The conversation I had with my friend brought to mind a local talk show, the hostess of which threw grenades at the city’s mayor a couple of years ago because – according to her logic – he hates cars. He wants to spend millions and millions of dollars on bike paths and streetcars and light rail tracks and stations. His agenda, said she, is to force public transportation on as many people as possible whether they want it or not. Like our then-newly elected president, our mayor is a Socialist, she proclaimed. He’s a Marxist. Everything the mayor does and says is linked in ways large and small to his deep-seeded hatred of cars. He wants to model Portland after Amsterdam. On and on she went.
Because he’s a public official, the mayor must have felt pressure to participate in the third-grade level of discourse (as so many left-leaning politicians do) by denying, repeatedly, that he hates cars. He said that he simply believes there are many other modes of transit – buses, bikes, skateboards – and that he thought it would behoove the city of Portland, and the region as a whole, to accommodate as many of them as possible.
Since I am not running for public office and do not plan to ever do so, I will say what the mayor perhaps felt he could not: I suppose that technically I don’t hate cars, but I do hate what they represent. We’ve built our economy around them. We’ve subsidized them and their operating costs for well over half a century now. For their sake, we have sacrificed what was perhaps one of our few shots at national redemption – our oldest, grandest cities – and replaced them what I think is our most noxious innovation: Almost every city in the U.S. is surrounded by mile after mile of pure shit suburban construction accessible mainly – and in many cases exclusively – by obscene stripes of pavement that stretch out until they disappear beneath the horizon. Along with the cities, we’ve let the rail system deteriorate into a severely broken calamity. Like riding a bike or a bus, traveling by train has been blasted by the conservatives as a European thing to do, and to their way of thinking – which I fail, absolutely, to comprehend – that means it’s undesirable.
What I really hate about cars, though, can likely be attributed to the marketing team. It seems to me that at some point it was discovered, or observed, that more people were spending more and more time in their cars. According to my logic, the best solution at that point would have been to work toward reducing that time by investing in the cities and the transit infrastructure. Instead, the cars started getting bigger, and, like many of the people who sit in them, they’ve been growing steadily for many years now. It is no longer even noteworthy when a vehicle roars past my house that is bigger than my kitchen. I guess what the marketing team set out to do was not to not reduce the hours people spend stranded behind the wheel but to make the vehicles feel less like a car and more like home and, as usual, the marketing team succeeded. So, to make it possible for drivers to tend to other business while they’re driving, some of the best engineering minds around are hard at work not on coming up with new ways to consume resources more wisely or to reduce the volume of toxins belched into the air we are all going to breathe sooner or later, but on state-of-the-art air bags. If you hit someone head on, don’t worry: You’re safe. And so are your children. And your hound dogs.
But those are just my opinions, and while I happen to think I’m right, I don’t expect anyone to agree with me. In terms of axing the Tri Met pass from the benefits package for state employees, on the other hand, there are a couple of facts that hold their own against the right wingers’ tantrums about Amsterdam.
The first is that by eliminating a benefit that can be taken advantage of on a pre-tax basis, the disparity between one end of the income scale and the other expands. Number two: There is a parking garage close to the building where my friend works. The monthly fee for parking there and the monthly fee that state employees will now pay for a Tri Met pass are similar enough that there is no longer much financial incentive to use public transportation, so my guess – and it is only a guess – is that two conditions will change. First, there will be less money in the checking accounts of state employees who work in the Portland area. And second, there will be more of them driving their cars to and from work.
Which brings me back to the radio hostess. In addition to taking pot shots at the mayor, she loves to attack public employees and their lavish benefits packages and she loves to blame public transportation for pretty much every problem in the area. At the same time, she loves her SUV, and she loves to complain about how backwards the prevailing mindset in Portland is because the roads on which she drives her SUV have not been widened to the extent that she thinks they should be. And now, thanks to the fervor against public institutions and those who operate them – a fervor for which she is one of the most ardent cheerleaders – she can now share the streets and highways of Portland with even more vehicles. Even though having more cars on the road will only impede her “right” to burn as much fuel as she can afford as she blasts across the suburbs of Portland, I guess she and her compatriots really showed the public employees on this one.
