An American couple enjoying the benefits of car ideology.
An American couple enjoying the benefits of car ideology. Syda Productions/shutterstock.com

Every effort must be made to reduce the number of distractions in an automobile. The driver should always be sober, never listen to music or the news, never on a cellphone, never texting, nor checking GPS devices. If one is lost, they must pull over and sort out the matter while not moving. When not moving, you can listen to news, talk on the phone, check GPS.

We live in a society that has been socially engineered to see the operation of a 4000-pound machine as exactly the same as a walk through a park. But the car is nowhere near anything like walking (the average weight of an American is 180 pounds), and nor is it a living room (which is stationary). Driving a car is a lot of work and demands that as much of your attention be as present as possible. Driving should mentally exhaust you. You must feel it in much the same way a hill makes a pedestrian feel it. And as walkers avoid hills if they can, you should avoid the imposing demands of driving.

Indeed, this is why I hate Metro passengers who feel it is cool to just talk to bus drivers while the vehicle is moving. This is American ideology in full effect. It has leapt whole from the car into the bus. But one should leave bus drivers the fuck alone. They have a lot to think about. The bus is not a toy.

I bring all of this up because a young man who is accused of causing a deadly car crash in Burien claims that blame for the accident should not be placed on him but on his GPS device, which absorbed his attention at the moment of the fatal impact (which happened in October). No matter what you may think about this explanation, there is no smoke without fire. There are studies that show that GPS devices have become of one the leading distractions for drivers.

In fact, it can be argued that the decline of car ideology, a product of one of the greatest social engineering programs in human history, is behind the race for self-driving cars.