In 2012, a more innocent time, Jamie Glazov had me write up a parody of gun control talking points that called for banning "assault vehicles".
The children, the most innocent among us, are the real victims of America's insane car culture.
Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for children from 2 to 14 years old. An average of 6 children die every day in car crashes... and 700 more are injured. Some of those injuries will cripple them for life.
Any decent person, even a car owner, can't help but look at these statistics and demand immediate unthinking action of some kind.
No one is talking about banning all cars, but there's no reason for a law-abiding driver to own a car that goes faster than 35 miles per hour. Above that speed is when most fatal accidents occur and closing that speed loophole will save millions of lives.
Cars that travel faster than 35 miles per hour, let's call them Assault Vehicles, have no purpose except to cater to a sick car culture that values speed over the lives of innocent children. We owe it to our children to give them a better world.
An assault vehicle ban will also be good for the environment. Some drivers will discover that they can get to work faster by riding a bike than by driving their fume-spewing murder machines.
It's 2017 and parody is reality. Courtesy of BuzzFeed, the head of something called Transportation Alternatives and the complete collapse of the left into insanity.
We Should Ban Cars From Big Cities. Seriously.
In the coming days, politicians will try to convince you that what happened on the West Side Highway in Manhattan this week was an issue of terrorism, immigration, or religion. But just like the plague of mass shootings is a gun problem, the thousands of people killed by cars as they walk our streets every year is a car problem.
A gun lobbyist would typically step in right about now to ask whether those who demand gun control after mass shootings also want to ban cars after events like this week. To which I say: Hell yes. Cars don’t belong on the streets of big cities, and we should do everything in our power to get rid of them.
It's happening. It's really happening.
Singer's screed actually reads a lot like my article.
More than 40,000 Americans were killed by cars in 2016 — the equivalent of a fully-loaded Boeing 747 falling out of the sky once every three days. It’s more than the 33,000 annual gun deaths, and more than the 20,000-plus people killed by synthetic opioids that year. Half of those automobile fatalities occurred in urban areas; about 6,000 of them were pedestrians.
And we need to do something about lighting storms. There's no reason for us to keep putting up with clouds.
Anyway if you guessed that this genius has no serious plans for replacing cars, despite just calling for it, you guessed correctly.
Of course, the cities we have today could not ban cars tomorrow. No current public transportation system functions well enough to carry an entire city population. Not everyone can walk or ride a bike. Too many taxi drivers would be out of work.
We are not ready, but the car-free city is being tested in bits and pieces around the world. We should learn from all of them, and apply those lessons as soon as possible.
Oslo plans to ban all cars from its city center by 2019. Madrid has a goal of 500 car-free acres by 2020. In Paris and Mexico City, people are restricted from driving into the city center on certain days based on the age of their cars or the number on their license plates. Inside Barcelona’s superblocks, all car traffic that isn’t local is banned. Over 75 miles of roads in Bogotá, Colombia, close to traffic for a full day every week.
With an extensive network of bike lanes, and plans for a bike superhighway that stretches to the suburbs, Copenhagen has convinced more than half of its population to bike to work. A planned city outside Chengdu was developed to make walking easier than driving, with all destinations built within a 15-minute stroll. In 180 cities, some 31 million people globally leave their cars at home each day and ride on bus rapid transit systems, a sort of aboveground subway built of buses. When London introduced a congestion fee that charged drivers a premium to travel into the city center, so many people took public transit instead that traffic crashes declined by 40%.
Of course not. But bike superhighways. That's the answer.
The deadliest Car Jihad attacks actually involve trucks and other large vehicles. And our progressive genius has no plans for replacing all the delivery trucks that make it possible to live in a city. Maybe he thinks that his Amazon Prime packages and the organic mangos delivered to his Whole Foods supermarket will be brought over on bikes or public transportation.
But you're not supposed to think on the left. Instead you're supposed to propose ideologically correct ideas. And then try to figure out how to make them work.
Let's ban all cars. But not today. And make sure that the trucks can still bring my Bed, Bath and Beyond soft scrub brushes into the city.
This is a microcosm of the left's approach to policy. You can see it with ObamaCare and Bernie's socialized medicine. Or California's unbudgeted version of it. Pass the law now. Figure out how to make it work later. It's the right thing to do. How hard can it be?