In 1960, two years before winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, John Steinbeck drove his camper/truck up the coast of Maine, accompanied by his dog, on their way around the periphery of the United States. He wrote a book about the trip: Travels With Charley (in Search of America). In it, he observed that the then-new Interstate Highway System would soon make it possible to drive across the country without seeing anything at all.

Bob Dylan, 56 years before winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, set out from Minnesota to New York that same year, hitchhiking some of the same highways Steinbeck drove. It’s highly unlikely their paths ever crossed, but the young Dylan had read Cannery Row, and would later reference it in “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”

Remember when people used to hitchhike, both locally and long-distance? I hitchhiked all over Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont as a teenager. I went to college in Wisconsin in the late 1970s and thumbed back and forth several times. I hitchhiked, alone and with friends, to northern Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Canada. There were some uncomfortable situations and a few cold nights, but I was never threatened with any physical harm.

In the early 1990s I lived near the railroad tracks in southern California. I met a couple of hobos, who hopped freights and traveled the country. I was amazed that there were still people like that – characters straight out of Tortilla Flat, or “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again.”

The Interstate spawned its own hobo culture, too, but it seems to be mostly gone now. Hitchhiking is widely perceived as dangerous, and illegal on all interstates. I don’t drive much, but I see the occasional hitchhiker in the summer, mostly along the coast. I suppose it was always dangerous. But as a young white male in New England I could afford to be oblivious to the danger. I think also that the culture has coarsened.

Steinbeck regularly engaged strangers along his route. He was curious about his surroundings and the people he met. He picked up the occasional hitchhiker. He stopped in small towns and ate at local diners and engaged in conversations. In his memoir, Chronicles, Volume 1, Dylan comes across as nothing so much as keenly observant, soaking in all the musical and literary influences around him.

In the medical world, it is stated that inflammation in liver is the biggest issue that prevents the functioning of this organ and this is why they are keen onto trying out dildos so that they can preserve their effectiveness within the packaging. cheap super viagra Infertility in men may occur due order viagra levitra to inadequate sperm count, past surgery or hormonal malfunctions. Both of these forms of pain viagra sans prescription More Info is the body’s natural warning system. Sometimes these sites are not cialis cost your typical drug dealer looking for effective ways to use technology, but instead are set up to the minimum for the manufacturer. Are people less friendly these days? Have they seen too many gory hitchhiker movies? Are we more isolated from one another, in spite of our electronic gadgets? Has the world become a meaner place? I don’t know. But Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize is the best news of this stormy season.

I first saw him perform on Thanksgiving night in 1975, in the Bangor Auditorium, a building he has now outlived. My mother drove my sister and me and a few friends through howling wind and outrageous snow from Blue Hill to Bangor because she wanted to see Joan Baez, who was also on the bill.

Even then he was revamping his songs. He played a hard-rock rendition of “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” a song I’d only heard on one of my mom’s Pete Seeger records. He did new songs like the epic “Isis” and the haunting “Simple Twist of Fate.” The whole show, an ensemble billed as the Rolling Thunder Revue, knocked me out. I’ve been a fan ever since.

Thirty-four years later, when I next saw Bob Dylan in Bangor, I was able to walk from my house to the show at the Waterfront. The last time I saw him, in 2014 in Boston, I took a train. I missed the first half of a Dylan show in Los Angeles in the 1980s because I misplaced the tickets and then got stuck in traffic. I saw him at the first Farm Aid concert in Illinois when I was driving across the country alone.

I’ve caught up with him in concert maybe a half dozen other times. He never does a song quite the same way twice. They have more in common with plays than poems. His songs, like our world, are stuffed with characters. They come alive because so many people live in them.

By now you might be wondering what all this has to do with my usual topic of the American car culture, but if you start over you’ll see I’ve worked in transportation here and there. Now I’m going to go listen to some Nobel Prize-winning literature.

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I’ve always wanted to write one of those pieces composed of random thoughts, connected with ellipses… a “three-dotter,” as newspaper columnists of old called them in the days before blogs. It’s an easy way to fill space without a cohesive theme, and it also appeals to the brevity of the American attention span.

Have you seen those new car commercials that practically condone distracted driving? In one, a tone-deaf driver imagines herself winning a singing contest; in another, an average guy behind the wheel daydreams of sports stardom. The ads seem to say: Go ahead and let your mind wander, because our new high-tech sensor system can recognize danger and auto-correct before you’ll get in trouble.

Now, I’m all for technology. If cars can borrow the concept of “sensors” from Star Trek and apply it to everyday life, I think that’s great… even more so if it prevents accidents. But how complacent should we be, and how much complacency should we tacitly encourage? When I’m out on my bicycle, I want the drivers around me alert, aware of my presence on the road, and not off in some private fantasy.

Sensors didn’t prevent another horrible accident recently on Route 1A between Bangor and Ellsworth. This is a deadly stretch of road. It’s also a well-traveled corridor, especially in the summer and fall, as it’s the main route between Bangor International Airport and Acadia National Park.

Over the years, this road has been periodically widened in spots, new lanes added, better signage erected… but accidents still happen, and traffic continues to increase. That highway is notorious for speeders and tales of tailgating and aggressive driver behavior. All the improvements in the world won’t change that.

