Nothing left to lose

Vroom Vroom

Wasn't the car was supposed to be the machine that represented freedom? The magic carpet that whisked us away to exotic destinations, that let us spread out and claim that little piece of the American dream? The essential expression of our personality, our very identity? Weren't we all supposed to get in the giant gas guzzler, put the top down, hit the road and discover America à la Kerouac? Was not the back seat the storied locus of our very conception? Where the hell did it all go so horribly wrong? How did the thing that was supposed to free us become our captor, our slaver; the shiny wings transformed into shackles?

As I've started to commute by bicycle regularly, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the role of cars in our community landscape. I have time for a lot of such idle thought as I'm gliding past car after car sitting stock still through light after light (note that we call them Stop lights, not Go lights), futilely attempting to get home, swimming upstream against the overburdened intersections, our mangled on-ramps, the press of our fellow humans all jammed into the constraints of our impossibly congested, detested, molested roads. If your body's arteries are anywhere near as clogged and sluggish as our poor, ailing road network is every evening at 5:30 PM, I seriously advise you to consult a physician immediately. You are on the verge of death.

I couldn't wait to get my first car. As soon as I was of legal age I got a drivers license and as soon as I could afford it, I bought a car. Then of course I had to have the money to pay for gas, insurance and maintenance, which meant I had to get a job, which frankly I only needed to keep the car running which I needed to get back and forth from work. By the time I was eighteen I had pretty much recognized the pattern of desire leading to enslavement. And I stayed voluntarily enslaved to the car for about the next thirty years. Good thing I wasn't allowed to get a learner's permit to use heroin.

SubDivision

The suburbs were the great promise of the American century. GI's coming back from the war could hope for a little place in a nice new development away from the troubles of the cities with their factories and immigrants and crime. The American dream included home ownership and mobility. Both literal and figurative mobility. We built the interstate highway system and drove our Conestoga Vista Cruisers out past the beltway to the promised land of the middle class. And the burbs had a pretty good run. We loved our little boxes and still do. But the suburbs have became so congested they're starting to look like cities. Cities with no cultural amenities (i.e., museums, theaters and public spaces where a diverse array of citizens mix), no public transportation, and no soul. The old shopping malls are dying or desperately trying to transform themselves into cutsie "town centers" where there is no town. Presumably the designers of such faux spaces think people will simply accept that our civil interaction is best played out at Old Navy or the 20 screen multiplex. No wonder the current generation of creative information workers are clamoring to get into cities.

Faced with the inexorable deterioration of our civic landscape, it is inevitable that some of us would seek alternatives. But what? A return to some non-existent pastoral utopia? Return to our Agrarian roots? Shall we hike up our breeches and go back into the fields? Not a very likely alternative for a nation of overweight consumers. But maybe by very small personal decisions, maybe through modest shifts in public opinion we can nudge our culture to first recognize the folly of dependence on automobiles for our every movement in life and find ways of building our communities and our lives around human beings instead of machines.

It's tough to imagine what such a future America might look like. And I'm certainly not an optimist that my countrypersons will suddenly come to their senses and recognize we have spent the last hundred years transforming our country into a spiritless hellscape and abandon the car over night. But there are already signs of transformation. In addition to the aforementioned migration of youth to formerly blighted cities (Cleveland and Detroit notwithstanding), the increase in bicycle commuting, increased investment in public transportation and even the aforementioned lame attempts at reconstructing our suburbs on the notion of Smart Growth / mixed use development are heartening signs of life after Exxon.

Thankfully, we can always trust in good old entropy to help us do the right thing. As we are confronted by the incredible societal cost of maintaining our crumbling roads and of securing fuel for the ever bigger Humscalades we need to isolate ourselves from the increasingly horrid road surfaces, and of the individual cost of owing and operating a personal internal combustion vehicle (auto loans, gas, maintenance and insurance), the sensible alternatives that have always existed (think bicycles, public transportation and more walkable communities) may just occur to more of us as obvious ways to improve our quality of life. But such transitions cannot be imposed on us.

We have to make choices based, hopefully, on enlightened self-interest. We will only choose to make our communities better places when we can no longer ignore the obvious; that the type of absolute reliance on cars that has characterized much of the past century makes our communities and our lives worse, economically, socially and and spiritually; and that walkable, bikeable, human-scaled towns and cities lead to happier, healthier lives for those living in them. It won't happen suddenly and the change won't come from above. It will come through the myriad personal choices made by people like me who seek out walkable communities in which to live and who limit their job searches to positions available within the range of biking, walking and/or public transportation. It seems a luxury to be able to do so, and for most people it is. But if you think about how much money you wouldn't be spending if you weren't dumping it into your car, you might find that you could afford a slightly more expensive house or apartment on the same salary. And if you add to that the fact that if you walked or biked to work each day, you might be able to stop spending money on a gym membership and a holistic life coach. You'd be healthier and happier because you're getting some freakin' exercise for a change.

