February 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28

February 22

Living my entire adult life in Minneapolis without a car I am not sure I ever felt like a first class citizen. The transportation system here has always been so based on the car. Compared to other cities, Minneapolis residents seem to be much more fixated on getting around only in cars. The language of the daily news and of daily life is always that you should "drive to" or "drive by" something. The perpetual neighborhood problem is always parking, and nobody can seem to see that if you have a parking problem, the problem is not the parking, the problem is the cars. Every year prior to this year I felt the burning need to travel to some place that had rail transit just to feel some dignity in my transportation.

When the Hiawatha Line opened last year, it was the first time I think that I truly felt like a citizen of Minneapolis. I felt then that I had an importance equal to that of all the drivers and parkers in town. Now I had a first class amenity that met my transportation needs. The train still thrills me like that every time I see it go by, even tho I do not ride it every day because it does not run anywhere near my house.

Buses work, but the ways they work are much more limited. They have a certain utility about them, but not a dignity. The ride is bumpy and a little tight. The seats are narrow and so are the aisles. If you are stuck standing on a bus, you have to hold on for your dear life. A crowded bus can take a long time to make its run because it has to stop so often. A crowded bus sometimes does not move that much faster than walking.

When the car companies took over the streetcar companies, they replaced the streetcars with "modern" buses because they knew that people wouldn't want to ride the buses as much as they would want to ride the streetcars, and that they would eventually move to private cars. At one time supposedly rational people thought that public transit would even go away some time in the future as everybody eventually moved to getting around in private cars. The writer William Howard Kunstler said that buses in the U.S. may as well have signs over their doors that say "Losers Enter Here," because that is how buses are thought of in this culture.

A train on rails moves smoothly. If it has signal priority or its own right of way, it moves quickly. It is more comfortable to sit and stand on a train than on a bus. The sounds of the train present a more interesting transportation experience.

But above all, a train ride has a sense of dignity. It is not a last ditch transportation system, it is a transportation that can move paupers and kings too. You don't have to stand on the street corner like a prostitute, you can wait for the train at a station instead. You have room to walk and some room above your head. You are a human being on the same level as many other human beings. You are not the something less than human which a bus ride can sometimes make you feel.

I am so glad that we have at least one train line here. Now I can feel like a citizen of my city.

February 23

In the newspaper yesterday was an article about a woman who had taken on the task of walking every street in the city of Minneapolis. Being that there are over a thousand miles of streets and she only does a few blocks at a time, the task is taking her years to do.

One of the comments that she made in the article resounded quite strongly with me. She said that in all her walks she sees so few other people walking. She blamed this lack of pedestrians on people watching TV instead of walking, but I would blame it more on cars.

I walked for an hour yesterday. I did some errands in my neighborhood, then walked to the edge of downtown to the post office to mail a package to a friend, then I walked back across the river to work. On the walk I saw a few people standing at bus stops, but I did not see another pedestrian until I had actually crossed the Hennepin bridge over the Mississippi and reached the edge of downtown, where the post office is. And in all the time I walked downtown, across two bridges and in and out of the post office, I saw less than ten pedestrians. I can really only picture four, but there might have been a couple more a little further away from me. This was in the late morning of a sunny day, around 11 o'clock. It was almost shocking when somebody did pass me, like a man and a woman I saw walking across the bridge when I was almost at work. They were dressed very nicely; they seemed to be of a social strata higher than that which I usually see walking across the bridge. The other pedestrians I saw looked like they were poor people.

When I was leaving work last night, I was offered a ride and turned it down, once again. I told the wonderful person who had offered me the ride about my attempt to not even ride in a car this year, and that I hadn't been in a car for almost two months. He didn't say anything about this, this thing I said was "my own personal Kyoto."

