[For Blobby: PRIVATE.
Nobody’s fooled, man. They’re onto you. The whole “we†thing. The trip to Vegas, the papier-mache bike helmet, the canoe paddle you fixed with duct tape. No one actually thinks the Star editorialized in favour of banning car adverts; no one buys it that Governor Rounds of S. Dakota ever spoke up in defence of the most vulnerable road users. Most of us doubt that Guy Giorno ever complained about your version of Royal York Road; most of us quit reading your fancy HTML tips. Give it up, I tells ya! Stick to what you do best: naming the car porn that pays the wages of typists and hacks, removing the mist of uncertainty that clouds the yellowed fringe of the fifth column. The car ad will fall. It has to! It will go the way of the cigarette ad, the gun ad, the booze ad.
Now back at it! And no hard feelings. You can count on me –ed.]
Andy Singer writes:
You know I also have a CD-Rom that
has 60 or so images drawn since the book was written?
(all are in TIF format, so you'd have to covert them
to low-res GIFs for the web).
I think car advertising is evil (and support its
restriction or removal) ...but, it underpins so much
of our media that it will be tough to undo. For me,
the biggest, most important, and most POSSIBLE short
term thing we can do (that will stop the growth in
automobile use and all the evils that come with it) is
to reign in state highway agencies and prevent them
from building new highways. I have a slide talk on
this that I go around the country doing and need to
make into a comic or a web-based slide presentation
...But the crux of the issue is state highway
agencies' exclusive control of gas taxes and toll
revenues. In the 1950's GM and the car clubs they
created (like AAA), succeeded in passing
constitutional amendments in most states that MANDATE
that all state gas tax and toll revenue MUST be spent
on highways. This is the reason that there is little
or no money for transit and the reason that state DOTs
are often the most powerful force in state politics
...and keep getting more money to build highways
(since control of dedicated funds means control of
jobs). I give tons of examples in my talk, from many
different states, but the bottom line is that state
highway agencies have the politicians and the public
by the balls. The only state to remedy this is New
York (in 1970, under Nelson Rockefeller). There,
highway toll revenues can be used to subsidize
transit. At the federal level, there was ISTEA, first
passed in 1991, allowed a third of all FEDERAL gas tax
dollars to go to non-automotive projects. This money
paid for most of the LRT and commuter rail systems
built around the country during the 1990s (in Salt
Lake, Houston, San Jose, Portland, Minneapolis, LA and
many other cities). However, it left state gas taxes
and tolls untouched. We need to enact ISTEA type
legislation on the state level and make this a
political issue. There are a number of strategies for
doing this and it's definitely possible if we can find
creative sympathetic politicians who grasp the
problem.
...a thought for the day!
Happy trails,
Andy Singer