“You’re lucky to have freeways—when I was a kid, we didn’t have freeways,” she used to say.

But that didn’t stop my brother and me from whining about congestion on the 10 during long drives to see her relatives in Redlands. She’d respond to our complaints with the Southern California version of “when I was your age, I had to walk six miles through the snow.”

“I grew up in Hawthorne,” a working-class town near LAX, she’d remind us, “and when we went to Redlands, we had to go via Imperial Highway and other surface streets.” In her telling, the trip took three hours.

Mom is 75 now, and her memory isn’t great. But I’ve never forgotten her story, and for years I’ve wondered what such a trip would be like. So, with her encouragement—she’s a retired newspaper editor who taught me the old journalists’ adage, “if your mother says she loves you, check it out”—I decided to do the reporting. I would drive from Hawthorne to the Inland Empire city of Redlands without getting on a freeway.

The drive would trigger memories, inspire emotions, and serve as a reminder how, when you’re traveling in California, time can slow down even as it hurtles ahead.

I start near Imperial Highway’s western end in El Segundo, from the former site of the North American Aviation plant where Grandma Edith, my mom’s mom, once worked the assembly line. From that spot, I see the office building that is now home to the L.A. Times, the paper my mom and I both worked for when it was headquartered in downtown L.A. From El Segundo, the highway proceeds underneath the 105 Freeway, which effectively replaced Imperial as an east-west thoroughfare when it opened in 1993.

Imperial Highway—really a collection of four- and six-lane county roads and state highways, with stoplights—was first conceived of a century ago by agricultural and business interests who wanted to connect L.A. with farms around Brawley, 220 miles southeast in Imperial County.

But building infrastructure was never easy in this state of too-many local jurisdictions; construction on the highway got started in 1931 but wasn’t finished until 1961. The Imperial Highway my mom and her parents relied on in the 1950s and ’60s slowly became obsolete as long stretches of the highway were replaced or subsumed by other freeways and highways. Today, Imperial Highway doesn’t come within 100 miles of Imperial County; its eastern end is at the border of Anaheim and the city of Orange.

Heading east from El Segundo on Imperial, I stop immediately in Hawthorne, at a small apartment building that occupies the lot where my mom grew up. I also swing by the monument to the Beach Boys, whom my mom knew at Hawthorne High School. From Hawthorne, Imperial passes briefly through Inglewood and then makes its way through South Los Angeles, the section of Southern California that has changed the most, and most consistently drawn my attention, throughout my career.

Courtesy of Joe Mathews.

To drive Imperial Highway today is to see Southern California as an unhealthy empire, at war with itself. There are more check cashing places than banks, and more liquor stores, fast-food restaurants, donut shops, and smoke shops than I can count, most in small strip malls with names like “Imperial Plaza.” Their sun-splashed marquees mix with newer health clinics and gleaming schools—public, charter, private, and religious—often fenced off.

This streetscape reflects dueling impulses. Will health care and education save us before we eat and drink ourselves to death?

Just as in the rest of California, there is not enough new housing here. Homes along Imperial are often stucco and mid-century, their ugliness hidden behind uglier walls that block the traffic noise. The two public housing projects I pass—Nickerson Gardens and Imperial Courts—are in better shape than the apartments and motels around them.

East of South L.A., after grabbing a burrito at Plaza de Mexico mall in Lynwood, I can’t help but stop when I see the street sign for Gary Beverly Court outside of an empty Lynwood High School building. The high school has moved, but the street sign remains, in honor of a beloved principal who was shot to death on his drive home 20 years ago. I covered the case, which remains haunting and unsolved.

With a multi-car accident blocking Imperial ahead, I take a mile-long detour south into Compton, which allows me to visit the tombs of my great-grandparents. When I return to the road, I head through South Gate, and battle traffic. The retail shops become more frequent and more middlebrow in Downey. There, a sign points me in the direction of the museum memorializing the Columbia Space Shuttle, which my grandmother helped assemble later in her aerospace career.

Traffic is slow in Norwalk, with county government buildings and churches that have taken over old hotels, auditoriums, and restaurants. The drivers go so fast in Santa Fe Springs and La Mirada, the last two L.A. County cities Imperial runs through, that I move over to the slower right-hand lane.

