Dream 2: The Way We Commute
As I travel about the city, on foot, by bike, or on public transit, I regularly have a very appealling vision. I find myself imagining what life in the city would be like if there were no cars.
Just imagine sitting at outdoor cafes, newly enlarged to take advantage of all the extra space available now that the roads aren’t lined with parked cars, and enjoying your coffee and conversation without having to try to hear your friends over the din of roaring engines. Imagine being able to ride a bike without feeling (quite reasonably, on most streets) that you’re at risk of being mowed down at any moment by two tons of inattentively maneuvered steel. Imagine sitting on a comfortable train car on your morning commute, sipping tea and reading a good book, and arriving at the office relaxed and ready to face the day with optimism, instead of sitting in a car that’s creeping along the freeway at 20km hour, listening to universally dismal traffic reports, and arriving at the office tense, frazzled and ready for whatever other misery may arrive through the day.
I find that this is a particularly difficult thing to imagine for most urban, and especially suburban, people that I talk to. It’s not necessarily a lack of imagination that’s the problem, but negative imagination. People are imagining alright – they imagine what they think the phrase “public transportation” means, and they picture standing on a wet, mouldy bus next to a homeless psychiatric patient who smells of urine, being jostled back and forth as the bus continually accelerates and brakes. This is not necessarily an inaccurate scenario, but it’s not necessarily accurate, either. We do have buses like that, but forget that they don’t have to be like that. We’re provided with insufficient numbers of poorly designed buses by people who never ride them. The design of our public transit system is overseen by provincial government ministers who ride around town in limousines and SUVs. More imagination and committed resources, and less pandering to the billionaire owners of multiple car dealerships, and perhaps we’d start making some progress toward having a public transport system that people actually want to use.
We’re at an interesting point in history right now. The US government has already handed over some $40,000,000,000.00 to auto companies to bail them out and keep them from failing. And they are asking for billions and billions more. And what will come of this? We’ll have car companies that are – stable. That’s it. Oh, maybe we’ll get more hybrid cars and fewer Hummers on the market, but essentially, we’re in for more of the same. A government that is already trillions of dollars in debt is donating billions that it does not have to keep dinosaur businesses alive. It’s like bailing out the horse and buggy industry to keep it going. At the same time, they are asking auto-industry retirees to trade their future health care benefits for stock in the car companies. If I were a GM retiree, I’d be pretty leery of accepting pieces of paper that are almost certain to be worthless for health care.
The time of the private automobile is coming to an end, at least for the urban market, and a new order is coming to replace that tired old, destructive model. A model that is destroying our atmosphere, polluting our lands, encouraging war, ripping apart societies that have the oil to operate the machines, and generally making our cities less and less livable the more crowded they get with private, noisy, filthy, dangerous machines.
I have a more imaginative suggestion for Barack Obama, along with Stephen Harper and other western leaders. Instead of simply handing over all these billions to the auto companies in exchange for minor improvements in fuel efficiency, lets put this money to the most effective possible use. Let’s turn the whole industry on its ear and use it as an opportunity to shift the entire urban transportation paradigm. Let’s pay the car companies to stop simply making and selling cars, and pay them to build and operate a public transportation infrastructure like North America has never seen. Efficient, comfortable buses, streetcars, trams, and light rail for local transport. Rapid transit and conventional rail for longer and high speed routes. Build transit routes in cities so that no one need walk more than two block to access the system. It could be done.
In order to make this work, of course, cars would need to be gradually, but not too slowly, eliminated from city streets, starting with the downtown centres, and expanding in sections or belts to the external limits of cities. The effects of this would be monumental. We would become less insular and more social. Our housing would evolve to become more efficient, in terms of space, resources, and energy. Communities would become friendlier, more child friendly, safer. We would become much more attuned to our surroundings once we’re walking, cycling, skating, or looking out the windows of the bus while someone else looks after the driving than we do when we’re sitting behind a wheel staring at the bumper ahead of us, or trying to avoid being killed at every moment. We’d all relax, and the gods know, we all need to relax a little.
There is precedent for this sort of public works initiative. The Depression of the 1930s was the spark for all kinds of public works initiatives that provided new infrastructure and put people to work when there was little work to be had. We can keep auto workers employed, put more people to work building, maintaining and operating this new infrastructure, and generally end up with a quality of life improvement of which it is difficult even to imagine. But imagine we must.
One of the great things about imagination is that no action is required. We are not compelled to commit to decisions. All we have to do is sit down for fifteen minutes and imagine, just imagine, what life would be like if our streets were car free, and yet it actually becomes easier and more pleasant to get around. That’s all. I’m not asking you to get rid of your car, walk 20 miles to work, or sit in a bus seat that has a puddle in it. Just imagine. That’s it. Just imagine.
Just imagine!
