Paved with good intentions

I did two years or so in the Tampa City Clerk's office, and the experience was an eye opener. One of the biggest shocks to my personal system was learning that the central necessity of any urban planning is to map out the parking first. It is the primary consideration, the thing you tackle before all else. After all, if there is no place for people to park, then there's no point in development. People, it is implicitely understood, will never take the BUS to your new mini mall, much less frickin' walk. They will die first. Or worse, drive their cars and their money to someone else's mini mall. Can't have that.

Simple economics points the way to sanity. As IOZ has noted, and I can attest from typing out endless city budget meeting minutes, the cost of one major highway on or off ramp would be enough to fund a good twenty miles of light rail. And the idea that we could get a great deal more mass transportation bang for our tax payer funded transportation buck with mass transit than by feeding our individual motoring monkey is certainly food for thought. Unfortunately, it's sugar free, fat free, low carb diet food. By which I mean, sure it's healthy, but hardly anyone is willing to buy it, much less eat it.

People like cars. I know you all know that, but, well, it's the kind of simple truth that cannot be overstated. It goes to eleven. People like cars. They like what they perceive as the freedom and the flexibility implicit within the sleek lines of their driveway ornament.

They don't have to look up train schedules, they don't have to walk in the rain to a bus stop, they don't have to sit there in a large vehicle with a bunch of strangers whose appearances, body odors, or vacuous blatting noises they may find unpleasant. They need not conform their destinations with the inconveniences of a planning board's transit routes. Freedom from all of this is what they like, and what they will never, never, never give up. Forget about their guns. It's their steering wheels you will have to pry from their cold, dead hands.

Another of the things I noticed during my two years typing up a backlog of City Council minutes was this: you can always get votes for improved mass transit systems. Always. There are always city council members willing to make, second, and overwhelmingly approve the motion; there are always urban denizens willing to vote in heavy volume for candidates that propose such.

But this doesn't mean all these people are willing to actually use the subway, the improved bus lines, the light rail, oh no. The vision that dances like sugarplums in all of their heads is that everyone else gets on the frickin' George Jetson atomic hover-bus, leaving each of them to speed down John F. Kennedy Boulevard (there's always a John F. Kennedy Boulevard, just as, running at right angles to it, there's always a Martin Luther King Avenue, too) in solitary splendor behind the wheel of their huge honkin' SUV.

It's the same impulse behind why, when politicians promise us alternate energy, what we all envision is, you know, somebody from NASA coming around to our garage Real Soon Now and rejiggering our car engines to run on water. Or cold fusion. Or lawn sweepings. Now that's what we pay taxes for, dammit!

Always remember, never forget: the American way of life is non-negotiable. Unfortunately, what most people don't understand about that quote is that the lifestyle Mr. Cheney was talking about is, we pay them, they stay rich. There's much less profit in teaching a nation of consumers to only shop within walking distance, or on the bus route, and there's no profit at all in providing us with anything free, especially energy.

Or, you know, in teaching us to actually live within our means, and do without all this crap we really don't need.

So, y'know, fuck that noise.

Mind you, I'm a product of decadence myself, and while I fully realize that I don't need the third season of Hill Street Blues on DVD, I'm still damned well going to buy it if I get a chance. And I don't mind somebody else making an honest profit on the transaction. Still, even I can see that our insane consumer-consciousness culture has gotten wildly out of hand. I just don't know what we can do about it at this point except buckle in and enjoy the ride.

We'd be much better off enjoying the ride on an electric street car, or a magrail, or a methane powered bus... as a society, I mean. It would all be much healthier. But it wouldn't be anywhere near as comfortable for us as individuals... and here in America, as elsewhere in the civilized, industrialized nations, individual comfort is all that really matters.