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Wednesday, April 16. 2008
Bus Stop
Spent another warm Sunday at the beach! Thought I was having a good time until I came home and found out the lovely Gianna (no photo available) was at Oceanside Harbor Beach. My beach of choice was Pacific Beach. No matter …Took an hour and 15 minutes to get to the beach, and about the same to return home. All on the San Diego transit system and the Trusty Trek. A year ago I would have told everyone — actually did tell people — I could never live without a motor vehicle. That’s bullshit. I’ve been living without an automobile (or pick-up truck) since August of last year and quite frankly, the only time I miss the damn thing is when the buses are slow (like on Sundays) or when the bus bike rack is full, as is often the case, now that the weather is nice enough (close to 100° today) for everyone to feel froggy and get outside.
I suspect many of my friends, who also sport the notion that they can’t survive without a motor vehicle, could actually do quite well without the gas-guzzling contraptions. The use of our own personalized motor vehicles is, for most of us, a luxury. Not to mention, it is a privilege to operate these vehicles legally. We don’t have the “right” to operate motor vehicles. But cars, trucks and motorcycles get us to our destinations far quicker than any transit system and we don’t have to endure the company of people we don’t care to socialize with elsewhere.
But most of all having our own motor vehicles means we are the masters of ourselves in yet one more facet of our lives and having a motor vehicle is status in America; it means we are prosperous enough that we don’t need public transportation. For the most part, having a car is an ego trip; it feeds our enormous pride. We can cruise past a bus on the freeway, look at the passengers and laugh, “Ha-ha! I can toodle down this freeway by myself!”Now, many people will give very good reasons why they can’t afford to depend on the public transit system. Actually, some people can’t. Contract trades-persons haul tools and supplies to their various jobs for instance. Can’t think of anyone else at the moment.
My friend Dan considered the possibility of taking the transit system from home to the job, which takes an hour as he drives — but also costs $600.00 per month in gas. He actually looked into it, which is more than I actually expected; I’m no different, I talk a good game. Anyway, the trip from his home to the J.O.B. would take close to three hours each way. He lives nearly 40 miles from his place of employment. So, taking public transit to and from his job is time-prohibitive.
But most of us, what do we do? We drive to and from our jobs every day, sitting in our cars, alone for the most part, pissed about the traffic we have to put up with, never really considering the reality that we are part of the traffic we have to contend with day after day. Sure, we can stop at the store on the way home, maybe pick up the shirts from the cleaners, but is all that really necessary? The kids have to be picked up and hauled from school to soccer practice and then home again; the reasons we have to make owning a motor vehicle important, forgetting that the internal combustion engine in an automobile is just over 100 years old.
We have complicated our lives to such an extent that we are obligated to justify what really is a convenience. We have to be everywhere by yesterday just to get our overly scheduled lives on track, never mind keeping them on track. And if we had to give up our Nissan Maxima or BMW 325i and rely on the bus, we’d have to eliminate much of our extracurricular activities and my god! The kids would have to get to and from school on the school bus system or, god forbid, the public bus system. I take the #15, and less frequently, the #7 buses to and from the job. Lots of high school kids on those buses. In fact, one day when I had stood up to exit the #7, my pants fell down. I had lost weight and my belt no longer keep my pants tight. Anyway, the high school kids had a great laugh.
The next day when the kids got on the bus, sitting behind me, I heard one whisper to another, “there’s the old man with the pants falling down!” It’s great to be known for something.
And that little tangent brings up another issue about owning motor vehicles: Most of the people who rely on the mass transit system live in the inner city and are too poor to own cars. Yeah, there are a lot of cars in the inner city, but it’s no mistake that the mass transit system offers little to the suburbs and has frequent buses and trolleys in and around the poorer sections of town. The zeitgeist in America is: mass transit is for the poor people. Those of us who can afford an automobile don’t have to lower ourselves by using the bus system.
Owning a motor vehicle is mostly about status. With one of those, we can zip to-and-from out job, our kids don’t have to put up with the miscreants and bullies on the school buses and I can listen to Roger Hedgecock in the afternoon undisturbed by the crazy woman yelling into her cell phone telling the person on the other end of the line about her latest round with the employer.It’s all about status. Plain and simple. We don’t need to own cars, we want to own cars. It separates us from the have-nots in the world, regardless of how humble and decrepit our car may be.
The bus system isn’t the answer — yet. The one in San Diego system could use a lot of improvement. The #20 line, which runs from Downtown San Diego to the North County Fair mall in Escondido, well over 20 miles, runs every half hour and they often use the shorter buses which means half the riders on some trips have to stand. That line should run more frequently and during the rush hour, they should have those double buses that bend in the middle when they turn a corner. And the number of times I’ve had to wait for the next #20 because the bike racks are full … don’t get me started.
But we have to start rethinking how we commute. In San Diego and Southern California, single occupant vehicles are making commuting one of the great horrors of our society. In the ‘50’s, the ubiquitous “they” said owning a car defined us as Americans and that definition has evolved. It still defines us, but now as the most rapacious consumers of petroleum. With the worst café standards in the developed and developing nations. We are the world’s worst polluters and the addiction to our automobiles is a major contributor to that pollution.
I didn’t own my first automobile until I was 22. I did own a few motorcycles between the ages of 18-22, some really sweet ones too! Then, after that first car was stolen, went nearly six years before getting another. And now, all these years later, I’m back to depending on a bicycle and the mass transit system.
To all the people who insist they need that Lincoln Navigator or Toyota Land Cruiser (or whatever vehicle you own), I won’t act like a reformed smoker and excoriate you for clogging up the freeways with your single occupant vehicles. I was once one of you. As a matter of fact, if I win the lottery this week I’ll probably have another pick-up truck before the month is out. Had a Ford Ranger, might opt for one of those GMC/Chevy hybrid pick-ups should I have the right numbers!
But my attitude about owning cars versus public transportation has changed. Significantly. The best part about being down at the beach — other than all the unfettered bikinis — was pedaling around Pacific and Mission Beaches watching all the motorists in their traffic jam trying to find the phantom parking space. My ride was right over there, on Mission Blvd! And it would be there 30 minutes later too!
Anyway, I wanted to write about Mission Beach, crammed with bikinis. Instead, we get a treatise on the joys and horrors of our automobile society. Damn! The beach was fine!
P.S. Check out the beauty just above this post script! Show her some love, help her out!
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