 (Mark Wilson/ Globe Staff) |
Four-wheel nation
AMERICA IS one with the automobile, and the cultural cement hardens with every decade on the road.
Driven to distraction
BICYCLISTS SAY THESE motorists are indistinguishable from drunk drivers. Truckers honk when they stray from their lanes. Regular drivers watch for their last-minute swerves down a side street or onto an exit ramp.
Real insurance reform
THE AUTO INSURANCE titans have paused in their internecine battle over the airwaves, and each side has testified before a legislative committee. It's a good time to step back and consider whether Massachusetts consumers would be best served by tuning up the current auto insurance system or demolishing it.
Safe buckling
MASSACHUSETTS DRIVERS have an aversion to seat belts that is as odd as it is dangerous. Compliance is just 64.8 percent here, compared with a US average of 82 percent, according to data released last fall by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The right driving age
FOR ELDERLY drivers, cars are often a means to escape isolation and depression. For teenagers, licenses represent nothing short of liberty. But car keys are often a cocked weapon in the hands of many drivers at the extreme ends of these accident-prone age groups.
Better than petroleum
MAYOR MENINO is the proud owner of a new Chevy Tahoe fueled by compressed natural gas, but regional power officials are worried that New England generating units might not have enough natural gas to get through cold spells this winter.
Vehicular envirocide
EVEN MORE than coal-burning power plants, the car has become a symbol of Americans' refusal to curb their use of fossil fuels, despite the political and environmental cost of the addiction. Cars are the culprit largely because their efficiency has actually fallen in recent years, in contrast to that of ...To yield or not to yield?
THE AUTHOR Tracy Kidder once called Boston's drivers ''famously deranged." But we like to think they're just misinformed. Common roadside confusions probably are responsible for a good percentage of the average 140,000 car crashes in Massachusetts every year.Raise the driving age
IN LICENSING young drivers, the state must consider maturity as well as experience. Two auto accidents, only nine days apart, have left four dead -- a boy and a girl, both 16, in Reading, and another girl, 17, and her 10-year-old brother, in Hopkinton.Insure cars fairly
THE AUTO insurance bill offered up this week by House members from the Joint Financial Services Committee is not appreciably better than an earlier, ill-conceived version from Governor Mitt Romney, who thought little of burdening urban drivers with higher rates for a chance to woo national insurance carriers to Massachusetts. While such proposals might promote competition, they hardly qualify as ...A public menace
THE LOADED GUN Salem police found in the possession of one Leonard Levasseur last week wasn't the kind with a barrel or bullet rounds or a trigger. It was the kind with a gas pedal, 3,000 pounds of moving steel and, according to police, Levasseur's impaired mind, driving erratically through town. When officers arrested the 55-year-old unemployed man, hiding behind ...