When Driving Isn’t An Option

Hank Garfield

One-third of Americans don’t or can’t drive. In Maine, according to the Moving Maine Network, some 83,000 adults don’t have a driver’s license. One might think that this represents a potent constituency for change in our transportation system.

It should. But public policy tends to be made by people with access to automobiles, usually their own. The one-third figure makes non-drivers a significant minority, but a minority nonetheless. Voters are much more likely to approve a new highway than they are to support expanded bus service and bicycle lanes.

We who are physically able to drive and have the financial wherewithal to own vehicles tend to dismiss the needs and desires of those who can’t drive. A few weeks ago, I picked up a new book titled When Driving Is Not An Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency. I also got to meet and briefly chat with the author, Anna Letitia Zivarts, who describes herself as “a low-vision mom and non-driver.” She was born with a neurological condition called nystagmus, which renders her unable to operate a motor vehicle.

I can’t honestly describe myself as a non-driver. My license is current, and my credit card information is on file at Budget Rent-a-Car, which I use about a dozen times a year. Zivarts has a term for people like me: “choice” non-drivers. I could, if I wanted to, take out a car loan and make monthly payments and buy insurance and go in for regular oil changes and buy new snow tires every Maine winter. Been there, done that.

Those car rentals, depending on the season, cost me about a hundred dollars a day. The most up-to-date estimate from the American Automobile Association of the average annual cost of owning a vehicle is above $12,000. This means that I could rent a car 120 times a year – every three days – before it would cost as much as owning one.

But Zivarts’s book is not about people like me, though she welcomes us into what she calls “the non-driver movement.” It made me stop and think about many of my fellow citizens whom I see regularly on the bus, and who don’t have a choice, when beset by something like a pandemic, to retreat into the privacy of their cars.

What I am is a non-car owner, a cumbersome phrase that describes my choice not to spend money supporting an exclusionary infrastructure. Though I quit cars mostly for economic reasons, I am concerned about the automobile’s effects on climate, land use, and increasingly belligerent public behavior.

Zivarts focuses, rightly, on people forcibly excluded from the car culture for physical or financial reasons. When I gave up car ownership, I discovered that I needed to plan my days and weeks more effectively. I needed to schedule appointments with transportation foremost on my mind. I had to shop more locally and at a smaller scale. I had to look at bus routes before renting an apartment. Of necessity, I walked more. Sometimes I passed on social events because I could not get there.

This is everyday life for people who can’t drive. Yet businesses, hospitals, schools, and local governments, with the tacit approval of car owners, effectively discriminate against one-third of the population. Most businesses provide free parking for their employees but not free bus passes. (The University of Maine, where I work, is a laudable exception.) Many hospital procedures require a patient to be accompanied by a driver. Bike racks are hard to find at most shopping malls and big-box stores.

Zivarts argues for change in public policy, but more importantly, for change in public attitudes. “Car-dependent communities aren’t just failing those of us who can’t drive,” she writes. “They are failing everyone.” Just as more bicycles on the road make driving safer by forcing drivers to be more alert and aware, so do options other than driving make towns and cities more pleasant places to live.

“What nondrivers need – what we all need – is a transformation of the way we organize mobility, housing, and public space so that we have options for getting around that do not rely on driving a car,” Zivarts writes. Amen to that.

When Driving Is Not An Option is available from Island Press.

Where Have All the Small Stores Gone?

Hank Garfield

A packet of jigsaw blades fits easily into a pocket of my autumn jacket. It so happened that I needed a blade on a recent November afternoon, and I had to think a minute on the easiest way to get one.

There used to be a hardware store in Penobscot Plaza that I could walk to. There used to be one on Broadway that was easy to reach to by bus. But they are gone. With a twinge of sadness, I realized that my best option was Home Depot, out on Stillwater Avenue, one of Bangor’s busiest car corridors. I slung my bicycle onto the Community Connector bus and headed off to the nearest corporate megastore to buy an item smaller than my hand.

We had been doing a home construction project, the lovely Lisa and I, and so far, everything too heavy or too bulky to carry home had been delivered. But sometimes you need to run out and get something. This is when owning a car can seem like a necessity – or at least an awfully handy convenience.

The store is set back from the street by a massive parking lot, sectioned off by raised asphalt islands into smaller lots. There is no designated bus stop, no sidewalk or walkway for pedestrians. Nor are any bike racks in evidence. Bus passengers must navigate the parking lot on foot, and bicyclists at their peril. I locked my bike to an outdoor display of garden tools and went in to find my blades.

As I pedaled home through the car traffic, I pondered the absurdity of operating a two thousand-pound, gas-burning, space-occupying machine to obtain one pocket-sized package of saw blades. Doesn’t anybody consider this, well, wasteful?

It’s bad enough for someone like me, who has chosen not to own a car and to live with the inconveniences. It’s worse for people who have no choice: those who can’t drive, due to medical, financial, or other reasons.

