Like Jello Sez, Become the Media

Since both the Seattle Weekly and The Stranger have declined to print this spiffy op/ed piece I wrote over a month ago, I decided to take the Virtual World into my own hands and steer it toward self-publishing. Here's my piece:

MASS TRANSIT
By Melinda Murphy

I recently spent a month and a half toting a backpack while touring a sizeable chunk of Australia, via planes, trains and buses. After reluctantly returning to the States, I moved from Reno, Nev., to Seattle, the emerald jewel of the Pacific Northwest.

My former hometown, Reno, Nev., is a dusty, boom-n-bust ‘burg that developed epic traffic problems around 1992, when the main thoroughfares started funneling four times the cars they were designed to handle. Now, belatedly and at a staggering cost, the city is submerging its downtown railroad tracks, because the trains shut down north-south traffic, while preventing ambulances, police and firefighters from responding to calls on the other side of the busy freight line. This will be an even bigger inconvenience when Nevada’s old nemesis, the Department of Energy, starts using that same freight line to ship high-level nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain … right through downtown Reno. And I’m not even going into what it’s like for people who have to commute to work downtown.

Although I did a brief stint in Los Angeles in 2002, I was "gobsmacked" by Seattle’s glaring shortcoming: the traffic.

Prior to seeing Oz and its wonders, especially Sydney (beachfront property for 4 million people), I spent one month in London, England. Casting nationalism aside to visit other post-industrial environs makes one fact neon bright: cities and automobiles go together like oil and water. And nobody truly excels at mixing these two like America, originator of that concrete flower: urban sprawl.

Cars are bad for countless reasons, among them:

They are THE most expensive form of transportation, costing us earthlings in everything from maintenance, insurance and oil to the air we all breathe.

Cars are also No. 1 in carnage. Freeway accidents killed 42,815 in 2002, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics’ website. Half of those fatalities involved passenger cars, which averaged 22,400 deaths a year since 1975. "Light trucks" killed 4,856 people in 1975 and a whopping 12,182 in 2002. Compare that to the 16,371 people who died from AIDS last year -- including many who may have been infected years before -- and it is clear that cars are deft killers.

They account for a lot of stress, which equals high blood pressure, road rage, etc. My dad had his first heart attack while behind the wheel of his antique Mercedes in Monterey, Calif., during the evening traffic snarl.

Finally, there’s something abysmally alienating about them. Viewed from the confines of a Dodge Intrepid, Cadillac Escalande, Ford Escort, or what-have-you, life’s like that freaky 80s punk song, "Here in my car, I can do anything …" Except interact with the environment, other than to run over a stray pet or sideswipe a parallel parker. You’re in a metal box, which, despite millions in advertising, is still like a coffin. The spring breeze, the gamboling Labrador and the flitting butterflies are all OUT THERE.

This must be terribly esoteric information for the majority of Americans, rather than just a short Internet search away. On Dec. 1, 2003, Newsweek ran a horrific report delegated to page 49, behind a gas card ad. "Three for the Road" examined one Yuppie couple and their burning need for three cars. And their teenager is only 13. One car is for commuting, the other is for shopping and a third is the "date car." What, they don’t have a master bedroom for that? The report gleefully said cars now outnumber licensed drivers. The Yuppie’s justification? Their "friends hadn’t said anything (about) the excessiveness."

I don’t know if it was luck or deliberate design, but the original architects of cities such as London, Paris and New York weren’t terribly impressed with automobiles, at least not enough to scrap their rail lines and subway plans. These rail lines became the skeletons for the muscular metropolises erected on them.

The myth of the American car, the eternally sophomoric fawning over restored Chevy Bel Airs, and customized high-rise pickups have made our cities un-navigatible and, in air-pollution sinks such as East Los Angeles or Dallas-Fort Worth, literally unlivable.

Need to get from Stratford-upon-Avon to Hammersmith in London? Board the Central Line. An express train makes it in 18 minutes across the girth of metro London. That’s compared to one to two hours spent up top, on the pavement, among enraged English cabbies and lumbering double-deckers.

Want to go from downtown Sydney to picturesque, sea-swept Manly? Hop on a ferry and you’re there in 20 minutes, while enjoying one of the cleanest, fastest and most beautiful ferry systems in the world. Entire suburbs were built in Sydney after WWII around ferry routes, not the other way around.

All this while Seattle dilly-dallies over the old monorail debate, the only thing that might cure what ails us.

When I first laid eyes on Seattle’s skyline, it was marred by the cement tangle of the I-5 southeast of downtown. To me, most U.S. cities now look like sprawling tract houses; lacking foundations, but with dirt floors that will disappear during the next natural disaster.

Indeed, our entire country’s infrastructure is much the same, ready to drift downstream in the next flood. The motto for most cities in the western U.S. ought to be, There’s no better plan, than no plan at all.


Peace,

-- Mz M.