Root Causes

I love cars. Why would I bother spending so much free time fixing up a 34-year-old car when my (currently) childless wife and I already have two perfectly good, newer cars unless I had a passion for cars?

Some of my more conservative friends give me a hard time for this because I also own 8 bicycles, am pro mass transit and anti suburban sprawl/car culture. Many of these friends are also car fans, usually American muscle cars, but seem to think that means buying into everything car-related. Suburbs, more and more highways, cheap gas and all that should therefore be good if you love cars.

It's flawed logic at best. I have a passion for cars and enjoy driving. I don't like sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the freeway. An open road with few other vehicles is the ideal, is it not? Not only that, but an open road with great scenery all around you is another part of the idyllic picture. Nobody likes choking on the exhaust of thousands of other vehicles all going 5mph only to see billboards, cookie-cutter housing developments and big sound walls to protect the ears of residents living next to the freeway.

This is why I'm pro mass transit and pro bike commuting. Some of my liberal friends have bikes they ride year-round to get to work, even here in Minnesota where it can get into the double digits below zero in winter. They have stickers on their bikes like "one less car" and are considered die hard, anti-car culture activists by some.

If people were thinking, muscle car fans and year-round bike commuters would join forces. When it comes right down to it they both want the same thing: fewer cars on the roads and more room for them to enjoy their pastimes. But, both are afraid of admitting to this similarity because they don't want to be grouped together with "those people."

There's so much they agree on. From both groups I've heard complaints about bad drivers. Usually, bad or dangerous drivers are not picked on for being overly-aggressive. The worst sin is inattentiveness. Yeah, you got it: they're yakking on the cell phone.

If cell phone drivers aren't taking up the left lane and blocking faster traffic they're unwittingly endangering you on your bike because they're not paying attention. Every now and then they actually do cause harm to bikers for this very reason.

So, of course, everyone talks of legislation to outlaw cell phone use while driving or at least to increase penalties for drivers involved in accidents who were talking on the cell phone at the time. It's a band-aid fix, to evoke the cliché. The root of the problem, I believe, is the car culture itself.

The Minneapolis/St. Paul metro is one of the most spread-out major metropolitan areas in the country. Some figures have us rivaling LA in traffic congestion. We have a bus system constantly getting its funding cut and only one rail line. More rail lines are proposed, but the whole area is at a tipping point between finally getting its act together with mass transit or surpassing places like LA with a massive freeway infrastructure.

The result for many is a long commute by car. I worked with people whose normal commute was just over an hour one-way. If the weather's bad that commute would get stretched-out to over three hours or almost four. On days like that if they worked eight hours they only have enough time at home to get something to eat and go to sleep. One guy said his kids missed him as if he weren't living at home.

It's no wonder people talk on their cell phones, eat and even read in their cars. They're spending a significant part of their lives sitting in a car, and they're usually miserable during that time.

Why would anybody want this to continue? Even better question: why would anyone want this situation to get worse? Americans love their cars, so why would we want more sprawl, more freeways, more cars and more congestion when that has nothing to do with the enjoyment of driving?

That's what's been lost. For the most part people don't enjoy driving anymore. They can't because there's no room to enjoy it when you're always stuck in traffic. The pleasurable drive is an endangered species because in lieu of an efficient mass transit system cars are taking up the slack by packing themselves into as tight of a space as they can on the freeways. Many of these are single-occupancy and more and more of those are large SUVs.

Again, though, people misdirect their efforts and try to fix the surface issues rather than the root causes. Being anti-SUV doesn't get you anywhere. If you replaced all the SUVs with Civics congestion would still be just as bad. When you consider the following distance most people are comfortable with even at 5 mph the difference in size between an H2 and a Geo is insignificant. The H2 just has more cup holders.

Then I start to notice something about this cool little 34-year-old VW of mine. It has no cup holders. It doesn't even have a cigarette lighter or ash tray so I can't plug in a cell phone charger. I could buy an after-market center console with cup holders and more storage space if I really wanted, but that wouldn't be very historically accurate.

This was a car made for car lovers. It was made for people who just wanted to drive it and enjoy that experience. You shouldn't be drinking a Big Gulp of Mountain Dew, smoking a cigarette and chatting up a storm on your Nokia in this car. You should have both hands on the wheel, both feet on the pedals and very briefly move your right hand from the wheel to the stick to shift gears. Your whole body needs to be connected to this car and as aware of it as possible as if it were an exercise in Zen.

Then, once you're done enjoying it, you should park it in the garage, hop on the bike and make your way to the light-rail station so you're not late for work.