World Carfree Day

Today, September 22, is World Carfree Day. Events are happening around the world to point out the destructive impacts of car transportation, and how free life can be without that car ball and chain to weigh you down. I don't know about any events going on in Minneapolis to celebrate this day, so I'll throw up a little bit of confetti and give a hip hip.

Today, on World Carfree Day, I am reflecting on some of the city policies here that make it difficult to live without a car. These policies seem to me to really encourage car use and discourage use of other transportation modes.

First of all, during the winter, the city scrapes the snow down to the surface on all the streets but leaves sidewalk cleaning to the private sector. This means that carfree folks pay taxes to clear the streets that they don't use, and have to walk a hazardous tangle of ice and snowpiles on the sidewalk space that they do use. The city also pays for street repairs from its general fund and assesses individual property owners for sidewalk repairs. This seems to be a great way to get homeowners to hate walking when they look at their bills. The city also lights up the middle of the streets with its streetlighting system, but if people want streetlights that light up the sidewalk they have to pay assessments.

All these policies encourage car use. It's the whole chicken and egg thing: government is using your tax money to make it easier for you to drive so you do drive. It isn't because cars are better, it's because the state is forcing you to use them.

Despite all this, 20% of Minneapolis households do not own cars. These people are really paying for the transportation choices of the car households. Many of those carfree households are that way for economic reasons. This is really a social justice issue. The poor are subsidizing the transportation choice of those who are wealthier than they.

And that's what I'm thinking here in my carfree life in very car-intensive Minneapolis on World Carfree Day.

A family who lives near me recently went from a car family to a carfree family. Their car-aches and bus-aches and bike-aches and victories are all documented here:

http://carfreefamily.wordpress.com/

And here is where you will find more information on World Carfree Day:

http://www.worldcarfree.net/wcfd/

Transportation Dictatorship/Transportation Democracy

After the collapse of the 35W freeway bridge, there were several letters and commentaries blaming the bridge collapse on the funding of non-car forms of transportation. People wrote that funding light rail transit drew resources away from freeway bridges. Loopiest of all was Katherine Kersten, Star Tribune columnist, who called Senator Oberstar to task because he funded bicycle transportation amenities, and that made the bridge collapse. These people are certainly subjects of the transportation dictatorship, their brains so warped by it that they can't see outside the limits.

We live in a transportation dictatorship. The state has decided that transportation is the same as cars, and that you do not get around if you do not do so by car. So the vast majority of state money spent on transportation is spent on building up the car transportation infrastructure.

What would it take us to get to a transportation democracy? It would take the division of that transportation funding into equal amounts, so that as much state money was spent on developing bicycle trails that was spent on car things, that transit funding equaled highway funding, and that pedestrian amenity funding was the same as that spent on car infrastructure (by the way, the city is fixing sidewalks around my block now, which is great, but they are billing the work to the homeowners. Why does the city fund street repairs through the general fund and charge homeowners for sidewalk repairs? Because that is how cities act in the transportation dictatorship.)

If we had a real transportation democracy, we would be able to make real choices. If we requested that our government spent equal amounts on cars, transit, bikes and walking, we would have a wonderful pedestrian transportation system. Biking would be a great way to get around. Transit would get you where you needed to go. But if we gave car transportation the same funding as the other modes, we would have a pretty poor car transportation system.

That is because car transportation costs so much more than all those other methods. That is why no other nation in the world has built as intense a car transportation system as we have. And a car transportation system is the least sustainable - it deteriorates the fastest.

A real transportation democracy would relegate car transportation to a fairly minor role, because it wouldn't be able to compete with the other modes given equal funding.

Let's get away from the transportation dictatorship and start building transportation democracy.

freeway bridge collapse

I was sitting in my Northeast Minneapolis backyard when I heard all the sirens. Then I started getting calls from my family in Montana and California to find out if I was alright. Then I turned on the TV and saw what was happening not far from from where I was, and very close to where I work. If I hadn't taken off work early to get ready to leave town the next day, I probably would have heard it fall.

It was very out of body to see all those familiar places on CNN, and it is stranger yet to see them now, a few hundreds miles away.

It felt odd to be leaving Minneapolis at this time of community coming together to mourn and rescue and recover. But I had my plane ticket. I left the next morning for a trip to Montana to visit my father and sister. As the number 17 bus slowly drove across the Third Avenue bridge, I was looking down the river just as everybody else on the bus was to see the disaster. All I could see was what I couldn't see. I could see the 10th Avenue bridge completely. Before, it was always blocked by the 35W bridge, which just wasn't there.

A woman on the bus on her cell phone was giving the play by play to the person on the other line. She talked as if she was seeing the horrible tragedy of it, but all I could see was its absence.

I took the train down to the airport and as I took off I tried to lean over to see the collapsed bridge but it was all too small compared to the rest of the city all around it.

Even if it was impossible to see from up high, that bridge was huge and important and of course it will be rebuilt, but I also have to think about what might happen if we decide not to rebuild it. When the Embarcadero freeway crashed down in San Francisco sixteen years ago, that city chose not to rebuild what was there. Instead they made a wide leafy boulevard with a streetcar line down the middle of it.

There was a time when 35W didn't cut its canyon thru the city, and I believe that there will a day when it will be all just a memory. Maybe we should see the bridge collapse as a reason to rethink our city's transportation system. San Francisco realized that it could still function without that one freeway. The structure had to fall down before they could see that.

