8/10/2023 0 Comments A road to nowhere book![]() A staggering number of people are regularly killed or maimed by cars. The costs of automobiles are not purely economic. Given this situation, it’s easy to conclude that in the U.S., when it comes to transportation, there is no alternative. Owning a car, then, is effectively a necessity. But for everyone else, the distances between home, work, the grocery store, schools, hospitals, and other essentials are just too far to realistically travel by any other means. Buses and trains might be practical for urban workers, though budget cuts have increasingly undermined their utility. Despite their disadvantages, not least of all the exorbitant costs it takes to maintain them, cars are essential for the vast majority. Far from offering freedom, cars are more likely to be claustrophobic cells that move people to work at a glacial pace, when they’re not entirely stationary in miles of traffic. With a car, you are free.Īctors in these commercials have the luxury of barreling down empty streets. (Notice how there are, improbably, never any other cars on the road.) Rather, they all push the same alluring message: with a car, you can go wherever you want, whenever you want, as fast as you want. These commercials are nearly indistinguishable, and not just in surface details. Nothing quite captures the enormous chasm between capitalist promises about the future of transportation and our present-day reality than the typical car commercial.
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