"In the first half of this month [August], thousands of ordinary French people—not all of them already sick or close to death—died because one of the most expensive and well-regarded health and social protection systems in the world failed to cope with 10 days of exceptionally high temperatures.
All over France, hospital wards were closed down this month to allow staff to go on holiday. Trolley beds containing dehydrated old people piled up in hospital corridors while large wards, filled with expensive resuscitation equipment, were locked and inaccessible, until the government belatedly declared an emergency.
Old people’s homes, where 50 percent of the casualties occurred, were operating with reduced and, sometimes, temporary staff. At one home in the Paris area, visited by French TV, there were two auxiliary staff members to cope with 60 residents during one of the worst nights of heat. Seven people died that night. Those old people’s homes, which were unable to cope, were discouraged from sending patients to hospitals, which were also unable to cope."
Is that unthinkable? Imagine that - you call the hospital and they tell you not to send someone who is in a life or death situation. Fran Drescher makes a better nanny.
So, what does that have to do with us? A lot, if the wrong people have their say. You may think this will never happen here, but it's already happening in increments. Here's an excerpt from a recent article from the New York Times by Thomas Friedman:
"Imagine a day when you will go online and buy a pass to drive into any major urban area and the price of your pass will be set by whether you are driving a hybrid or a Hummer, the time of day you want to drive, the road you want to use and how much carbon your car trip will emit...
Well, that day is pretty much here for London, Stockholm and Singapore -- and New York City could be next. In a few years, the notion that you will be able to get into your car in the suburbs and drive downtown for free will be as old-fashioned as horses and buggies. "
Buy a pass to drive? We already pay for the privilege to drive in congested areas - it's called TAXES. We pay taxes to maintain the roads we drive on. We even pay tolls to gain access to special lanes that suffer less congestion.
But that's not enough. Never satisfied, the green bandwagon wants to tell us where to drive and what to drive. So the concept here is to charge additional money to gain access to downtown areas that are congested, and they want to penalize those who have a larger "carbon footprint" so that they can even further rub their noses in it. This is despite the evidence that the number one producer of carbon emissions in congested urban areas, call it carbon bigfoot, are the operations of the buildings themselves. Rather than go after the biggest problem, lets focus on the guy in the Hummer. If you have to pay to drive on a congested street, maybe it would sweeten the deal if you got a hummer.
I understand the motivation to reduce congestion. But congestion is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. Most major cities have a robust public transit system that is good at moving people around the city, but not as good at bringing people to the city. If there were a few things in place on public transportation, I think it would help reduce congestion and the size of carbon feet. Such a system would have to be:
- Convenient - access points that are easy to get to, free WiFi on board
- Clean - no sticky seats, no BO smell stuck in the seats
- Safe - no muggings, park-n-rides at which suburbanites can leave their cars and expect to find them in one piece at the end of the day
- Comfortable - enough room to spread out, a fold down tray for a work surface
I won't deny that if there were fewer cars on the road we would be better off from a pollution standpoint and a traffic safety standpoint. Making people pay for the privilege of visiting a downtown area will reduce traffic, yes. But if you have fewer people driving downtown, it makes sense that fewer people will be going downtown. That means fewer shoppers, fewer restaurant patrons, fewer bar patrons. The only ones driving downtown will be the ones who can, or are willing to, afford the cost. But the Nanny state doesn't look that far down the road. Says Lichfield: "In the last Easter holidays, a close friend had to have an emergency operation on her eye. No state hospital in Paris could take her in during the holiday weekend. Admissions were allowed for life-or-death cases only. Saving the sight of an eye did not qualify. She had to have her operation done in the private (and expensive) American Hospital in the Paris suburbs."
This traffic idea is a far cry from denying someone emergency care, but every inch given is an inch we'll never get back. Today it's your car, tomorrow it's your eye! 20 years from now we'll wish we had the vision to see that.
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