into cars.

Crops such as palm oil, sugar cane, corn and soybeans are being raised to make ethanol and other biofuels, when that food could be used to feed billions of people every year. These crops are often grown at the expense of cleared tropical rainforest.

The billions of tires around the world slowly decompose, polluting groundwater, going into our lungs as fine dust, or catching on fire and emitting acrid smoke. They are a serious toxic waste issue.

Cars require tremendous amounts of space, and that space comes in the form of asphalt and concrete, and asphalt and concrete are not part of the future. South Korea loses huge tracts of forest and farmland to highway and parking lot construction each year.

In the United States, for which statistics are readily available, a car requires 60 square meters of road surface when moving, and 30 square meters of surface area when parked. The major cities of the world have all become ``concrete jungles,'' largely due to the automobile.

Cars are inefficient. While a highway lane can move about 1,500 cars per hour at peak capacity, one light rail can move 40,000 to 50,000 people per hour over the same distance.

Cars are no longer romantic. Perhaps they never were. While American pop culture romanticized the car with movies starring James Dean ― who tragically died in a car crash ― and songs by the Beach Boys, Steppenwolf (``Born to be Wild,'' a song about driving along an empty highway at top speed) and others, the fact of the matter is there are few places in the world where you can drive fast anymore, unless you live in the Australian outback or rural Canada.

Cars make us lazy and fat. Just go to America, and take a look at the average waistline. That waistline has spent most of its life behind the wheel of a car.

The irony of the automobile is that it was originally marketed as a tool of freedom. As we can all see, it has become anything but that.

As more and more people purchase cars, we will all have fewer open spaces in which to drive them. Gridlock will increase. Unless, of course, the government builds more roads, something they are only too willing to do.

Next time I will explain how the automobile and oil consortiums conspired to bamboozle the public into becoming dependent on the car and addicted to fossil fuels.

The writer, a graduate of the University of Texas, Austin, now writes from Gangneung, Gangwon Province. He can be reached at rick_ruffin@yahoo.com The views expressed in the above article is those of the author and do not reflect the editorial policy of The Korea Times.