Coping with Adversity
For the past week, I have been suffering from flu-like conditions that I apparently picked up secondhand from the current consort of my roommate. Such misery! My throat feels like ground glass when I cough or sneeze – not an infrequent occurrence – and I have plenty of aches of the head, neck, shoulders and, at times, the teeth. My nose is rubbed raw from blowing it and there is a disconcerting presence of phosphorescent liquids. More than you care to know, perhaps, but I’m sure it paints a picture of the discomfort.
Unpleasant as it is, though, one must remember that at any given time, someone, somewhere, is suffering more grandly. What better way to put one’s pain in perspective than to pay some heed to someone else’s suffering? With this thought in mind, I went to visit the Globe and Mail to see what tragedy might be unfolding toward which can focus my blurry vision.
There on the front page was a photo of Stephen Harper. This didn’t help. For the first time during my illness, I felt nauseous, as I always do when the words “Prime”, “Minister” and “Harper” are combined into a single, spirit-dampening triactor of unfortunate phraseology. The accompanying article contained text that showed the words “Harper” and “Mulroney” in the same sentence. In my rich fantasy life, I often think of Harper and Mulroney in a single sentence, but usually the fantasy includes a cell in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines shared with “Mom” Boucher, with “Mom” taking more of a “Dad” role after lights out. But this isn’t the way that I meant to make myself feel better. Let’s move on.
It was the mention of Brian Mulroney that got me on track for feeling mildly empathetic. Not for Mulroney himself, of course. It’s Mulroney’s “spokesman”, Luc Lavoie, the guy that has to stand up and publicly proclaim the depth of Mulroney’s innocence and the peerless extent of the great man’s unquestionable virtue. Maybe it pays well, but what a shitty job!
I’ve been contemplating a return to the workforce of late, which means that I’m actually going to have to go out and do a little self-marketing, something I never enjoy and therefore find it a difficult activity to embark upon. In my darker moments, I sometimes fear that, in some sort of perverse path-of-no-resistance, I’ll end up being employed as the counter boy at the New York Fries outlet in The Mall. Have you ever been there?
Many years ago, I was a shoe salesman in the previously mentioned mall, an occupation that I despised thoroughly. Whenever I was feeling like I could sink no lower than to be on my knees stuffing a size nine foot into a size six shoe while trying not to look up the skirt that was splayed open before me, I would take a walk down to the food fair and watch the pimply-faced kid behind the counter, shaking the grease off the potatoes for probably less than minimum wage. He’d dump them in a paper bag, collect some money, and turn back to make more, all while a frumpy middle-aged manager yelled at him if he stopped moving for a second. And then I would go back to the shoe store, feeling a just little less miserable.
But I think I’d rather work in the fry shop than be Luc Lavoie. The poor bastard!
Resurfacing, at my peril
My previously announced ambitious resolve to spice things up in this blog has, you may have noticed, failed to amount to anything other than unexplained silence. Despite some valiant attempts (my hard drive is full of half-finished screeds on related subjects), I tried to write something about the current political situation in Canada, but was sent into a state of depressed anxiety from which I am only now emerging. It’s only thanks to my concentrated avoidance of all sources of “news” for the past couple of weeks, as well as beach yoga, meditation and several milligrams of dexedrine that I can even broach the topic now.
After all this time, I still can’t get used to the phrase “Prime Minister Harper”. It sounds completely implausible, like “certified organic veal”, or “hamburger milkshake”. The fact that Canadians are now, if the published opinion polls are at all reliable, preparing to give Harper a majority (the Canadian equivalent to naming him a four-year Tsar) seems inconceivable. However, Harper’s rise from backwater knee-jerk to PM is hardly an isolated phenomenon. It all seems like just another piece of evidence that the free world is marching lock-step through something resembling democratic fascism, toward who-knows-where.
‘Fascism’ is one of those terms that often cause us to lump the speaker of the word into the category of “loony conspiracy theorist”. In fact, as soon as it appeared here, you may have rolled your eyes and clicked on your CNN bookmark to get the latest breaking news on Paris Hilton’s in vitro fertilisation using Julius Caesar’s sperm, reconstituted from a dried drop of blood found on a dagger in the Vatican by Pope Ratzinger while he was burning documents in the basement. (If white smoke comes from the chimney, the next pope will once have been a Pol Pot supporter). Fascism is now thought of as an archaism, a historical word, one that refers to forgotten and irrelevant historical incidents, such as the second world war. Look around, though. Retro is the new old, the old new. The lines blur between what is, what was, and what will be.
