Recent Streetsblog LA posts about Car Culture

Who Loves Traffic? Dan and the Highway Lobby

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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 […]

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

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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 […]

Ad Nauseam: Pump

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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

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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 […]