By Julia Hanna

Like so many suburban parents, Catherine Lutz RI ’08 often found herself behind the wheel of a car, driving her children (now grown) to various activities. Never mind traffic congestion; under the best conditions, Lutz was still unhappy with how much time she spent on the road. “I had a sense that something wasn’t right,” she says. “Everyone I knew was heading out in their own individual car to pick up their kids and take them somewhere else. Our lives are so spread out, so sprawling.”

Full Metal Jacket

Lutz, who holds the Matina S. Horner Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Radcliffe and is a professor of anthropology and international studies at Brown University’s Watson Institute, also became increasingly aware of the car’s contribution to global warming and oil-driven wars, and of the toll taken by auto accidents. She had lost both a cousin and a friend in crashes. Every year, approximately forty-two thousand people die on US roads, while hundreds of thousands of others suffer disabling injuries. “There’s a bizarre quality to how normal and acceptable those numbers have become,” says Lutz, who is at work on a book that will explore the conundrum of how we live with and through what critic Roland Barthes once described as “the Gothic cathedral of modern times.” Tentatively titled “Full Metal Jacket: The Car, U.S. Cultures, and Their Contradictions,” the book, which Lutz is cowriting with her sister, Anne Fernandez, will draw on extensive field interviews to illuminate the car’s role in everyday American lives and its relationship to power, identity, family, and political economy.

To date, most scholarly work has considered the car as object; Lutz focuses instead on commuters, gas station owners, and those who care for crash victims, to name a few. She also interviewed people she found at bus and train terminals who rarely drive at all.

In Debt to Drive

“One aspect I’m interested in is how the car system affects levels of inequality in this country,” Lutz says. “Talking to families about the economics of the car is revelatory.” Cars are the second most expensive item in most household budgets, she notes. According to the Department of Energy, American families spend, on average, nearly $14,000 a year to drive two cars about 21,000 miles at a cost of $.66 per mile. ”People are going into debt to drive,” she says, “and they have to drive to stay at their jobs. In some communities, without a car your job prospects are more limited, or you have no prospects. To afford housing closer to job centers, you need to spend that much more on rent or a mortgage.”

And when a car crashes, the results can be economically devastating. In some cases, a family member will leave his or her job to serve as a full-time caregiver if a victim is severely injured. “There are no good national statistics that I can find on this invisible nation of disabled car-crash victims,” Lutz says. She recalls interviewing a man who suffered a spinal injury in a crash while he was home from college. The man has been living in a wheelchair for several decades; he described his memories of the accident and the long, painful process of learning how to live without his legs. After years of coping with depression and bouts of alcoholism, he has recovered enough to help other people in his situation become as self-sufficient as possible. But, Lutz notes, on the day of their interview he was home sick with a urinary-tract infection—a common problem for people who sit in wheelchairs. “In some sense, the car keeps crashing,” she says. “The story doesn’t end.”

Getting People to Drive Less

If the story doesn’t end, it begins again and again with legions of freedom-hungry sixteen-year-olds. “They all talk about how exhilarating it was to get up for the first time and drive away from home,” says Lutz, who uses the word “terrifying” to describe the experience of watching her own children get their licenses. “Having my level of knowledge and anxiety about car crashes made it not much fun,” she admits, noting that in the United States, auto accidents are the leading cause of death for people between the ages of one and thirty-four.
For the record, Lutz owns a 2000 Honda Civic. However, she commutes from her home in Providence, Rhode Island, to her office at the Radcliffe Institute by train, subway, and bus. She points out that people often miscalculate the cost of their commute by looking at the price of gas alone, whereas the true cost is reflected in the additional expenses of depreciation, credit, insurance, taxes, and maintenance.

“A motivating factor in writing this book was to raise the level of economic and social literacy around the economic and societal costs involved in operating a car,” says Lutz. “The goal of getting people to drive less is both important and feasible.”

Lutz raises my own awareness by pointing out that my forty-mile round-trip commute to work is actually more expensive, at $26.40, than public transportation, at approximately $18. And if having time to read or work a crossword puzzle doesn’t tempt reluctant drivers, here’s another fast fact: Those who commute by public transportation weigh five pounds less, on average, than those who join the long lines of cars on our nation’s highways.

Julia Hanna is a freelance writer.

Photo by Webb Chappell