What If I Should Drive An SUV?

Weighing self-preservation, principle, and duty to family

Recently, I saw two tweets. One, a journalist sharing a story about the death of a cyclist, struck and killed by a motorist. The other, a businessman arguing that if you care about your family’s safety, you have a duty to drive an SUV.

Because I follow so many urbanism/transportation folks on Twitter, I see this all the time—the bicyclists and pedestrians getting killed, not the trolling businessman. I’m tired of seeing it. Yes, of course I mean that I’m tired of it happening. But also, frankly, maybe selfishly, I’m tired of seeing it. There are a million ways to describe a death, apparently more than I can think of to mute in Twitter’s blocked word list: “died,” “killed,” “he’s gone,” “didn’t make it,” “no longer with us.” It’s not enough. Some non-zero amount of the effort spent on social media is spent pruning it back into something tolerable to see every day.

I usually make a point of not paying forward the misery—not sharing something I didn’t want to see in order to force others to see something they don’t want to see. But I’m not doing that here. I’m thinking about my reaction to these two tweets, which I’m sure is not mine alone.

I confess that much as motorists bear the greater responsibility in most of these “accidents,” and much as their recklessness or lack of attention can inflict far greater harm and injury than that of a cyclist or pedestrian—I still sometimes wonder, why did they choose to bike, knowing the dangers? Don’t we owe it, if not to ourselves, then to the people who depend on us, not to engage in unnecessary risks?

How is it not correct to argue that everybody with the means to do so has, essentially, an obligation to buy the biggest, safest car and transport themselves and their families in the safest way they can? If one cannot afford this—and many people are forced to rely on slow public transit or afterthought walking and biking infrastructure—that’s one thing. But to eschew the big car for the sake of the environment, or even out of concern for the potential pedestrian you might strike and kill—is this self-sacrifice defensible, ultimately?

If you choose a small car, what gives you the right to choose the potential life of a stranger over the life of your spouse or children? If you bike, what gives you the right to potentially deprive your spouse and children of yourself? An abstract desire not to intensify the collective problem of larger cars and more dangerous roadways?

The cyclist killed was a father. A husband. Being a lifelong suburbanite and motorist, if only that driver hadn’t killed him feels more abstract, more recited, more intellectual, and maybe less true, than if only he’d been in a car too.

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I’m not sure, honestly, how much I mean any of what I wrote above. But it is the more natural reaction for me. Maybe I want to preemptively excuse myself, in, God forbid, an event where I strike someone with my own car. Maybe owning two reliable cars obscures how much goes into making those cars convenient to use frequently. I don’t like the fact that I’m more viscerally upset at having to read about another traffic death than at the fact that it actually occurred—that these things feel in any way equivalent to me.

But this is part of the mental operating system that motordom installs in you. I can sense that there is a lifetime of messaging and assumptions and narrow experience that makes it hard for me to understand that those outside of the car have actual, concrete, apolitical, non-ideological interests. That reckless motorists do not, or should not, negate their right to the road. No matter what I believe, though, rage over a crowded parking lot feels natural, while rage at a blocked bike lane is something I have to mentally assent to, like an obscure doctrinal element of my faith.

What these stories and the commentary around them reveal to me is how wide the gulf is between those who view the car as sort of default—a bare, morally neutral fact of nature—and those who don’t. Perhaps this is the single most important division between us. The fact is, if you grow up in suburbia driving everywhere, you’re probably not aware there is any alternative view. The cyclist and the urbanist view the car as an instigator of stochastic terrorism. That is how they experience its presence.

The motorist, on the other hand, finds this insane. He views the car’s death toll, in which he potentially participates every time he drives, as no more willed or chosen or preventable than a heart attack or a case of cancer. The motorist senses that in acknowledging the terrible cost of the car, he might also be admitting guilt. And because he will not admit guilt, he refuses to acknowledge the cost.

This is one of those metaphysical or worldview questions—the load-bearing beam, the bedrock—that separates a lot of urbanists from non-urbanists. It reminds me of a web comment somewhere, on some article about housing, that argued, more or less, parents who choose to live in cities are endangering their children. Anybody who can move to a safe suburban neighborhood with good schools must do so. This is even more tendentious than the gotta-drive-an-SUV argument, but it is something a lot of suburbanites think, even if they would never express it this way. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that suburbia would exist at the scale that it does in the absence of this attitude.

But, narrowing back down to the SUV bit, the real problem is that it does make a certain kind of sense. It’s the same logic as owning a gun. In a world without any guns at all, we would be safer. But in a world with guns, we might very well be safer with one of our own. Any individual who gives up his own gun without a guarantee that everyone else will give up theirs is choosing to place himself at a relative disadvantage. Gun, SUV. Unilateral disarmament, bike riding. The giant car and the transportation network scaled to it operates in exactly this way. The worse it gets, the more it makes sense to partake of it. It is a collective action problem whose only real solution must also be collective.

Another fellow on Twitter probably got it right: “This is all true,” he replied to the SUV pusher, “and exactly why these vehicles should just be straight-up banned if you don’t have some sort of commercial license. Stop the arms race and the carnage.”

I am partial to this solution. I’m not concerned that restricting a vehicle approaching the size and heft of a World War II battle tank on the public roads is an attack on American liberty. Some will argue, of more interest to me, that restrictions on SUVs are an attack on families, especially large families. I’ve written before about both the downsides of cars for families, and also the conveniences.

But if the SUV in particular is essential to large families, then so is everything that it entails. We know that larger cars kill more people in collisions—that is one of their implicit selling points. We know that their visibility is poor, that they shrink the motorist’s perception of the world outside the windshield. If we arrive at a point where in order to be pro-family we must shrug at 40,000 violent traffic deaths a year, we have reached a point of does-not-compute. There is no world in which the flourishing of the family demands this. It is impossible to express what an obscenity this idea is.

The problem is not with cyclists, or anti-SUV people, nor is it with ordinary suburbanites and motorists who have never given more than five minutes’ thought to any of this. The problem is our culture of driving.

Our motoring culture essentially encourages us—forces us—to hope that the other guy will die. It forces us to assent to the idea that mobility demands a price in blood. It is morally corrupting and rotten. The answer to so immense a collective problem must not be individual. We must agree, as a society, to root out whatever must be rooted out to end the carnage.

Until then, however, what is an individual to do?

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Related Reading:

15-Minute Suburbs

No Harm, No Foul?

Don’t Do This In Remembrance Of Us

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