Cars

Interstate I-16, August 2005

Cars isolate people.  They keep us seated and sedentary, apart from our neighbors, isolated and alone.  The highways they need carve up and divide our cities, keep neighborhoods separated, and are formidable barriers to pedestrians. The traffic they cause generates stress, anxiety, road rage, and loathing.  Their petroleum fuel contributes to climate change, ozone pollution, smog, and haze, and provides funds for Islamic extremists.  Cars promote urban sprawl and the loss of wildlife habitat and the tree canopy, and their in-town parking lots occupy valuable urban space and keep buildings far apart and separated, further discouraging pedestrian access.  They sometimes kill us slowly through stress and pollution and by keeping us from exercising, and sometimes rapidly in violent accidents that shock our sensibilities.

Atlanta's Interstate highways are not roads, they are failures of urban planning and design. They are the boulevards of broken dreams. They are what's wrong and they are the problem.

That, and trees (guns, too).