By popular demand -- a comprehensive review of all the ways car dependency destroys our communities, our health, and our planet. With gratuitous commentary by your host!It looks like I have to update the headline statistic in U.S. traffic deaths reached nearly 43,000 in 2021, the most in 16 years, a driving update, which I had telling my students to make a point. The actual number is 4,000 higher, 46,980. They would be even more shocked if I told them more than one million people die every year in car crashes, including collisions with pedestrians, worldwide. Yikes! Also, I make that comparison between the safety of cars and commercial airlines every year as an analogy for the day-to-day safety of coal-fired power plants and nuclear plants. Both commercial air travel and nuclear power plants are much safer than personal automobile travel and coal-powered plants, even accounting for Boeing's current problems and meltdowns. Nuclear waste? We haven't got there yet.
The rest of the list is just as enlightening and I plan on sharing the highlights as stories I tell my students. I hope they learn them, too. As for me, it's always a good day when I learn something new and I learned a lot from this video.
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