Forty-one miles in, when I cross into Orange County in La Habra, Imperial looks more prosperous. There are a couple of tech firm offices, as well as high-end retailers, gyms and yoga studios full of pretty people, and an Amazon Fresh. I push through Brea into Yorba Linda for a bit, and see a few horse trails, along with signs for the Nixon library, devoted to the only California-born president, a kid from Whittier who weirdly embodied the promise and paranoia of his home state.

My total drive time, not counting stops, has reached two hours. And Imperial Highway would only get me halfway to Redlands, in the northeast corner of the L.A. basin that is part of San Bernardino County.

So, I turn north and head through Brea Canyon on a dusty, traffic-crammed road paralleling the 57 Freeway. Upon reaching the San Gabriel Valley, I take surface streets in a northeast direction through Diamond Bar, Pomona, and Claremont—passing a familiar mix of fast-food joints and donuts and schools.

Without a map, I drive in search of Base Line, where I’ll turn eastward. It’s the road my mom remembers most from those long-ago drives.

It also was once among the most important routes in all of California.

Indeed, Base Line is older than almost everything now standing in the Los Angeles basin. In the 1850s, U.S. government surveyors, charged with establishing an “initial point” for Southern California surveys (they chose Mt. San Bernardino), established a north-south meridian line and an east-west baseline to guide future surveys.

That baseline became Baseline, which today goes by various names—Base Line or Baseline, Baseline Avenue or Baseline Street, or, in Upland, 16^th Street. At the point beyond Claremont where I reach Baseline, I find a dustier, less dense version of Imperial Highway, with three lanes and too many liquor stores, but with more parks and trees and vacant lots. Just as the 105 Freeway shadows Imperial, the 210 tracks the Baseline corridor it replaced over the past two generations.

The housing is newer here—my mom recalls the Base Line as a strip of development and services, running largely through groves and farms. But the buildings seem sun-bleached and in need of repair—a reminder that California’s housing stock is older than that of the Rust Belt states.

I head through Upland, with ranch houses and a few parks, and then into Rancho Cucamonga, which seems to have an abundance of dental practices along Baseline. “Why all the dentists?” I ask myself, before answering my own question: it’s all the donut shops!

I am through Etiwanda and into Fontana before I spot new housing construction, a development calling itself “The Encore at Providence,” which sounds like the last song before the show ends and you get your audience with God.

But then in Rialto, Baseline becomes a divide. On the south side are homes, protected by sound walls. On the north side are warehouses. These facilities grow more massive as I move further east; the “Now Hiring” signs on their walls also get bigger as I head deeper into the Inland Empire, now an American center for logistics.

Sidewalks are replaced by dust, and the landscape gets browner, except for the brilliant green colors of Eisenhower High School. I feel like I’m in the country, with things spread out—until I cross the 215 and enter the west side of San Bernardino.

To this point, the roads have been relatively smooth, but San Bernardino is a poor city, even after emerging from one of America’s worst municipal bankruptcies in 2017. Baseline here is full of ruts and potholes, and my Prius bounces up and down. Many of the storefronts are empty. Even in the Inland Empire, one of California’s fastest-growing areas, San Bernardino seems stagnant; it’s been eclipsed by its inland urban rival, Riverside, which has grown faster and richer since the 1980s.

I’ve been driving for more than three hours, and I’m getting close to my destination. I head through the city of Highland, home of the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, who sponsor the new event space back in L.A. that the media nonprofit for which I now work helps program. I drive a few miles past their newly renamed casino and I’m in East Highlands, where my grandmother, great-grandmother and other relatives worked in the orange groves and packing houses after arriving from Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl.

Courtesy of Joe Mathews.

The packing company provided a small green house for the family to live in here in East Highlands; that’s where my mom was heading from Hawthorne six decades ago. That green house, in a line of houses once known as the Green Row, is long gone, but I find the spot, on a hillside in a planned community.

Baseline dead-ends at an orange grove, which provides a bit of agricultural respite, and beauty, between the development and a dry hillside crisscrossed with hiking trails. Many of the oranges lay unpicked, rotting on the ground.

