Friday, January 31, 1992 —- North Shore News - 35°

AUTOMOTIVE
Is personal liberty sacrificed in quest for safety?

Car & Driver editor claims too

much is lost in

AT THE annual Driving
Through the Nineties road
safety conference held in
Vancouver last week, Brook
Yates seemed strangely oui
of place.

Editor-at-large for Car &
Driver magazine and instigator of
the infamous Cannonball Run (a
no-holds barred, mad dash across
the United States), Yate's presence
was somewhat akin to a
Rastafarian at a Mormon conven-
tion.

Yet his message was perhaps the
most interesting and potent of all
the speakers who came from
around the world to give their
opinions of traffic safety. Yates
claimed that personal liberty and
mobility are under attack from
those who want to control our
cars and highways.

“There is a component within
our society that is very uncom-
fortable with cars,’’ said Yates.
“It’s politically correct not to like
cars today. Cars are viewed as the .
enemy. They’re viewed as killers,
as congesters of our cities, as
polluters of our atmosphere. And
I think there’s a movement now to
collar cars, to bring them under
control.’’

Yates
engineers”’

claimed that ‘‘social
are much more com-

“Get ready for

policing drivers

fortable with a society that can be
moved around on mass transit
systems. ‘*The thrust of a collec-
livist society that we all struggle
against is to put the car in the
garage and put everyone onto
mass transit, into situations where
their movement can be controlled,
and plot their movement. It’s
much more comfortable for them
to know where everybody is."’

By comparison, says Yates,
automobiles are basically anar-
chistic devices. ‘‘We (drivers) have
massive freedom, we have control
over enormous power, we are able
to move freely wherever we choose
to move,”’ Yates believes that even
if all the highways in the country
were torn up, people would find
ways of adapting their vehicles to
the conditions.

“The automobile is a source of
personal options, and personal
freedom that is terribly valuable
to all of us, and I think it is in-
credibly important to all of us.
We must maintain some perspec-
tive of its value, its value well
beyond its function as mere
transportation. The car symbolizes
the personal freedom we so much
cherish in Canada and in the
United States.”

As an example of what a collec-
tivist society would be like, Yates
cited the the crumbling Soviet
Union where cars are scarce and

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lack of mobility, claimed Yates.

And while the automohile can
be made to be socially more
responsible, said Yates. the
realities of human nature cannot
be changed.

“Human nature demands a cer-
tain level of risk-taking — par-
ticularly in young men. It’s very
nice to say we'lH educate them,
show them details of gory acci-
dents, and speak to them about
responsibility.
difficult to crack the human urges
for aggressiveness and com-
petitiveness which often can be
expressed in cars."°

Though cars and hizhways have
improved dramaticaliy over the
last couple of decades, Yates in-
sists that we haven't (changed the
way we drive cars. ‘*I] don’t see
any indication of a lessening of
the ageressive qualities that we see
out on the highways,”’ he said.

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Yates believes that
most drivers are better than
they're given credit for. ‘*When
you consider that there are a cou-
ple of hundred million people
veering around out there every
day, in these two-ton behemoths,
and only a few of them crash into
each other, I think it’s pretty good
testimony to the general good
sense of the public."”

However,

Solving traffic accident prob-
lems will require a better under-
standing of human psychology
and an acceptance of our
weaknesses as human _ beings,
believes Yates. ‘In the context of
trying to build a better world,
automotively speaking, i think we
have to recognize that the human
condition is fraught with weakness
and temptation, and = unfortu-
nately, an opportunity for many
people to behave badly."*

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