Hoopdriver

Today was “Bike-to-work Day”, so I biked to work. I’ve been biking, walking, or occasionally taking public transit to work every day since May 2004. I don’t have a car, and have no plans to own a car or to drive on a regular basis for the rest of my life. I have a driver’s license, and I’m not anti-technology or anti-progress, but it’s safe to say that the cultural and social dominance of cars leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

For years, I have tried and failed to think of any social institution more absurd than the American transportation paradigm of driving everywhere. Sure the medical system is fucked up, and the tax code is full of crazy loopholes, and the so called “War on Drugs” is a farce, but all pale in comparison to the ridiculousness of firing up the engine of a 4000-lb vehicle anytime a person needs to cover some distance longer than 50 feet! And even if you can’t see the monstrous absurdity of 300 million people doing THAT several times a day, surely it’s obvious that a lot of Americans are fat slobs on the verge of diabetes or heart disease or both, and in dire need of a little exercise, and that oil is a dwindling resource that ain’t getting any cheaper, and I wonder if we’d send all those handsome boys to die in Iraq for “freedom” if Iraq didn’t have the oil we need to drive our fat asses to the store to go buy more pop? And anytime there’s contaminated drinking water or a contaminated ecosystem, 9 times out of 10 it’s a leaky tank of gasoline from your friendly neighborhood filling station! The hits just keep coming!

And even if we forget about ALL of the above complaints, consider that the basic human right of putting one foot in front of the other and walking somewhere is generally made unpleasant, if not dangerous or even impossible, by society having granted priority to all the cars speeding back and forth on any given road. Try finding a place where you can listen to birds and critters and breezes and not hear the far-off drone of somebody driving somewhere. There’s no way to escape it except to retreat into desolate places that most people consider thoroughly inhospitable (my typical vacation).

Of course, cars provide certain conveniences, and I’m sure in the early days, the automobile was really something to behold at a time when most Americans had never been more than a dozen miles from home. Twenty years after that, Henry Ford made it possible for many families to have a car. And 20 years after that, the most cutting edge new subdivisions proudly boasted that they wouldn’t have sidewalks, because modern convenience had arrived, and it sure as shit wasn’t going to walk! And 20 years after that, nobody could imagine life without driving everywhere. Nobody planned it to be this way. There was no group of brilliant social engineers who sat down and calculated that this would be the best outcome for us. It just happened in a haphazard, minimally structured way, and now we all put up with the result.