My great aunt and uncle, Fern and Don, remain in Redlands, near the 800-square-foot house my great-grandparents saved up to buy and which we would visit on those traffic-choked drives on the 10. I turn south, taking Orange Street through the Redlands downtown and up to the retirement community where Fern and Don now live.

More than eight hours have passed since I started. My total drive time, excluding stops, has been more than four hours. But the journey has felt even longer, with time moving in reverse as I retrace my mom’s family drives from six decades ago, and follow thoroughfares that date to the mid-19^th and early 20^th centuries.

After navigating the community’s COVID checks, I knock on my aunt and uncle’s door. I hug Fern, and spend a half hour arguing good-naturedly with Don about what he’s watching on Fox News. But I am eager to get home, without delay.

In less than five minutes of driving, I’m on the 10, heading west toward L.A. This drive will take me only 90 minutes, because of some traffic around West Covina. The route is not particularly scenic. But as I drive home, I suddenly feel fresher and renewed—with new memories of Southern California surface streets, and with my mother’s enduring gratitude for our freeways.

The post Why I Drove 80 Miles Across Southern California on Surface Streets appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Sound like a lot? It’s one small part of Sweden’s extensive “Vision Zero” project, an initiative begun in the late 1990s to eliminate all deaths and serious injuries from traffic accidents. Coordinated across multiple government agencies, Vision Zero ambitiously prioritizes the safety of residents from preventable tragedies. And while it’s paying off—the clear trend is decreasing deaths and injuries—we’re not at zero yet. In 2009, 358 people died in traffic accidents in Sweden; in 2019, that number was 221. (By comparison, the U.S. states Georgia and North Carolina, which—like Sweden—have a population of approximately 10 million, had more than 1,500 and 1,400 traffic deaths, respectively, in 2018.)

As an American immigrant in Sweden, I find this focus on safety admirable, even utopic. Similar examples of Swedish regulatory cultures around safety abound. Every new private home is required to have a locked medicine cabinet. Employers pay for protective glasses for workers suffering from too much screentime. Alcohol is highly taxed and only available at the federal store known in Swedish as “the System.” And hitting closer to my own crunchy, homesick-for-Whole-Foods-Market tastes: Only whole flax seeds are sold in Sweden (even though our bodies can’t take in their beneficial nutrients that way). Alas! The crushed ones carry a tiny risk of cyanide poisoning.

In Swedish society, the precautionary principle reigns: When we lack evidence for the safety of a given issue, we proceed with caution to protect the public from harm. This bedrock principle informs all of the safety regulations above, and more—especially when it comes to health care. Sometimes infuriatingly so, doctors here are cautious in prescribing everything from hydrocortisone to antibiotics, and unless there is clear evidence a treatment will not cause you harm, you will have a hard time finding a Swedish doctor who will prescribe it.

Soon after our family moved here for work in 2015, I fell in love with the sensible, progressive attitude of most Swedish governmental policies, gladly shedding my distrust of institutions. A chronic worrier about immigration matters (among other paperwork stressors), I adopted the comforting, if naïve, mantra: “If it’s wrong, Sweden will find a way to make it right.”

All of which is why, when the novel coronavirus began to break into the news cycle early in 2020, I watched the Swedish response with curiosity. Sitting in a doctor’s waiting room on February 28, a small, professionally printed (and impeccably designed) cardboard table tent informed me that the overall risk level for an outbreak in Sweden was “relatively low.” I felt soothed by this news. Sweden was taking care of it. The authorities had said so. And they had time to make table tents!

Just 12 days later, the first person died of COVID-19 in Sweden. The infection rate, here as elsewhere, climbed steeply. At the end of March, one month after the table tent, Sweden reported 4,834 people had documented cases of COVID-19; by the close of April, that number had jumped to 21,602 cases. (It’s worth noting that Sweden did not offer widespread testing until late June; in the spring, only those admitted to the hospital were offered COVID-19 tests, so these numbers are likely an undercount.) In the fall, following six weeks of population dispersal into the Swedish countryside, case numbers dropped significantly. Starting in September, about two weeks after school resumed, cases appear to be climbing again—albeit slowly, while intensive care beds occupancy and deaths are way down compared with the spring.

