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Are we Driving Ourselves to the Poorhouse?

Hank Garfield

 

Maine is famous for low wages and small towns. Those small towns have been losing population for decades. When I was growing up in Blue Hill, families with five, six, or more children were common. Last year, deaths outnumbered births in all but two of Maine’s 16 counties.

My parents had five kids and two cars. My father drove one of those cars a mile and a half to work, where it sat in a parking lot all day. My mother used the other one to haul groceries and to take us to doctor’s appointments and such. Almost everybody we knew lived like this.

It’s hard to question a lifestyle when you’re living inside it. I anticipated that I would buy a car as soon as I got my license, and that I would spend my working years as a car owner. It took many years of driving and pouring money into a series of vehicles before I began to think seriously about alternatives.

Thus I sympathize with the young woman whose story appeared recently in the Bangor Daily News, my hometown newspaper. She is by all accounts a skilled elder care worker with a full-time job at a Bangor facility. Her salary – about $1,600 per month – barely covers her basic living expenses. Her story is repeated all over the state.

And yet, according to the BDN, those basic expenses include a monthly car payment of $233 and an insurance premium of $135. Before she puts gas in the car, or buys a set of tires or has an oil change or a minor repair, she has to make a monthly “nut” of $368 just to keep the thing in the driveway. And that doesn’t include registration, inspection, wiper fluid, parking tickets or any of the other little expenses that crop up from time to time. She is paying more for her car than for her monthly rent, and many Mainers are in the same boat.

Her hours may not align with the schedule, but her place of employment is right on a bus line. A monthly bus pass is $45 – a far cry from what she’s paying to keep a car.

These were just some of the major branches of lowest price tadalafil psychology, new branches are being introduced with time to help us understand different life aspects more easily. They are loaded with sugar and caffeine is the subsequent most copious substance in them that, similar to alcohol, gives you can look here levitra without prescription rise to water failure inside your body. These are easily available at generic viagra for woman any registered medical store located in near region. This is an added advantage for men who are younger, men in their 40s, or even their 30s, who didn’t think that someone their age could ever suffer from Erectile Dysfunction. generic tadalafil india is an excellent product which helps a person to overcome erectile dysfunction form their life. If Maine employers want to keep skilled workers, they could raise their wages, of course – or, they could encourage them to use public transportation. The University of Maine has been doing this for years, and Husson and Eastern Maine Community College have recently followed suit. As an adjunct professor, I have months during the year when I make less than $1,600. Those times are tight, but I never have to worry about getting to work.

Municipalities can help retain workers by expanding bus schedules and encouraging employers to offer incentives like the schools do. Even small towns can do this, with a little creative thinking

Most employers willingly offer free workplace parking. What if they offered free transportation instead? This is essentially what the University of Maine does and, except for evening hours, it works splendidly. Some companies (though few, if any, in Maine) offer their employees parking offsets, where the price of a parking space is reflected in the paychecks of workers who don’t use one.

The Jackson Lab in Bar Harbor partners with public agencies to run several daily buses. This reduces traffic on Mount Desert Island and the need for more on-site parking. The bus is a boon to the employees who use it, too, because every dollar they don’t spend on a car trickles into other areas of the economy. It’s good for everybody.

We need to think differently about the way we use cars. We don’t all need our own private chariots all of the time, and we certainly can’t keep doing it forever. But it will take time to convince most Americans of this. Most of us have spent our whole lives believing exactly the opposite.

A changing mindset about our use of automobiles will produce other long-term benefits. We won’t have to keep filling our cities with parking lots. We won’t have to keep paying oil companies to drill for more and more oil in fragile ecosystems like the Arctic. And perhaps we can fight fewer wars over this finite resource.

Yes, Maine needs better wages. But businesses and local governments can also expend a little capital to promote ride-sharing, public transportation, and smart development. This in turn can encourage more Mainers to get out of the cars that are keeping them poorer than they should be.

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“Slow” is just a Four-Letter Word

Hank Garfield

 

I’m watching the World Baseball Classic in the middle of a Maine snowstorm. Venezuela is playing Italy, and I don’t know many of the players, but I don’t care. Baseball’s back, after a dark winter.

When the time changes in March I often take my bicycle out, but the wintry weather discourages me. I skied home instead. There are many ways to get around without a car – almost all of them slower.

I named this blog Slower Traffic, as in “slower traffic keep right” on the road signs, but also because that was literally what I intended to write about: walking, bicycling, and public transportation. All of these are usually slower than driving.

But so what? Baseball is slow. Yet it’s also the most interesting sport we have, because there is more going on beneath the surface in a baseball game than in a season of hockey, football and basketball rolled together.

Maine is slow. When I moved back to Maine after 16 years in southern California, the phrase I heard most often was “quality of life.” This means that you can work well and still have time to sail, go camping, or enjoy a backyard barbecue. Everyone doesn’t live on top of everybody else, and we aren’t all rushing to get somewhere. Mainers make fun of people from Massachusetts, because they always seem to be in a hurry. Life should be less frenetic, and in Maine it is.

Willie Nelson is slow. His songs ooze out of him like warm maple syrup over a stack of blueberry pancakes. Who doesn’t like Willie Nelson? Even people who say they don’t like country music like Willie Nelson. He’s in his eighties now, but he was 28 when he wrote “Crazy,” a slow song for the ages.

