Sunday Satire: What if We Shut Down Roads Like We Shut Down Transit?

A satirical post by Daniel Hertz takes an April Fools approach by reporting a fabricated reality where the federal government takes seriously the dangerous conditions on the nation's roads and highways:

Citing safety concerns, today Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx announced he was contemplating the closure of roads to all private vehicles in nearly every city in the country until he could assure the nation’s drivers that they would be safe behind the wheel.

The satire plays on the reactions to safety concerns on transit in places like greater Washington, D.C., where officials have announced an aggressive maintenance plan that will require closing the transit line for regular, long intervals. Secretary Anthony Foxx himself threatened to shutdown D.C. Metro for safety reasons. Hertz points out the obvious discrepancy in the numbers when it comes to accounting for public safety:

Since 2009, 14 Metro riders and employees have died in collisions, derailings, and other incidents. On an annual basis, that translates to about 0.48 fatalities per 100,000 weekday riders.*

However, Secretary Foxx noted that this is exceeded by the fatality rate of car crashes in every single American metropolitan area for which data was compiled in a recent report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

As is visible in the article's comments, not everyone got the joke, which just goes to show, once again, the dominance of the car as the preferred mode of transportation for most people in the country.