Photo: 1978 Ford Country Squire
Normally, I would compose a humor column for this spot in the Daily Post, but I’m not sure if this column is going to be humorous, because of the headline.
It’s about death, which some people do not consider funny.
Luckily, I am not among them. To me, everything on God’s green earth is worth laughing about. Or else, you end up crying. Not that I’m opposed to tears and sorrow. A good cry can be cathartic.
Pretty much anything you find yourself crying about, however, will one day end up seeming ridiculously funny. “Really? I was crying about that? Ha ha.”
Spilled milk is spilled milk. No use crying over it. There’s more milk at the supermarket. Plus, spilled milk is entertainingly funny when someone else has spilled it, and is crying over it.
Which brings us to the subject at hand. Obnoxious vehicles.
I learned to drive in a 1978 Ford Country Squire, which my dad bought new off the lot. My mom had been in a traffic accident a year earlier — just a minor fender-bender — but she’d developed, as a result, a severe anxiety about driving our little AMC Gremlin.
My father’s solution was the Country Squire, which — he assured my mother — was built like a tank and would fully protect her from harm in even the most serious accident. It measured nearly 19 feet long (5.73 meters, for our readers in other countries) and weighed 4,880 lbs in its stocking feet.
Mom did in fact feel safer in her new station wagon, plus she could now get about ten bags of groceries in the back. Nothing made Mom happier than a car full of safe groceries.
And she wanted her kids to be safe, of course, when she was driving me to soccer games, or my sisters to their dance classes. After which, she could do more safe shopping.
In a sense, this car was slightly crazy, because America was just getting over sky-high gas prices with no promise that the future would be any better, and I think the car got about 5 miles to the gallon.
We’re in another crazy time, and Americans are back to buying monster vehicles. Especially if — to judge by the big trucks and Suburbans in the City Market parking lot — they normally reside in Texas.
And the statistics indicate that, in fact, you are safer inside a monster vehicle.
But you are more likely to kill someone outside your vehicle.
The Economist (published in Great Britain, so take that into account) recently crunched some data and concluded that, if you drive in America, the chances are that 1-in-75 of all the people in the cars around you on the road will be killed by a car — probably, by someone else’s car.
From a summary of the Economist article (which you have to pay to read) on CleanTechnica.com:
Wherever you may be, the folks who are cocooned in a giant SUV or pickup truck are likelier to survive a collision with another vehicle. But the weight of those machines has a cost; it makes the roads more dangerous for everyone else. The Economist has found that, for every life the heaviest 1% of SUVs or trucks saves in America, more than a dozen lives are lost by people riding in smaller vehicles.
Each year, cars kill roughly 40,000 people in America, and not just because it is a big place where people love to drive. The nation’s roads are nearly twice as dangerous per mile driven as those in other developed countries. Deaths in America involving cars and trucks have increased over the past decade despite the introduction of technologies intended to make driving safer.
Smaller, lighter vehicles would save lives, but that’s not what we care about, apparently. The government body that rates cars for safety didn’t take the safety of pedestrians, or other vehicles, into consideration until last year.
And because of a trade dispute with Europe over exports of poultry, a number of lighter-weight foreign-made trucks are not even sold in America, a little political wrinkle known as the “chicken tax.”
Death on the highway is not even mentioned in the political debates this year, as far as I can tell.
Readers will be pleased to know, however, that my mom no longer drives the Country Squire. Dad bought her a Prius a few years ago, as an anniversary present.
Considering how my mom drives, we are all safer as a result.
Even if she is not.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.