Sweden’s pandemic approach has garnered outsized attention in the English-speaking press considering its relatively small population of 10 million. I watched with incredulity as tiny Social Democrat-ruled Sweden was celebrated at home by Trump supporters who urged, “Be like Sweden!” Meanwhile, on the left, our high death rate became a cautionary tale for the dangers of “herd immunity.” When a community achieves herd immunity through prior infection or vaccination, vulnerable individuals (even the unvaccinated) gain protection because the disease can’t find new hosts and thus can’t spread as easily. Explained in this way, herd immunity sounds quite Swedish: Collectively, we can protect the members of our “herd” unable to protect themselves. (Yet interestingly, Sweden does not mandate vaccinations for newborns, relying on parents to make that decision for their children. Compliance is reliably around 97 percent.)

Officially, Sweden never adopted a herd immunity strategy, although several of its policies seem to have it in mind, at least as a side effect. Sweden in fact chose a mitigation strategy: The Public Health Agency (FHM) aimed not to stop the virus but to control its spread so that the health care system, especially intensive care beds, would not be overwhelmed. In the beginning, this mitigation strategy—aka “flatten the curve”—was the goal of many nations, but as we learned more about the dangers of surviving COVID-19 (including sustained damage to the heart, lungs, and kidneys), and more about its transmission, many nations similar to Sweden (such as its neighbors, Denmark, Norway, and Finland) shifted course to a “crush the curve” strategy of “test, trace, and isolate.” FHM, however, persisted in emphasizing mitigation measures (wash your hands, keep your distance, stay home if you’re sick), avoiding panic, and protecting our most vulnerable, those who are over 70 years old and/or those with risk factors that exacerbate COVID-19.

But at the time I write this, Sweden has one of the highest death tolls per capita in the world: 57.3 deaths per 100,000 residents, just under the United States’ 57.39. By comparison, in Italy, ground zero for the European pandemic, that number is 58.77; in Norway, a more comparable nation to Sweden in terms of demography, that number is 4.97. Perhaps more alarming is Sweden’s high case fatality rate (6.9 percent), more than double that of the United States. Some of the most vulnerable in Sweden—those in nursing homes—were not protected under the mitigation strategy. In fact, of the 5,731 people killed by COVID-19 in Sweden, 5,137 were older than 70, and 2,855 of those deaths were people over age 85.

Reports have emerged in Swedish media of family members being informed their loved ones were being placed in palliative end-of-life care instead of being treated for COVID-19 in the hospital. According to the National Board of Health and Welfare, a mere 17 percent of Swedish elders in care homes were provided hospitalization, and public documents show that instead of attempting to fight the virus, the National Board of Health and Welfare advised health care workers to treat these patients with anti-anxiety medications as well as morphine and other opioids. As I watched this failure of compassion and infection containment in real time, I became saddened. Then enraged, then disillusioned by my adopted country, or my idea of it. I asked Swedish friends, “Would your reaction to these deaths be different if it were children who suffered disproportionately instead of elders?”

Their silence was informative. And the policies around education followed suit: Schools remained open for the under-16s throughout the pandemic. FHM has also advised parents to send children to school even if someone in the household has a confirmed case of COVID-19, so long as they are symptom-free. At first, FHM reasoned, and most Swedish media agreed, that if the children stayed home, we’d suffer from lack of personnel in essential services, particularly in health care. (Never mind the extensive child-care system in place for school breaks designed just to meet this purpose). But recently, leaked emails between state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell and other high-level public health advisors belie this public position. On March 14, Tegnell wrote, “One point in favor of keeping the schools open is to reach herd immunity faster.”

Yet these leaked emails, and the assumptions they make about the more vulnerable relatives and school staff to whom children could transmit the virus, barely made a splash with the stoic Swedish public.

It may be that elementary school-aged children face a relatively low risk of serious health consequences from COVID-19. But since we don’t know the long-term effects the virus has on young people, and we also don’t know their role in spreading the disease to the adults in their lives, shouldn’t the precautionary principle apply?

