To some extent I apologize for going over the same themes over & over, but when someone sees the old idea in a new way, I suddenly see the problem again and I am again enthused about a topic I was enthused about before.
James Howard Kunstler has come to Traverse city several times in the past few years. He has delivered excellent talks on what is wrong with the American landscape. Much of what I am about to tell you appears his book The Geography of Nowhere.
Kunstler points out that in America it is almost impossible to go about the ordinary business of living without a car and yet we do not think about how dangerous cars are and how much time we spend in cars. He points out that if we drive one hour each way to work everyday, we end up spending seven weeks a year in a car. Seven weeks every single year. This is time we could spend with our children; this is time we could spend unwinding from a stressful day at work. Seven weeks each year.
But it is not just the time we spend in the car. Cars have carved up our landscape--our landscape is full of roads for cars--and this is an inefficient means of transportation. One lane of highway can accommodate 2,500 cars per hour, while one lane of light rail can accommodate 40,000 passengers per hour. What an unbelievable comparison--2,500 per hour versus 40,000 per hour--and the light rail lines do not encounter other traffic: they are not suddenly slowed down, stuck in traffic. You could get from here to there quickly, and you would leave the stress of driving to others.
But there is so much else that makes public transportation wonderful. Public transportation offers rides to a huge segment of the population that cannot drive--children and older people. These people cannot fully use their everyday environment and that is partly why they watch so much television: older people and children are stuck indoors. The outdoors is dangerous, polluted, out of reach. There is nothing else to do but watch television.
And it is no wonder that we are such a lonely and frightened populace: there is nowhere to go to socialize. Strangers are frightening because we never encounter strangers. In fact, as Kunstler points out people will "spend as much time as their dignity affords haunting the supermarket aisles because it is practically the only place where they can be in the public realm and engage in some purposeful activity around other live human beings."
I know I am going over old points, points I've gone over before, but it is worth reminding me--and all of you--of the benefits of public transportation & the drawbacks of private transportation. Public transportation is efficient, safe, social. Private transportation is dangerous, time consuming and anti-social.
Copyright © 2004 Henry Morgenstein