One from the vault: February 11, 2004

Winter is the season for tragic death on Maine’s weather-slicked highways. The engine of commerce must go on, and we live in an economy that depends on people being able to get to their jobs by automobile, no matter what the weather. Schools have the good sense to close down when road conditions become dangerous, but most businesses don’t.

Is there anything – short of catastrophic illness – more frightening to a parent than teaching a kid to drive? A car or truck is the most powerful piece of machinery many people will operate in their lives. We put cars in the hands of teenagers because the only way for them to learn is by doing, and because, at least in rural Maine, the mobility afforded by the private automobile is a near necessity.

This doesn’t make it any less scary. We lose a few kids every year. We accept the carnage on our highways (43,005 fatalities in the U.S. in 2002*) as the price we pay for this individual mobility. We don’t shut down the roads every time there’s a tragedy.

I’ve been though this twice now. Both my kids are now licensed drivers, and both breezed through driver’s ed and the test more easily than I did. Still, there’s nothing like the feeling of handing your kid the keys for the first time and putting your life in their hands as you buckle into the passenger seat. And nothing matches the lump in your throat the first time they take the car out solo, leaving you to watch from the driveway or the front window with an outward show of confidence and your fingers crossed behind your back. Every time there’s an accident involving a teenager, you die a little bit inside, knowing that it only takes a second of inattention, a patch of ice, or a bit of bad luck to send your kid to the hospital or the graveyard.

In California I used to take my daughter and son out to the desert and let them drive on sandy trails when they were around 11 or 12. The worst thing they could do was run over a cactus and flatten a tire. That never happened.

I learned to drive on an island in Maine in a Jeep with a standard-H shift and bad brakes. To stop, you coasted uphill, turned the key and popped the clutch, or ran into something – preferably something soft, like a bush.

But a lot of kids have had no driving experience when they get into the driver’s ed vehicle. They don’t learn how to drive a manual shift. And they don’t see the gory films my generation did, from what my kids tell me. My friends and I joked about those films, but on some level they served their purpose, which was to remind us that driving is a dangerous activity that can snuff out your life in a second.

Information on erectile dysfunction Erectile dysfunction basically is a disorder where generic india levitra a man is not able to enter into the vagina totally. While going through tests, the topics considered pictures levitra shop uk of creatures, ecological moments, appealing foods, and people. It encourages the creation of luteinizing hormone, which regulates ovulation, and eases hormone irregularities. canadian viagra pills http://appalachianmagazine.com/2015/10/19/the-incredible-story-of-the-blue-ridge-parkway/ Every medicine comes up with a cheapest cialis from india description manual which includes all the possible information about the product so that you would already be aware of its treatment that is very cheap and easy. On the day of my son’s test, we drove around and around downtown Belfast as he practiced parallel parking. As the hour approached, my son grew more and more apprehensive with each botched attempt. “I’m going to fail,” he moaned.

Now, parallel parking happens to be one of my few strengths as a driver. I can’t see well at night, I sometimes forget to buckle my seat belt, I drive about 10 mph above the speed limit, and I’ve rolled through more stop signs than General Sherman did on his march through Georgia. But I’m a superb parallel parker. So I tried to offer some fatherly words of encouragement.

“This isn’t that hard,” I told him. “I aced parallel parking all three times I took my driving test.”

Somehow, this nugget of parental wisdom didn’t send him into the test brimming with confidence. But he must have done it right, because they gave him his license the very first time, like his sister before him.

A few weeks later he took the car to Bangor by himself. I tried not to be nervous. Eventually I had stopped being nervous when his sister drove to school every day. I told him to be careful. It was all I could do. It’s all any of us can do.

___

Originally published in the Village Soup Times.

* — Happily, fatal accidents have decreased since then, as Americans have begun to drive less. The figure for 2013 was 32,719. Source: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

[wpdevart_like_box profile_id=”slowertraffic” connections=”show” width=”300″ height=”550″ header=”small” cover_photo=”show” locale=”en_US”]

It was an honor to participate in last week’s concert and silent auction for my friend Hannah Somers-Jones, a talented young musician who suffered serious injuries in a November car accident. Her medical bills will be in the many thousands of dollars, and her physical recovery will be even more painful.