I still couldn't do the reply I always want to do. When somebody offers me a ride, I want to offer them the chance to walk and take transit with me. I always chicken out, tho, when I get that ride offer, because, after all, an offer like mine is crazy in this car-centric world. It is crazy when you are the only one, or one of the very few doing something, so I guess I am the crazy one. But what looks crazy thru my eyes is that so many people have given up on walking, that so many people are so crazy dependent on their cars that they have left their whole city behind, that they have closed themselves off from it in service of their automobile.

February 24

Last night as I watched a tow truck slowly slide up the pie plate of the car it was capturing, the lights for night and the ramp, and the chains and the slow beep beep as it pulled the car up from its front, I thought of the bizarre superstructure necessary to make the car culture work. Parking and towing are just a small part of that network of errors. There are places to park and places not to park, but mostly, there are places to park.

In order to make car transportation work, you need about seven parking spaces for every car. To use a big car to get around, you need a place to put it every where you go. You need parking at home and at the job. You need parking at shops you might go to in between, and even the ones you might not go to, just in case. You need parking at the places of entertainment and recreation, and parking spaces where you park your vehicle to get on another vehicle, a transit parkinglot, or parking by your jet ski lake.

In order to make car transportation work, you need so many spaces for every car. And that's about how many parking spaces there are in the world, or at least in this town, where the most underutilized real estate is kept empty for parking.

In the twin cities there are about 1.25 cars per person. So it is safe to say that in this city there are more parking spaces than people, and probably several times the number. Parking most likely overwhelmingly outnumbers the people who try to control it. If the parking spaces ever chose revolution, we would be the loser. They would win from sheer numbers. Maybe they already have.

So the parking spaces outnumber the cars by a times sign, and the cars outnumber the people who think they control them. We have already lost. We have drowned ourselves in the car support system.

We have turned our cities into big empty ashtrays, for that is what a parking lot truly is, it is a place to put the leftovers of a trip that may or may not happen.

Ten years ago when we bought our house, I began a little experiment. Our house had a parking pad in back big enough to park two or more cars. I took the sledgehammer to it; I started breaking it up to build a garden. I could do this because my household does not have a car.

When I started pounding out those parking spaces to free up my backyard for flowers, I felt a wave of ecstasy that couldn't be coming just from my feelings. Maybe the land below that I was now unlocking from the shadows of its asphalt prison was vibrating a signal up into my bones to say thank you.

Oh, I wish I were brave enough or foolhardy enough or wise enough or good enough to be a guerrilla de-paver, to roam the night with my trusty sledgehammer. I wish I was human being enough to take my sledgehammer to all the parking lots and streets, to smash them up under the cover of secret night- time. I wish I was species enough, cellular enough, organic enough, that I could smash up all the asphalt in the world, bit by bit, to let the trapped ground beneath breathe free, to let it finally drink its rightful rain.

February 25

I am off on an adventure this morning, and leaving early for a great long journey on public transportation. I am going to a conference on the other side of St. Paul, and it is a long bus ride to take me there. I was offered rides by co-workers, but I will get there on the transit system. But also now my co-workers, or most of them, now know about my harebrained attempt to resist the temptations of the car this year, its lure, its glory shine, its siren sound and smell and misery tires, and do not even bother to ask me if I want a ride, unless they want to get my goat.

I do not know exactly how far it is that I will need to go. I do not know what my destination looks like, for I have never been there before. I will have a walk a ways after I leave the last of three buses. I know from the bus information that I will have to walk half a mile as the last stage of my journey.

My commute may take longer than an hour and a half, and at one point I have a twenty minute wait for the next bus transfer. But I will bring things to read, to sink into, to fall into rhythm, and I will start this adventure, my conquest of a new place on the magic carpet of public transportation.

February 26

Today is one more day of my long bus trip to the conference. There were many things that I noticed in the trip yesterday. Out on the east side of St. Paul, near where the city ends and the suburbs begin, all the sidewalks are perfectly clear of snow and ice. There was no a patchwork of some clear and some icy - it was fairly continuously clear. And this in a place the sidewalks are probably used far less than they are used in my neighborhood. It is not that people keep the sidewalks clear so they can walk on them, they just must keep them clear to keep things tidy.

