Editor’s Note

[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.
Andy Singer drawing. The gun, the booze, the smokes, the car. Without advertising, who will buy them?

Now back at it! And no hard feelings. You can count on me –ed.]

One Response to “Editor’s Note

  1.  

    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

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