Apparently not: Parents who in good conscience wished to protect their children or themselves by educating them at home were not only denied that opportunity, but they were also in some cases threatened with reports to social services for neglect for violating the skolplikt requirement. Literally the “duty to school,” skolplikt prohibits homeschooling and mandates education of all school-aged children. Like much Swedish public policy, it’s meant to provide a common standard for education and health, regardless of socioeconomic status. Skolplikt is there for the greater good of children, and thus, for the whole of Swedish society.

But during the pandemic, exactly whose greater good is Sweden considering?

COVID-19 is serving as a magnifying glass of our societies’ vulnerabilities. And what is magnified in Sweden is that this question of the greater good requires constant focus, revision, and holistic framing in the face of new challenges.

In the face of a deadly virus with unknown long-term consequences, why didn’t caution reign here? Where was and is the Swedish regulatory state in this question of safety? (For this virus is surely more deadly than crushed flaxseeds, and even more deadly than traffic accidents.) In a country where the good of the many often supersedes the rights of the few, why are Swedes content with a policy that instead puts so many burdens on individuals, particularly the most vulnerable? And, most disturbingly, why do so many accept, without question, the government’s policy to allow an unknown virus to spread freely through our shared society?

Even after five years in Sweden, I can only begin to speculate on answers to these questions. I know I’m not alone: Thousands of Swedes are members of secret Facebook groups advocating for changes to the Swedish strategy, and more than 7,000 have signed a Change.org petition asking the World Health Organization to intervene in Sweden’s relaxed policies.

My own love affair with this nation has finally encountered its first real conflict. As Sweden’s National Day approached in June, I looked for speeches acknowledging the thousands of lives lost or for Swedish flags at half-mast. Finding none of these, I grieved privately for the souls lost. I grieved for the soul of a nation lost. I grieved for the Sweden, or the idea of Sweden, that I had proudly embraced: of a nation that cares, equally, for all.

The post A Letter From Sweden, Which Deems Flax Seeds More Dangerous Than the Pandemic appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In your first option, you can rear-end the truck. You’re driving a big car with high safety ratings so you’ll only be slightly injured, and the truck’s driver will be fine.

Alternatively, you can swerve to your left, striking a motorcyclist wearing a helmet. Or you can swerve to your right, again striking a motorcyclist who isn’t wearing a helmet. You’ll be fine whichever of these two options you choose, but the motorcyclist with the helmet will be badly hurt, and the helmetless rider’s injuries will be even more severe. What do you do? Now imagine your car is autonomous. What should it be programmed to choose?

Although research indicates that self-driving cars will crash at rates far lower than automobiles operated by humans, accidents will remain inevitable, they will be unavoidable, and their outcomes will have important ethical consequences. That’s why people in the business of designing and producing self-driving cars have begun considering the ethics of so-called crash-optimization algorithms. These algorithms take the inevitability of crashes as their point of departure and seek to “optimize” the crash. In other words, a crash-optimization algorithm enables a self-driving car to “choose” the crash that would cause the least amount of harm or damage.

In some ways, the idea of crash optimization is old wine in new bottles. As long as there have been cars, there have been crashes. But self-driving cars move to the proverbial ethicist’s armchair what used to be decisions made exclusively from the driver’s seat. Those of us considering crash optimization options have the advantage of engaging in reflection on ethical quandaries with cool, deliberative remove. In contrast, the view from the driver’s seat is much different—it is one of reaction, not reflection.

Does this mean that you need to cancel your subscription to Car and Driver and dust off your copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason? Probably not. But it does require that individuals involved in the design, production, purchase, and use of self-driving automobiles take the view from both the armchair and driver’s seat. And as potential consumers and users of this emerging technology, we need to consider how we want these cars to be programmed, what the ethical implications of this programing may be, and how we will be assured access to this information.

Returning to the motorcycle scenario, developed by Noah Goodall of the Virginia Transportation Research Council, we can see the ethics of crash optimization at work. Recall that we limited ourselves to three available options: The car can be programmed to “decide” between rear-ending the truck, injuring you the owner/driver; striking a helmeted motorcyclist; or hitting one who is helmetless.