I don’t want to turn this into a polemic on car accidents. What happened to Hannah could happen to anyone. She wasn’t even driving. She was riding in the back seat of a car that was run off the road by an oncoming vehicle.

When I’m out on my bicycle, I’m as vulnerable as anyone in a car. I ride shotgun with my girlfriend all the time. Sometimes I even drive. Even walking isn’t safe. If you live in the American car culture, as virtually all of us do, you run the daily risk of violent injury or death.

And yet when we tally the cost of the car culture, we tend to downplay the cost of car accidents in lost and interrupted lives, as well as the strain on our health care system. According to the American Automobile Association, car crashes cost nearly $300 billion per year in this country alone. Some 2.5 million Americans – nearly 7,000 per day – are treated in emergency rooms due to car accidents.

Driving has become marginally safer in recent years. Traffic deaths peaked in 2005 at just over 43,000. Now the figure is around 33,000. That’s a significant reduction. Despite the relentless drumbeat of car advertising, Americans, for the first time in a couple of generations, are driving less. Cars are getting safer, thanks to innovative technology that allows the vehicle itself to sense and avoid danger. Both approaches are commendable. In tandem, they can continue to reduce the carnage of the car culture that we accept too readily.

Humans are poor judges of comparative risk. We worry about flying in airplanes when the most dangerous part of flying is driving to the airport. Driving feels safer because many of us do it every day. Kids get licensed to drive at 16, but only a small percentage of them will ever get a pilot’s license. Driving a car gives you the illusion of control, but in a plane you are at the mercy of the pilot.

sildenafil generic sale Medicines usually advised are Tenuate, Bontril, Didrex and Xenical. Well-equipped infrastructure and well-qualified doctors http://raindogscine.com/?attachment_id=45 buy cheap levitra make a hospital ideal for trauma treatment. Proponents of cialis ukgue that the reports of the remedies are very encouraging. Quite frankly no levitra without prescription raindogscine.com one wants to go bald, except by choice. I’ve been a driving fool this darkest week of the year. I drove to Belfast and back on Monday for a dentist appointment. I rode down to Brooklin on Wednesday with my son to visit my folks. When we got back to town, I borrowed my girlfriend’s car to do some last-minute Christmas shopping.

Technically, the only one of these three trips for which a car was necessary was the middle one. I could have used a bus to get to my dentist’s office, and I’ve done that in the past, but it requires spending the day in Belfast. (The reverse isn’t true, by the way: a resident of the mid-coast cannot travel to Bangor and home again by bus on the same day.) And I could have gone out on foot in search of that final gift, but it would have taken a lot longer.

Some readers might claim that this recent relative driving binge undermines the premise of this blog. But as I’ve said many times, I’m not a purist. I’ve renewed my driver’s license twice since I stopped owning cars. We all live in the American car culture, whether we like it or not. Anyone who seeks to influence change in the world must first acknowledge the reality on the ground.

I think about this during those rare occasions when I’m driving in a vehicle alone. I have to remind myself that most of my friends do this on most days of the year. It’s absolutely normal and unremarkable to them. That was my reality, too, for most of my adult life.

I do believe that we have too many cars on the road, and that we should pursue policies that encourage alternatives to driving. Does that make me a hypocrite every time I slide behind the wheel of a car? I don’t think so. All I’m trying to do is start a conversation.

Especially at this time of year, we should remember that we’re all in this complicated world together. Sometimes we seem to be in complete control of our lives, hands on the wheel and the road wide open. But it only takes a second to shatter that illusion.

[wpdevart_like_box profile_id=”slowertraffic” connections=”show” width=”300″ height=”550″ header=”small” cover_photo=”show” locale=”en_US”]

Imagine that:
An endangered bat
Got in the way of a highway that
Shouldn’t ever be built.