Maybe we could do something different and better, something that memorializes the tragedy rather than effaces it with a brand new 8 lane freeway bridge. Maybe we could do something that treads a little lighter on the world and builds community, something involving transit and bikes and walking. Maybe the riverbanks and gravity and everything else is trying to tell us something, and we ought to listen for a change, and act.

I Am Ethanol

What a brave new world we live in in which we plant corn with a tractor, fertilize it with petrochemicals so that this monocrop can make it, harvest it by burning more fuel, transport it to a distillery so that it can be fermented with more petroleum-derived energy, ship it to a gas station where it can be mixed with some more oil and make ethanol, and then pour it into a car so that 90+% of the energy can go to move the vehicle and less than 10% go to moving the person inside (based on a comparison of the weight of the car to the weight of the person inside it).

So here is my own version of ethanol. I eat food grown in the ground. Quite a bit of the vegetable matter I've been eating this summer I grow in my own garden. Then I directly use the energy from those crops to power my body so I can turn my pedals and ride my bicycle to get around.

I can grow the food in my graden without petrochemical fertilizers because I make compost from my own food waste, and because I get down on my knees to weed. I can ferment the vegetables inside my own body and break them down in my own stomach so I don't need a smelly huge ethanol plant to do that part. My stomach wall takes in the energy of the food and sends it to my muscles so they can turn the pedals of my bicycle. I don't need a heavy contraption of steel and plastic (more petrochemicals) to burn the fermented liquid into energy for transportation. And almost all the energy I create with my food-stomach-muscles goes to actually moving me. Just a little bit of the energy goes into moving the machine - my bicycle. My bike weighs quite a bit less than I do. Cars weigh quite a bit more than bicycles, and it takes so much energy to move a car that the person gets moved by just a small percentage of that ethanol energy.

So I think I do the enthanol thing a lot more efficiently than the state-subsidized ethanol industry does.

And it seems to me that we are pretty sad car addicts if we are so interested in moving cars around that we grow food to feed to them. We are spending valuable food on movement rather than on keeping people and other animals alive. That seems pretty crazy to me.

Car Castrastion

Here are two things I observed yesterday.

Somebody pulled up in his car next to my neighbor's house. Instead of getting out of his car and ringing the doorbell, he sat in his car and steadily honked his horn until a couple women told him to quit.

Late last night, when my girlfriend and I were walking the last couple blocks after we got off the last bus of the night, we noticed this car spending too long at the stop sign. When it drove forward, a man in the passenger seat dropped a string of lit firecrackers. They went off as we walked past, but the car had sped off into the distance.

These two episodes reveal to me with extreme clarity nothing but the laziness and cowardice of the guys doing these antics. They are so emasculated by their car that they have to act out from the inside of that shell. They can't talk or walk so they blap their horn. They can't interact with people so they throw firecrackers out of their car window.

These aren't men. These peas inside those metal pods are bits of giggling jelly. I do not think they would be that way if they didn't have that illusion of car shell invincibility. I think that if they had to face the world with no shell but the courage they had to make inside their own guts they would have the sense to not be assholes.

Car Sick

Before this past weekend, I had been in a car a total of three times so far this year. This weekend my sister, brother-in-law and their 3 year old daughter were here visiting and they rented a car for their stay. They were here for a wedding way out in a western suburb but spent most of the rest of the weekend with us.

Even tho cars are not really part of my lifestyle, we had one available for the weekend and it was used. It is amazing how seductive a car is when it is sitting on the street in front of your house and you have access to it. It really is a physical thing - if that car is there, your body almost wants it, maybe it even does want it, and wants to overdo it too.

The excuse was that with the three year old it was easier to just load all five of us in the car and go someplace rather than walk or take transit. And it was easier. My sister, who lives in Chicago, observed that Minneapolis felt much more car-centered than Chicago.

One thing I noticed by Monday, when my riding in their rented car was winding down, was how sick I felt. I felt sick and achy and knew that I was feeling car sick. It is easy to get queasy in a car, especially when you rarely ride in one.

There is something about the physical sensation of movement at a static body position. I think the body wants to move when it goes places - its natural response to inactivity during travel is to get a little nauseous.

I think most adults harden themselves to this car-nausea by their frequent time behind the wheel and over the wheels. It's like how that first cigarette might make you real sick, but the more you smoke the less sick you feel, and then your body starts to need those cigarettes. Car rides in isolation make you feel sick, but when you use one enough you harden yourself from the sickness, and then you become physically dependent on that car-movement.

I am glad to be back on my bicycle and getting around in my usual car-less manner. I feel much better already.

thirsty ground

When I was little I used to think about the hungry ground on rainy days. There was ground underneath the asphalt and concrete of streets and parkinglots and on a rainy day that ground couldn't drink the water like the exposed ground could. The rain water ran away, it ran off down the slope of the streets into storm drains and far away. Only where there were cracks could the ground drink up, and where it drank it grew weeds with roots that could slowly crack the street and parking lot into pieces, a slow Sampson, I called it.

The thirsty ground made me sad. That and so many other things made me revolt against the car culture that beats down on little kids and turns them into car-addicted adults.

I thought I was a little crazy to even think about such things as thirsty ground back then, but now we know all about stormwater runoff and impermeable surfaces and the problems that happen when all our rain water is diverted by our streets and parkinglots into lakes and rivers rather than seeping into the earth and refreshing the aquifers. Now we're trying to mitigate the problems that arise from all that asphalt by inventing permeable surfaces and engineering rain gardens.

Let that toddler wisdom out. Try to think how you thought about things before you only knew motion with cars. Let that thirsty ground drink. Get rid of a parking space, or the need for a parking space, today.