At first it may seem that autonomous cars should privilege owners and occupants of the vehicles. But what about the fact that research indicates 80 percent of motorcycle crashes injure or kill a motorcyclist, while only 20 percent of passenger car crashes injure or kill an occupant? Although crashing into the truck will injure you, you have a much higher probability of survival and reduced injury in the crash compared to the motorcyclists.

So perhaps self-driving cars should be programmed to choose crashes where the occupants will probabilistically suffer the least amount of harm. Maybe in this scenario, you should just take one for the team and rear-end the truck. But it’s worth considering that many individuals, including me, would probably be reluctant to purchase self-driving cars that are programmed to sacrifice their owners in situations like the one we’re considering. If this is true, the result will be fewer self-driving cars on the road. And since self-driving cars will probably crash less, this would result in more traffic fatalities than if self-driving cars were adopted.

What about striking the motorcyclists? Remember that one rider is wearing a helmet, whereas the other is not. As a matter of probability, the rider with the helmet has a greater chance of survival if your car hits him or her. But here we can see that crash optimization isn’t only about probabilistic harm reduction. For example, it seems unfair to penalize motorcyclists who wear helmets by programming cars to strike them over non-helmet wearers, particularly in cases where helmet use is a matter of law. Furthermore, it is good public policy to encourage helmet use; they reduce fatalities by 22-42 percent, according to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report. As a motorcyclist myself, I may decide not to wear a helmet if I know that crash-optimization algorithms are programmed to hit me when wearing my helmet. We certainly wouldn’t want to create such perverse incentives.

Scenarios like these make clear that crash-optimization algorithms will need to be designed to assess numerous ethical factors when arriving at a decision for how to reduce harm in a given crash. This short scenario offers a representative sample of such considerations as safety, harm, fairness, law, and policy. It’s encouraging that automakers have been considering the ethics of self-driving cars for some time, and many are seeking the aid of philosophers involved in the business of thinking about ethics for a living. Automakers have the luxury of the philosopher’s armchair when designing crash-optimization algorithms, and although the seat is not always comfortable, it’s one that they must take.

As crash-optimization algorithms plumb some of our deepest ethical intuitions, different people will have different judgments about what the correct course of action should be; reasonable people can deeply disagree on the proper answers to ethical dilemmas like the ones posed. That’s why transparency will be crucial as this technology develops. Consumers have a right to know how their cars will be programmed. What’s less clear is how this will be achieved.

One avenue toward increasing transparency may be by offering consumers nontechnical, plain-language descriptions of the algorithms programmed into their autonomous vehicles. Perhaps in the future this information will be present in owner manuals—instead of thumbing through a user’s guide trying to figure out how to connect your phone to the car’s Bluetooth system, you’ll be checking to see what the ethical algorithm is. But this assumes people will actually be motivated to read the owner’s manual.

Instead, maybe before using a self-driving car for the first time, drivers will be required to consent to having knowledge of its algorithmic programming. This could be achieved by way of a user’s agreement. Of course the risk here is that such an approach to transparency and informed consent will take the shape of a lengthy and inscrutable iTunes-style agreement. And if you’re like most people, you scroll to the end and click the “I agree” button without reading a word of it.

Finally, even if we can achieve meaningful transparency, it’s unclear how it will impact our notions of moral and legal responsibility. If you buy a car with the knowledge that it is programmed to privilege your life—the owner’s—over the lives of other motorists, how does this purchase impact your moral responsibility in an accident where the car follows this crash-optimization algorithm? What are the moral implications of purchasing a car and consenting to an algorithm that hits the helmetless motorcyclist? Or what do you do when you realize you are riding in a self-driving car that has algorithms with which you morally disagree?

These are complex issues that touch on our basic ideas of distribution of harm and injury, fairness, moral responsibility and obligation, and corporate transparency. It’s clear the relationship between ethics and self-driving cars will endure. The challenge as we move ahead is to ensure that consumers are made aware of this relationship in accessible and meaningful ways and are given appropriate avenues to be co-creators of the solutions—before self-driving cars are brought to market. Even though we probably won’t be doing the driving in the future, we shouldn’t be just along for the ride.

The post When Ethics and Autonomous Cars Collide appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.