It’s a lot easier to live with the consequences of bad poetry than of bad traffic planning. When I read that a proposed extension of Interstate 395 could be held up, or perhaps derailed completely, to protect the habitat of the northern long-eared bat, my sympathies naturally lay with the furry little night fliers. It could be a case of the blind leading the shortsighted.

The proposal in question is a bypass that would steer truck traffic away from residential streets in the Bangor, Maine area, by linking the Interstate Highway System to Route 9, a two-lane highway between Bangor and Calais that leads to the Canadian Maritimes. It might seem like a good thing to get the trucks out of town, but like most road expansion proposals, this one rests on a foundation of shaky assumptions.

In 2008, for the first time since the 1950s, Americans drove fewer miles than they had the previous year. Part of this was due to a spike in gas prices, but part of it was also due to a growing consciousness that we cannot continue to saturate the world with automobiles and automobile infrastructure. People are looking for alternatives.

We see evidence of this growing movement in the push for pedestrian-friendly downtowns, bicycle lanes, and improved public transportation. There is renewed interest in train travel. Long-distance trucking companies are having difficulty finding young drivers.

Yet public policy continues to promote more road building, which in turn encourages more driving, which exacerbates already dire environmental and economic problems.

Amongst all the drugs available in the market such as Kamagra, levitra 40 mg ,and a lot more. You levitra without prescription http://amerikabulteni.com/2011/10/03/cinsel-taciz-kurbanlarindan-new-york%E2%80%99ta-%E2%80%98surtuk%E2%80%99-yuruyusu/ need to be patient as natural treatments will take some time before you see any significant result. For the young women’s anemia, some of them are due to psychological issues where the individual suffers from mental pressure, depression commander viagra cases, risk based worries, tension, stress and mood pressures. Some of these are the levitra cost of sales tablets, jelly, and Kamagra gels. And it’s not that no one has seen this coming. In her seminal 1997 book, Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay wrote:

For decades traffic experts have observed the capacity of more highways to simply breed more traffic. “If you build it, they will come,” is the bleak truth confirmed by science and history. “Generated traffic” is the professional phrase used to describe traffic generated by increased roads.

In other words, you can’t build your way out of traffic congestion, because as soon as you build a new road, new drivers will show up to quickly fill it to capacity. We’ve seen this happen time and again. Interstate 495 around Boston has worse traffic than the city it was built to steer traffic away from. Building new roads encourages people to drive instead of seeking alternatives. It’s an unimaginative approach that no longer works, and in fact creates its own problems, from suburban sprawl to air pollution to loss of animal habitat to reduced quality of human life.

Instead of paving the way for more cars and trucks, we need to focus on creative, forward-looking solutions that reduce the number of vehicles on the road, and thus reduce the need for new road construction. Were challenged to maintain the roads and bridges we already have. Why add to a problem of our own making?

For similar reasons, the long-discussed east-west highway across Maine is a bad idea whose time has passed. The ports of Atlantic Canada are already linked to the American heartland by rail, over much the same route. Moving freight over long distances is much cheaper by train. “Intermodal” transportation, in which truck trailers can be directly loaded onto and off of rail cars, saving trucks for shorter, local trips, is the wave of the future. The American Association of Railroads has estimated that if just 10% of current truck volume were shifted to intermodal, more than a billion gallons of fuel would be conserved each year.

I remember when a Canadian passenger train plied that route, with stops in Brownville Junction and Greenville in the wee hours of the night. In the morning you’d be in Montreal. Franklin Roosevelt came up to Eastport on the train on his way to Campobello. Cars and trucks haven’t ruled for very long. We should not plan future transportation projects on the assumption that they will rule forever.

More importantly, Maine must not yoke its future to wasteful and costly modes of transportation when better alternatives are just over the horizon. We need to stop building new roads and fix the existing ones. We need to stop yanking up railroad tracks to create recreational trails. We need to continue the movement away from a car for every adult American.

Every road not built encourages us in a better direction. So I say bravo to the bats, for hanging in there.

[wpdevart_like_box profile_id=”slowertraffic” connections=”show” width=”300″ height=”550″ header=”small” cover_photo=”show” locale=”en_US”]