Monday, November 25, 2019

Please step out of the vehicle

As I drove to church yesterday morning, crossing Perring Parkway from Woodbourne on a green light, a northbound driver on Perring Parkway swept through a red light, missing me by about a car length. Had I been a couple of seconds earlier or a few miles per hour slower, he would have hit me broadside at speed and today Fred Rasmussen or Jacques Kelly would be working up my obituary for tomorrow's print edition of The Sun.

The romance of the automobile has never entranced me—hell, I drove a Chevette for the better part of a decade. And now, my daily travel to and from work, Hamilton in the northeast corner of the city to Port Covington at the southern end, is an ordeal.

Pickup trucks the size of ranch houses. Environmentally disastrous SUVs whose owners cannot manage the unwieldy things in parallel parking. The smell of weed emanating from cars and suggesting operator impairment. Dolts heedlessly pulling into intersections to block them as the lights change. Cowboys weaving in and out of traffic to gain a minimal advantage, who also appear to mistake Perring Parkway for the Bonneville Salt Flats.

They must be as maddened by city traffic as I am, without acknowledging how much they contribute to the situation.

They have fallen for the false promise of autonomy in automobile culture. Look at the ads for vehicles on television, in which sleek cars glide along picturesque roadways with no other vehicle in sight. Contrast that with the reality of creeping along city streets, or even sections of interstate highways during peak hours, at 12 mph.

But the automobile manufacturers and advertising agencies are not solely at fault. For sixty years the federal and state governments have prioritized and subsidized the construction and maintenance of roadways, even though we have known since Robert Caro's Power Broker (1974) that the more roads and bridges and throughways that Robert Moses built, the more traffic was generated. All the while, mass transit has been starved.

One reason is that mass transit not American; it's all lefty and European. Owning a private vehicle is genuinely American. I once saw a Republican's sneer that Democrats want us all to live in apartments and take mass transit to our government jobs. Yes, real Americans drive their hulking SUVs from their McMansions two to three hours distant from the workplaces where they keep capitalism great. Yes, owning a private vehicle and driving it alone, without any sissy ride-sharing, is what shows that we maintain rugged individualism, like hanging a set of chrome bull testicles on the back of a pickup truck.

I long for the day when my children will take the car keys away from me.