Recent Streetsblog LA posts about Car Culture

Who Loves Traffic? Dan and the Highway Lobby

By Ben Fried | Aug 22, 2008 | No Comments

U.S. PIRG has picked a winner in its "21st Century Transportation" video contest, and it’s this irony-soaked entry. Meet "Dan," a guy who just can’t get enough stop-and-go time on the highway. He loves sitting in traffic, and the last thing he wants to see is adequately funded transit giving people an attractive alternative to […]

Blogging Cyclist Calls for Truce in Car v Bike Culture Wars

By Damien Newton | Aug 11, 2008 | 9 Comments

It seems like everywhere you turn these days, you can find a news story about the growing cultural war between bicyclists and car drivers. Locally, the Mandeville Canyon Crash has shed a startling light on the violent attitudes some motorists have towards the two-wheeled users of the road, and similar stories have been reported in […]

This Just In: The Media Business Is Auto-Dependent Too

By Ben Fried | Aug 8, 2008 | 1 Comment

Think web sites are saturated with car ads? The internet’s got nothing on local TV. The graphic on the right comes from a recent Wall Street Journal article (preview only) on car makers’ attempts to curb their advertising budgets. The amount of money pouring into the media from the auto industry is staggering. Analysts predict […]

Seattle Critical Mass Assault a Flashpoint in Bike v Car Culture

By Damien Newton | Jul 29, 2008 | 17 Comments

Riders from This May’s Seattle Critical Mass Last Friday, during Seattle’s Critical Mass ride, a Subaru station wagon ran over some cyclists. The reasons for the incident are up for debate as cyclists claim the driver acted irrationally and plowed into the cyclists without provocation. The driver claims that cyclists were attacking his car and […]

Ad Nauseam: Pump

By Damien Newton | Jul 22, 2008 | 6 Comments

John McCain released a new television advertisement where he promises relief at the gas pump for working families by increasing oil drilling in America. The ad begins by showing an old fashioned gas pump as a voice darkly intones, “Gas prices, $5, $% no end in site.” Then, as the image changes to rapidly rising […]

Tom Vanderbilt Ponders Motorist Sociopathy

By Ben Fried | Jul 21, 2008 | 2 Comments

Yesterday, at the end of our piece about the recent road rage incidents in usually-polite Portland and Seattle, we posed a question to Tom Vanderbilt, author of the forthcoming book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us. We asked: What is it about automobility that often seems to […]

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