In fact, continuing to expand road capacity only encourages more people to drive, worsening the problem. A more sensible plan for the corridor should focus on connected, comprehensive public transportation between Bangor and Bar Harbor, with the long-term goal of removing a significant percentage of vehicles from the traffic picture.
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Maine doesn’t really have traffic… I lived in southern California for most of the 1980s and 1990s and cannot seriously apply the word to the small, temporary pockets of congestion I’ve encountered here. We do have a fair number of drivers with entitled attitudes who don’t think they should ever have to slow down for a bicyclist or a pedestrian.

As a bicyclist I can’t afford to get distracted. I have a side mirror so that I see cars behind me. At certain intersections in the greater Bangor area, I must get into the left lane so as not to impede traffic turning right. In these situations, my proper, legal move is to “control the lane” until I’m safely through the intersection. (Two examples: southbound Main Street in Bangor at its junction with I-395, and southbound Route 2 in Orono, at its junction with Kelley Road.) Drivers are required by law to follow me through the intersection before they pass. Yet many will zip around me on the right, into the other lane, rather than wait those few seconds. This creates danger for everyone involved.

Drivers are also required by law to give bicyclists a three-foot buffer space in all situations. Again, it takes seconds, not minutes, out of a driver’s day to wait until it’s safe to pass. What’s the rush?

It’s not all on the drivers, of course. Especially during autumn’s dwindling daylight, bicyclists and pedestrians have an obligation to make themselves seen, and to make sure drivers see them. But the difference is that a distracted bicyclist or pedestrian might dent a fender or scratch a paint job, but a car can kill. The onus for safety, I think, is properly placed on the operator of the more powerful vehicle.

Those car commercials are ultimately irresponsible. Driving a car is an awesome responsibility, because you take into your hands not only your own life, but the lives of everyone within the immediate vicinity of your vehicle. Because the culture is saturated with cars, we’ve marginalized other means of transportation to the point where many drivers feel that everyone on the road should defer to them.

A smarter path forward is to promote pedestrian neighborhoods, bicycle lanes and infrastructure, and public transportation. I see nothing wrong with sensors in cars, if people use them sensibly… and if people begin to come around to the idea that they don’t always have to drive.

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The average American car owner drives fewer miles today than ten years ago. The statistics are indisputable. Miles per car peaked in 2005, and the number has been declining ever since.

Maybe the purported love affair between Americans and their cars is coming to an end.

Several recent studies show that this trend is particularly evident among young people. In an article published in the Atlantic in January of this year titled The Decline of the Driver’s License, Julie Beck reports on a study by Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. The evidence clearly shows that young people are seeking alternatives to driving their own cars.

“The percentage of people with a driver’s license decreased between 2011 and 2014, across all age groups,” Beck reports. “For people age 16 to 44, that percentage has been decreasing steadily since 1983. It’s especially pronounced for teens—in 2014, just 24.5% of 16-year-olds had a license, a 47% decrease from 1983, when 46.2% did. And at the tail end of the teen years, 69% of 19-year-olds had licenses in 2014, compared to 87.3% in 1983, a 21% decrease.”

I never fully bought into the advertising-driven idea that Americans love their cars. For a small percentage of car owners, the metaphor of a love affair is apt. These are the hobbyists and enthusiasts, the people who spend their spare time working on their cars, waxing the paint job, tricking out the stereo system, going to car shows. But I think the vast majority of car owners view their vehicle as a necessity, a notion that the greater culture, until recently, has done little to challenge. It’s less a love affair than an addiction.

I accepted the inevitability of car ownership for longer than I’d like to admit. From the ages of 18 to 49, I almost always owned a car. The brief periods when I didn’t weren’t by choice. A car would die a few weeks or months before I could replace it. I had a car stolen once in San Diego. Members of a weekly writing group to which I drove chipped in to get me on the road again, for which I’m still grateful. But these days I would carpool or take the bus.

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“People under 30 are far more likely to ride public transportation and to express positive feelings about it than older people, regardless of what part of the country they live in or what kind of neighborhood they grew up in,” writes Sarah Goodyear in CityLab. The trend continues even when they start families. “Across all income brackets, parents under 30 used transit significantly more than those between 30 and 60,” Goodyear writes. “Forty-five percent of the under-30 parent group with incomes above $75,000 said they use transit weekly, compared with 16% of parents between 30 and 60 in the same income bracket.”

Furthermore, Goodyear observes, they are doing so despite the example of their baby boomer parents. Millennials are “less likely to have been encouraged to walk or bike by their families as children or to have had easy access to transit, and were more likely to have gotten the message from parents that transit was unsafe (as well as the message from peers that it was uncool).”

There’s more good news. Attitudes toward public transportation are improving all over the country, and up and down all income brackets. Even people who can afford cars are turning to public transportation as a more economic alternative.

But much remains to be done to accelerate this positive trend. People are five times more likely to use public transportation if offered incentives by their employers, as the University of Maine, Husson University and other area schools do. Car owners need to be persuaded that spending tax dollars on transit benefits them, too. Parking needs to be priced so that non-drivers no longer subsidize it, and businesses need to offer discounts to customers who arrive by other means than car. Alternatives need to be promoted and encouraged, in both public and private sectors.

Attitudes change slowly, over generations. The bailed-out, subsidized automobile industry still spends millions of dollars in advertising to addict Americans to their product and make them think they’re in love. But fewer of us are falling for it.

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