Author: Hank Garfield

Old, Entrenched Attitudes Die Hard in Car-Centric California

Hank Garfield

This is what we’re up against. 

Fox News recently gave the top of its Web page to an opinion piece by San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond, under this screen-spanning headline: “San Diego wants to tax people out of their cars and into public transportation.”

My first reaction: It’s about time.

Desmond lives in Oceanside, California. I used to live there. He came to North San Diego County in 1984, a year after I did. Companies were investing in new business parks near freeway ramps and surrounded by parking lots. The area had a decent bus network, and a commuter train along the coast. But little effort was made to integrate the outlying business parks with public transit, giving all those employees little choice but to drive, and exacerbating already bad traffic congestion.

After sixteen years, I gave up on California and moved back to Maine, a place with much less traffic but also fewer options. In both places, the so-called choice of driving is, for many people, hardly a choice at all.

The language Desmond uses is telling. He charges that San Diego’s most recent regional transportation plan is “designed to make driving so expensive that you succumb to public transportation.” I’m sorry, but “succumb”? It’s usually the other way around. People who want to use public transit are forced to reluctantly buy a car. For most of my adult life, I “succumbed” to the idea that car ownership was a necessity of modern American life. Every government transportation incentive over the past fifty years has encouraged driving and discouraged the development of alternatives.

Desmond trots out several dated and debunked arguments to prop up his position:

Desmond: “Government agendas should not be used to change behavior by taxing us into fixed-rail trains and buses. Instead of changing behavior, government entities should incentivize technology and innovation.” 

Slower Traffic: When Maine passed its returnable bottle law in 1976, people stopped throwing bottles from car windows. The bottles and cans that lined many roadways disappeared within months. Littering was already illegal, but sometimes people need a nudge from government to do the right thing. 

History abounds with examples of this, from civil rights to workplace safety to smoking in bars and restaurants. Governments pass laws, which in turn influence behavior. It’s ridiculous to argue that government should not and cannot be an agent for positive change.

Desmond: “Government should embrace what most people are already choosing, and make it cleaner, safer, and more efficient.  The people have spoken, they choose freedom of movement and not broken promises or additional taxes.”

Slower Traffic: This is a classic circular argument. People choose cars because government transportation policy encourages this choice and punishes others. Car owners are, as the late Jane Holtz Kay documented in her 1997 book Asphalt Nation, “responding to a rigged market… price supports for ring roads, beltways, and free parking… taxes and infrastructure that promote far-flung highways and suburban homes.” If the nearest grocery store is more than a mile away, and your job is in a business park surrounded by parking lots but nowhere near a bus stop, are you really making a free choice, or bowing to a de facto requirement? The people have not “spoken.” They’ve obeyed.

Desmond: Who will this affect the most? The lowest income earners. The math is simple, those that earn less will pay a disproportionately higher percentage of their income to get to where they need to go.

Slower Traffic: Lower earners already pay a larger percentage of their income on transportation. This has been true for decades. It’s still cheaper to take the bus than to own a car. Shifting money from the car system to public transit via taxation can help level the playing field. But this is exactly what Desmond opposes. 

Our motor vehicles and their ancillary services are a cumulative environmental disaster. Cars aren’t going away anytime soon, but doesn’t it make sense to soften their impact, on both the climate and our overall quality of life? I don’t know anyone who enjoys the stop-and-go freeway traffic I lived with every day in California. San Diego has, to its credit, expanded its trolley system, and built a downtown baseball stadium that replaced the one in the conglomeration of freeways and parking lots of Mission Valley. (Full disclosure: I voted for the ballpark, which passed 60-40% in 1998.) 

Public transportation is the future. But people like Desmond seem determined to stand in the way. 

Snow Day

Hank Garfield
The Bus must go through.

23 January 2023

Snow Day. Schools closed, government buildings closed, along with a lot of restaurants, bars and retail businesses. Cars buried in driveways, streets unplowed. My dentist’s office called early. Several appointments had opened up before my scheduled afternoon time. 

A quick Internet check confirmed that the Community Connector buses were running. I pulled on my boots and trudged down to the new, indoor, heated Transit Center, got on a warm bus and rode it out Stillwater Avenue and disembarked half a block away. Soon, I was reclining in the chair, enjoying a deep gum cleaning and some pretty good anesthesia. 

I could have canceled the appointment, like most of the patients that day who had probably planned to drive. But thankfully I live in a town with public transportation. Thanks to the drivers, and thanks to the City of Bangor for recognizing the bus as a vital service, and keeping it running on a day when most of us would have rather stayed home.

The Dying Year

Hank Garfield

In these dying days of 2022, I find myself thinking of people who didn’t make it through the year. Famously: Lieutenant Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), and Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher); the first ballplayer to steal 100 bases (Maury Wills), and the last leader of the Soviet Union (Mikhail Gorbachev); the Queen of England (Elizabeth II), and the queen of country music (Loretta Lynn). This year, mortality hit close to home: my mother, my girlfriend’s father, my sister’s boyfriend – and my college friend Martin Wooster, a writer and thinker of some note, and one of more than seven thousand American pedestrians killed by automobiles this year.

Martin wrote a column called “First Principles” for the Beloit College newspaper while I was its co-editor. He went on to be an editor and frequent writer for Reason magazine, and a contributor to many other respected publications. He sent me a note several years ago when I had a story in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He was brilliant and provocative and funny. And he didn’t own cars.

That last part I didn’t know until he died, and I read it in one of the many on-line tributes from people touched by his singular wit. But I remember the frequent sight of his tall figure walking along the campus paths with a book in front of his face – the same thing that almost got Stephen King killed along a rural Maine road. Martin was run down while attending a convention in Williamsburg, Virginia and walking from one event to another. The person who hit him drove off and has not been found.

He died alone, but he was not alone in the manner of his death. Sadly, pedestrian deaths on America’s roadways have been rising, even as total driving miles have decreased in the pandemic’s wake. In 2021, an estimated 7,485 people on foot were struck and killed by motor vehicles in the United States. This year’s total could be even higher.

What can be done about these avoidable tragedies? 

Drivers are quick to point out that pedestrians can be hard to see. But they say the same thing about bicycles. Yes, people out walking at night should wear brighter clothing, and yes, cyclists should exercise caution. But the onus for safety has to be on the operator of the lethal weapon that is a car. Perhaps one reason that drivers have difficulty seeing pedestrians and cyclists is that they aren’t looking for them. 

But the necessary attitude adjustment goes farther than that. Until pedestrians and cyclists are treated as equal users of the public right-of-way, they will continue to die in unacceptable numbers.

For whatever reason, I’ve witnessed more belligerent behavior behind the wheel this year than in years past. I’ve had close encounters in crosswalks, where drivers are required to stop. I’ve seen people running red lights, speeding, and taking dangerous chances in congested areas. I’ve seen people pull in front of the bus so suddenly that the driver has to slam on the brakes.

I don’t know why people are in such a hurry. But perhaps it has something to do with an economy that wants us rushing to and from work so that we can make our car payments so that we can drive to the store and our gigs and our night jobs. An economy that extends little incentives to drivers, like the widespread expectation of free parking, and the tacit “right” to drive up to nine miles an hour over the speed limit. 

The long task of steering people away from cars must employ both carrots and sticks. Carrots include well-maintained sidewalks, expanded bus service, and cycling infrastructure. Sticks include correcting ingrained bad behavior. When a downtown speed limit of 25 miles per hour means just that, and police ticket drivers for going 28, maybe there will be fewer close calls in crosswalks, and fewer senseless deaths like my friend’s.