Part 8: Quotes that make impact on America and around the world, gridlocked traffic worldwide, carbon footprint exhaust growing
“A society sufficiently sophisticated to produce the internal combustion engine has not had the sophistication to develop cheap and efficient public transport. There are hardly any buses, the trains are hopelessly underfunded and hence, the entire population is stuck in traffic.” Ben Elton, Gridlock
From my own experiences in traffic in Hong Kong, Tokyo, San Paulo, Sydney, Houston, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Beijing, Shanghai, Atlanta, San Francisco and dozens of other overpopulated cities, “Gridlocked traffic causes more deaths, more tension, more suffering and more emotional misery than yet understood. It defeats the human spirit with endless failure of the ability to move forward. You can be killed or maimed at any moment by another automobile. Drivers fume in their seats while their cars fume-up the biosphere. Gridlocked traffic worsens by the year as humanity grows its collective population by 80 million annually. Gridlocked traffic can never be solved as long as humans refuse to address the root cause of the problem.”
An average of 43,000 Americans lose their lives every year in traffic crashes. In Denver, Colorado where I live, gridlocked traffic accounts for 20 to 30 crashes every day of the work week. To put Denver’s traffic into a few words: an exasperating daily living nightmare.
Millions of drivers drive drunken 24/7 on America’s highways. You might go to work one morning and suffer an auto crash that takes your life or places you in the ICU at your local hospital.
According to the USA National Highway Traffic Administration, car accidents occur every minute of the day: “Motor vehicle accidents occur in any part of the world every 60 seconds. And if it’s all summed up in a yearly basis, there are 5.25 million driving accidents that take place annually in the USA. Statistics show that each year, 43,000 or more of the United States’ population die due to vehicular accidents and around 2.9 million people end up suffering light or severe injuries. In a certain five year period, there had been recorded a 25 percent of the driving population who encountered or were involved in car accidents. It is also affirmed that car accidents kill a child every three (3) minutes.”
Canada Free Press reported, “Here’s one way to get attention: traffic deaths worldwide kill the equivalent number of people as would perish in nine (9) jumbo jet crashes every day. Think of the headlines for nine jet crashes every day of the year. World traffic injuries are taking the lives of 145 people every hour of every day (totaling 3,500 per day). This is more than two a minute and adds up to something like 1.3 million people dying on the world’s roads each year and a further 20 to 30 million people suffering injuries, often debilitating ones.”
Already in China where they push 27,000 new cars onto their highways every single week of the year, some 14 million cars added annually as reported by NBC’s Brian Williams, they suffer unimaginable gridlock. Last year, China reported a 62 mile long gridlock traffic jam that took nine days to resolve. Motorists ran out of gas, out of water and out of food while stuck in traffic.
Ironically, China adds eight million more people to its population annually via “population momentum.” By 2030, they expect to burn 98 million barrels of oil daily, which exceeds the entire daily world consumption of 82 million barrels in 2013. (Source: The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler)
Why won’t global leaders meet in a world conference to deal with the environmental, social and mega-city consequences we humans created around the planet? When we see such enormous traffic gridlock, why do we think building more roads, highways and expressways will solve the problem? It won’t, it can’t and it doesn’t.
How can Los Angeles solve its God-awful and God-forsaken gridlock by adding another 10 million people, which demographic experts predict before 2050? What kinds of minds think they can solve anything by growing it bigger?
I have personally traveled through most of the major overpopulated cities in the world. It’s like trying to wrestle a giant squid with one foot. It’s like trying to fly using toothpicks for wings. It’s like trying to run with 100 pound weights attached to your ankles. You get the picture!
So, what’s the answer? Demographic expert Jason Brent of Los Vegas, Nevada spells it out: “Therefore, the only problem, the ultimate problem, facing humanity is to reduce our population as quickly as possible with the least amount of death and destruction and to determine who will be permitted to reproduce when the population contraction commences in the very near future. Compared to the problem described above every other problem faced by humanity is irrelevant and unimportant. If the problem described above is not solved, billions will die due to the decline in economic activity which will cause continuous wars and other horrors until the population is reduced to the level the declining economic activity can support.”
As our civilization adds another 138 million people driving cars by mid-century, what’s your solution?
Frosty Wooldridge is a Population-Immigration-Environmental specialist: speaker at colleges, civic clubs, high schools and conferences. Facebook: Frosty Wooldridge. Facebook Adventure Page: How to Live a Life of Adventure: The Art of Exploring the World. Www.HowToLiveALifeOfAdventure.com. www.frostywooldridge.com