I can see that this is in danger of going off on another erratic tangent, so let’s get back to the important point to be made – the trouble with Harper. It’s his bloody hair. It looks like the sort of molded polyester rug favoured by midwest American preachers who run around complaining about fags, abortion and affirmative action by day but spend their nights snorting crystal meth while gang-banging transexxual teenagers in seedy motel rooms. The look isn’t alleviated at all by the way his face has apparently been waxed, like a cadaver that’s to be put on display. He has ‘Jim Bakker’ written all over him.
The thing is, I don’t really think Harper is anything at all like Bakker or his ilk in real life. Oh, he’s probably got that rake-up-ass uptightness typical of someone accustomed to living in the wealthy, sterile part of suburbia. If he had any election-losing skeletons in his closet, he wouldn’t have gotten this far. No, I think the hair is a well-crafted campaign technique that some advisors from the Republican National Committee – hired by his forward-thinking handlers from the oil industry elite long ago, well before his National Citizens Coalition days – in order to seduce a certain segment of the Canadian population, establishing a base from which to snatch power from the the industrial elite back east. Sounds conspiratorial, doesn’t it? Don’t be too quick to discard conspiracy theories, though. They can’t all be wrong. Most of them probably are wrong, of course. I don’t think a Jewish conspiracy blew up the World Trade Centre, I don’t think those jet streams in the skies above are the fluoride of the 21st century (though they may ultimately prove to be the DDT of it, in environmental terms), and I doubt that the moon thing was faked (though perhaps overmilked for mysteriously spent trillions in tax dollars since). Just think of past conspiracies that effected some sort of change: Caesar, the Putsch, Trotsky. ‘Beware the ides of March’ probably sounded a little kooky at one time too. If there is a likely conspiracy today, I suspect it is a conspiracy to instill automatic doubt about conspiracies in the minds of the population. Manufactured doubt is perhaps the most successful political ploy in modern times.
Well, that’s enough politics for now. It’s simply too hard on my nerves to acknowledge the reality of this world in which I was cursed to have been deposited. Perhaps I should join the Raelians. At least I hear they get a lot of sex while they’re waiting for the mother ship to arrive.
Let’s talk about more mundane annoyances, like pets. On Monday evening I came home to find that my cat had been treed by two dogs. The dogs are owned by a one-eyed crazy gringo up the street. There’s a joke that this town attracts “the most wanted and the least wanted”. The word is that this guy’s a dual citizen. Anyway, apparently the cat had wandered beyond the fence and been pursued by these two hell-hounds. It was dusk and my cat was in a neighbour’s yard, way up in a palm tree, sitting on a clump of coconuts. I threw rocks at the dogs and got rid of them, but the cat wasn’t coming down. I retrieved its food dish and shook it below the tree, but despite its efforts, the cat could not get below the coconuts to grasp the trunk and climb down. It then sat there crying pitifully. Assuming it would find a way down when it got hungry enough, I went back in the house to make dinner. By the time I’d eaten, the cat was still in the tree crying. Right below the coconuts was a palm frond that arched past the cat and then down to me. In an effort to get the cat to walk down it, I grabbed then end and pulled, which snapped the base of the frond, without it breaking off, and made a nice little ladder down. The cat walked two feet along the frond toward me, then stopped and started crying again.
It was dark by now and I was getting strange looks from locals cycling home from the salt mines. Apparently a man wearing a headlamp and a pair of underwear who is holding a palm frond and talking to a tree in a strange tongue is worth gawking at. The sight grew even more absurd when, finally fed up, I started jumping up and down, shaking the palm until the damn cat fell off of the branch, sending it tumbling into a patch of hibiscus below. It couldn’t have been too shaken up, as it was back at the food dish in the house before I even had the gate closed. Of course, it was dark and the cat is black, so my audience never saw that cat. Just another crazy gringo. (For all I know, I’ve been dubbed a dual citizen too).
Eventually, I went to bed and left the cat outside, as I always do, to avoid having it climbing all over my head while I try to sleep. In the morning when I open the door, the cat always comes running, expecting to be fed. Not this time. I looked around, but couldn’t see it, and for one exciting moment I thought perhaps it had been eaten by a boa constrictor, until I heard a noise in the lavatory. I looked in to see that the cat had caught a large rat. The rat was apparently dead and the cat was sitting beside it contentedly. Still half asleep and unprepared to deal with this, I went off to make my tea. A short time later I returned to find the cat tossing the rat into the air, and a bit of rat blood was now making an appearance. Somewhat queasily, I went off to find the hose and an appropriate carcass removal implement. When I got back with my tools, the cat was sitting outside the door licking its paws. Inside, the shower looked like Charles Manson had dropped by. The shower floor and walls were covered with blood, and around the toilet was strewn various organs and entrails and the decapitated abdomen. I found the head behind. Much hosing and cursing ensued.
You may think this a bit repulsive, but given the choice of Harper’s hair or the rat, I’ll take the rat. At least I know I won’t be looking at it for four more years.