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How long did it take Charles Dickens to write Great Expectations? It took me a few months to read it, on the bus in half-hour installments. I wrote much of my own long novel on the bus. I can’t read or write in a car, though I know people who listen to books on tape while they’re driving. But I would have a hard time paying attention, I think, and an even harder time flipping back a couple of pages to catch something I might have missed.

Sailing is slow. So are badminton, curling, and cross-country skiing. What else is good but slow? Chess, and poker, and the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick and written by Arthur C. Clarke.

When did “slow” become a bad word? Maybe we could all use a little less speed in our lives. Maybe we would live in a saner world if we took the time to do slow things on a regular basis.

I confess that I drove to Belfast recently, and became annoyed at a slow driver on the way back through Hampden. But then I remembered the driver who passed us earlier that morning when we pulled over for an ambulance, just so he could nose into the drive-thru at Dunkin’ Donuts. Fast can be annoying, too.

On the other hand, I like my high-speed internet, and I’m a proponent of high-speed rail, though I’ve never ridden on a so-called “bullet train” like they have in Europe and Japan. When I moved to California in the 1980s there was talk of building such a rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Thirty years later, it still isn’t done. I guess high-speed rail is slow, too, at least in the United States.

But is there anything slower than the month of March in northern latitudes? “Just kill me now,” Julius Caesar said, on another cold gray day in Rome without a hint of spring in the air. The Romans knew about the slow precession of the equinoxes, but they knew nothing of Daylight Savings Time, or baseball. They just sat around in their villas drinking wine and waiting for spring. Only their Mediterranean climate saved them from sheer madness.

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Pedestrian Road Deaths and One Near-Death Experience

Hank Garfield

 

Years ago, I almost ran down a homeless man in San Diego. I don’t know for sure that he was homeless, but he wandered across the four-lane Pacific Highway one night, dressed all in dark clothing, in front of my car. I only saw him at the last second, and I don’t think he saw me at all. He had long dark hair and an old army overcoat. I might have missed him by two feet.

That’s not much margin for error. I could have as easily hit him as not. I would have stopped, and I would have likely been arrested. My life would be different today. I’d have the death or grievous injury of a human being on my conscience, and probably a record, too.

I’m reminded of this every time I see a news story about a pedestrian killed by a car. It could have been me, in either position. Nowadays chances are better that I’d be on foot, and thus my chances of surviving such an accident would be worse. But it could happen to anyone.

Recently, two regular readers (thank you, readers) sent me two links: one from Maine, the other from Ireland.

Writing in the Portland Press Herald, James Hettenbach and Lauri Boxer-Macomber lament the public tendency to side with drivers:

“All too often after the death of a pedestrian or bicyclist, the media and public ask questions like: Why was she wearing dark clothing at night? Why wasn’t he using a light or a flashlight? Why was she in a dimly lit area? Why was he riding his bike on that street at that time? The discourse evokes a blame-the-victim mindset, suggesting that pedestrians and cyclists on Maine’s roadways somehow invite their own deaths by walking to the grocery store in jeans and a parka instead of a neon orange reflective jacket.”

Theirs is a valid point, and I’ll return to it in a moment. But some pedestrians and cyclists are hard to see. As a walker and cyclist I am every bit as invested in my own safety as is the driver of a car. When I drive, I don’t run red lights for fear of getting T-boned, and when I walk I don’t recklessly wander into lanes of moving traffic. I use lights on my bike at night and wear bright clothing.

But I empathize with drivers who get annoyed when people ride bikes without lights or cross the street in the middle of the block on a dark night. At the same time, drivers must accept most of the onus for safety, because they are the ones operating a lethally powerful machine. That’s why we license drivers but not bicyclists, and why we don’t tell pedestrians what to wear.

It’s up to the driver, ultimately, to look out for pedestrians and cyclists. With greater power (a motor vehicle vs. a bicycle or a human body) comes greater responsibility.
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The piece from Ireland, written by Cian Ginty, contains a revealing short video, an “awareness test” that demonstrates how easy it is not to see something you aren’t looking for. I wasn’t looking for a guy crossing the Pacific Highway on foot that night in San Diego. But it would have been my fault if I had hit him.

Unexpected things can happen on the road at any time. Drivers, pedestrians, and bicyclists are all capable of erratic behavior. Animals can come out of nowhere; ditto children and homeless people.

The best way to increase pedestrian and cyclist safety is for more people to walk and bicycle, and for drivers to be constantly aware of them. Ginty concurs:

“One of the most quoted bits of research is from public health consultant Peter Jacobsen, who studied data from Europe and North America. Jacobsen established that: ‘A motorist is less likely to collide with a person walking and bicycling if more people walk or bicycle. Policies that increase the numbers of people walking and bicycling appear to be an effective route to improving the safety of people walking and bicycling.’

He says this result is “unexpected” as it is ‘unlikely that the people walking and bicycling become more cautious if their numbers are larger, it indicates that the behaviour of motorists controls the likelihood of collisions with people walking and bicycling. It appears that motorists adjust their behaviour in the presence of people walking and bicycling.’”

I’ve left intact his Irish spelling. It behooves us all to behave better, on either side of the ocean, or the windshield.

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