One day the personal automobile may seem quaint vestiges of a bygone era, like the steamship or the land line telephone. But at this rate I probably won't be alive to see it. In the meantime I'll just keep the cranks rotating while I roll by the line of humanity in their little metal cages.

Devolution Revolution

One small step for man

This is the end

Neil Armstrong put the first human footprint on the surface of the moon in 1969, three days after my sixth birthday. The actual memory of seeing it on TV is now lost in the hundreds or thousands of reruns of the event, but I have a distinct recollection of having been told that this was the greatest achievement in all of history, the pinnacle of human ingenuity, and that it was performed by the greatest civilization planet Earth had ever had the good fortune to have hosted. Land of the free. Home of the brave. My country 'tis of thee (whatever that means). In those days America was number one with a bullet! And I believed it. I think most of us in my generation did.

We were born into a world in which even the sky was not the limit. Anything was possible and despite a few minor anomalies like the war in Vietnam, the odd political assassination or the race riots in cities all over the country, America was leading the world into the trans-planetary future of infinite possibility. It's been all downhill from that point on. Looking back from our current vantage point, I've come to see the moon landing as the high point of human evolution. It was the last time a pedestrian was celebrated and what seems like, at least from a transportation perspective, the beginning of the end of human powered locomotion.

Just as soon as NASA could figure out how to do it, they got a car up to the moon so the astronauts wouldn't have to trudge around the way Armstrong and Aldrin had had to do. That was it, Apollo 15 - the last time any American had to walk further than the car port. Should humans ever go back to the moon, my guess is that the first thing they'll do is construct an inter-crater connector (ICC). And that should kick off the next phase of human evolution: the symbiotic fusion of mammal and machine. Call it Homo Automobilis.

In the beginning

What we think of as the modern human more or less began when our primate ancestors came down from the trees and walked out onto the grasslands. To this day we maintain an irrational fondness for lawns. Just fly into any city in the southwest if you don't believe me. They're piping water hundreds of miles so they can grow grass in the desert! So, given how intrinsically defining bipedal-ism is to humans, it is amazing to see how foreign an activity walking has become to modern Americans. This fact was brought into focus for me when a couple of young nieces came to stay with my wife and me for a weekend recently. Without thinking much about it, my wife and I routinely walk to restaurants, theaters and shops in our neighborhood but when our young nieces, aged eight and eleven, were confronted by the prospect of a fifteen minute walk to get to a park, they acted as though they were being tortured.

I initially attributed their resistance to simple preadolescent slothfulness, but the more I thought about it, the more it kind of made sense. They live in one of those new McMansion subdivisions where the sidewalks just mysteriously end, they are driven to school each day and there is a TV set in the family minivan. Their entire lives basically seem to be spent on a virtual sofa. They have hand-held devices with them at all times - the first thing they did upon arrival at my home was demand free WiFi access - and there is video streaming in front of them more or less twenty four hours a day. Walking to the refrigerator is about the longest distance they have to traverse without being in a car. And it turns out that in this respect, they are really just typical Americans.

"...the idea that that we, this species that first hoisted itself into the world of bipedalism nearly 4 million years ago—for reasons that are still debated—should now need “walking tips,” have to make “walking plans” or use a “mobile app” to “discover” walking trails near us or build our “walking histories,” strikes me as a world-historical tragedy."     The Crisis in American Walking

We're Number One! We're Number One! We're Number One!

Only thirteen percent of American children walk or bike to school —  down from 50% in 1969. 23% of American children get zero exercise per day. Zero. You don't have to go farther than the nearest mall — to which, by the way I'll bet you have to drive — to see that Americans are becoming increasingly, astonishingly obese. In fact, obesity is one of the only remaining characteristics in which we can still claim to be a world leader!
    
And the funny thing about this is how resistant we are to do anything about it. Witness the recent uproar over the proposal to ban absurdly large sodas in New York. Or the kind of push back you get for insisting that our neighborhoods should be walkable. Now, I'm really happy to be an American and I'm glad we repelled the British occupiers, but equating NYC's prohibition on trans fat in restaurants and large sodas with tyranny just seems silly to me. And labeling people fascists just because they want to wean our citizens from the corporate gavage that is turning us into a nation of diabetics is just laughable. But then I guess our tricorn-hat-wearing forefathers started a revolution over a beverage, right? So maybe it's not so weird that greet limitations on our consumption of corn syrup as tantamount to the imposition of Stalinist totalitarianism.

I've consequently had no alternative but to recognize Armstrong's first step on the moon as the zenith of human evolution. After that point it's all devolution, as we walk less and sit more and slowly, inexorably become fatter and fatter, less able to even lift the weight of our ever growing bodies, transforming from Fat Bastard, past the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen phase, through the Jabba the Hutt metamorphosis and inevitably back into some kind of legless fish creatures. And we'll complain about the tyranny of anyone who tries to intervene between us and our Kröd-given right to pollute ourselves with fake food and wallow in the soothing glow of our Retina screens.

So off we go, forward into the past...