In 1999, I packed my kids, the dog, the cat, and all our worldly belongings into an Aerostar van and a U-Haul trailer and moved from California to Maine. We tried to take local roads instead of the Interstate when we could. As we went through Illinois and Indiana, we began to sense the same story in every town. The brick post office and a church or two in the old town center, and then, a mile or more away, at the junction with the highway, a cluster of the same 15 or 20 corporate businesses. The same chains in every town. I hoped it would never happen to Maine.

But it has. It just took a quarter of a century longer to happen here. You can no longer walk down to Joe’s Hardware Store and buy a rake, or a set of jigsaw blades, or anything else you might need. You have been handed another reason to own and drive a car, and another alternative has been eliminated.

It’s not just hardware stores. Downtown of small cities like Bangor seem to be replete with restaurants and bars and places to buy art or antiques, but mostly devoid of outlets for the practical items of day-to-day life. I’ve had similar problems getting ink cartridges, fresh fruit, cleaning supplies, clothing, and scotch tape. The whole idea of walkable cities and downtowns is predicated on the idea that people can live, work and shop in a small area. If you must go to an outlying box store to get what you need, doesn’t that defeat the purpose? Shouldn’t city planners be considering this when they draw up zoning regulations?

Car ownership would not seem like such a necessity in an environment where Joe’s Hardware could coexist with Home Depot. But powerful forces seem to want as many of us to drive and own cars as possible. Never mind the millions of Americans excluded from such a system, or the damage our dependence on cars inflicts on the natural world. The car is encouraged and incentivized at every turn.

But we can do something about it, however small and incremental. We can patronize pedestrian-friendly businesses. We can eschew drive-throughs. As much as possible, we can avoid the big-box stores. There isn’t always a choice. That’s why we need to use the choices we still have.

Fernando Valenzuela

Hank Garfield

For most of the 1980s, and all the 1990s but the last four months, I lived in Southern California. I never made it to Disneyland or Yosemite. I didn’t get up to Edwards Air Force Base to watch the Space Shuttle land, nor visit Universal Studios or Hearst Castle.

But I did take my kids to Dodger Stadium to see Fernando Valenzuela pitch.

It was 1990, in what would turn out to be his final season with the Dodgers. My daughter and son were very young – five and two. We took the train from Oceanside, and a bus from Union Station to Chavez Ravine, where once stood a Mexican-American neighborhood that was forcibly removed in the 1940s to make way for a public housing project that never happened.

The Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958 on the promise of a sweetheart deal between the team owner and the city, in which the Dodgers acquired public land in the heart of the city for their new ballpark. The Mexican-Americans so recently evicted from that land saw no compelling reason to buy tickets.

Fernando Valenzuela gave them one. The youngest of twelve kids, from a small town in Mexico, he learned baseball at the feet of his older brothers. A Dodger scout discovered him there.

He started the first game of the 1981 season as an emergency replacement and shut out the Houston Astros. Four of his next five starts were shutouts; all were complete-game wins. He won his first eight games. Latinos in Los Angeles flocked to the stadium on the nights he pitched. He was 20 years old.

I liked him from the start. What was not to like? The way he rolled his eyes to the sky right before releasing a pitch? His chubby body that belied his athleticism? That he could hit and field as well as pitch? That his money pitch was a screwball? That he pitched complete games? That he was left-handed, like Sandy Koufax, like me?

His incredible rookie season was interrupted by baseball’s first prolonged strike, which wiped out the middle third of the season. But the Dodgers got into the World Series that year, against the Yankees.

The Yankees won the first two games in New York. Fernando started the next game in Los Angeles. He gave up four runs in the first three innings. But his manager, Tommy Lasorda, stuck with him. No more Yankees crossed the plate that day. The Dodgers rallied, and at the end of the game, there was Fernando, shaking hands with his catcher after a 146-pitch, 5-4 victory. They won the next three games to take the Series in six.

Fernando died on October 22, three days before the Dodgers would face the Yankees in the Series again, and nine days short of his 64th birthday. We were contemporaries. I was a kid when he burst on the scene with his cherubic face and unhittable screwball. By 1990 I was a parent, and he was a veteran, an established major-league star. An arm injury had left him diminished, but he could still move the ball around and keep hitters off-balance. His best years behind him, he still put fans in the seats.

I wanted my kids’ first live big-league game to be memorable. Despite its dubious history, Dodger Stadium is a landmark. It’s where Koufax pitched his perfect game, and where Vin Scully spun literature out of thin air on the radio.

Valenzuela lost that Sunday afternoon, 2-0, to the Cincinnati Reds, but he pitched well. He led off the sixth with a double to break up the opposing pitcher’s no-hit bid. He could hold his own at the plate, accumulating 10 home runs, 84 runs batted in, and a career batting average of .200, which is good for a pitcher.

The Dodgers released him before the start of the 1991 season. Over the next few years, he played for several teams in the big leagues and his native Mexico. I saw him a few more times when he pitched for the Padres in the late 1990s, getting by on his smarts and not much else, but still sometimes able to find the right pitch in the right situation and remind everyone of his youthful brilliance.

Adios, Fernando. You were an artist with a baseball, an ambassador for your people, and an avatar of joy for those of us who simply loved watching you work.