In St. Paul it seems that public transit is not taken as seriously as it is in Minneapolis, where is not really taken that seriously either. In St. Paul it seems to me that the class lines on the bus are drawn even more firmly than in Minneapolis. In Minneapolis I do see a mix of classes of people on the bus, at all times, poor and middle class and sometimes fairly wealthy folks. I see folks in raggedy clothes and folks in night coats. I smell folks with an odor and folks with perfume.

In St. Paul I was seeing mostly people of poorer classes. I also saw fewer white people on the buses than I see in Minneapolis, and this despite the fact that St. Paul has a lower percentage of people of color as residents than Minneapolis does. On my bus back west into St. Paul last night I was the only white person aboard.

I found out later that the bus I was on in St. Paul was on detour. In Minneapolis they would have a sign about this detour on every bus stop pole, and they would have had the driver announce it so you would know, but in St. Paul there was none of that. I had to ask the driver why he was going the wrong way, and where that detour would take us.

I did not think there was a place where transit could be taken less seriously than it is in my town, Minneapolis, but there is a place, and it is right next door. I felt transit rich about my own town in comparison. I felt transit pride about my own town in relation.

February 27

Riding the bus during the day, particularly in the morning when the sun is shooting thru the trees like gunfire, the bus is all aimed at the outside. The inside of the bus is the outside, and the riders are quiet and have their heads slightly tilted in the direction of the windows.

The trees do not stop when they get to the bus, the street and the sidewalks could be rubbing by your shoulder. When the bus pulls up to the corner, you could be right on the wall of a building. The outside is as close as here, and when you look outside to ponder, your thoughts get combed by the trees and the telephone poles.

If anybody on the bus is talking in the morning, you might pay more attention to them because the ride is so quiet. There is not as much to talk about, tho, because the day is still so young and untested. And in the morning more people get on the bus on their own and without a partner or friend, without somebody to talk to except for themselves (which does not stop many). And maybe they do not see somebody on the bus they may recognize when they pass down the aisle, if their eyes can even see the people past their quest for an empty seat.

Riding the bus at night is quite different. Because the lights inside the bus are so strong, the outside turns much darker. You might as well have just closed the curtains on the windows, for you can barely even see the outside past the reflections.

Only a few streetlights and commercial signs get all the way thru the windows, so at night the interior of the bus is everything, the inside of the bus is where the whole world is at. Even if you try to look out the windows you may be surprised to see that the inside of the bus out there too, reflected on the black, reflected on the windows.

Riding the bus at night, most riders have their head slightly tilted toward the aisle. There is more talk to be heard on the bus, the swearing and the stories, the exchanges of useless information, the babble of the day's experiments or the one little stymie annoyance that somebody has to keep cursing about

At night many riders get on with somebody they know. They are traveling teams, and they have travels and other things to talk about, and so they talk. If you are one of the ones riding alone, sometimes that ride at night can be threatening, for the talk is loud behind your back and if those words were turned to actions some throats might just get slit.

Riding on the bus in night and day is like night and day. If your ride is long and you have to transfer a few times, you just might notice how brilliant an adventure it all is.

February 28

The trees flicker

The low sun thru the bus window

Turn my book into a movie

The engine jerks just a little forward

The yell inside stops the driver

One more person wants on the bus

The man with the wheelchair wife

Pulls her away from the falling ramp

With the hood of her jacket

That other lady won't stop nagging him about it

A new rider gets on

Every head turns to look

You can hear the clicks

From all the snap judgments

See that insect car

Pull right into the bus path

Listen to the bus horn roar

You can tell it is morning

Bu the way the bus brakes

Sigh like exhaustion

Every head in every row

Does the same rolling evasive boxing move

Pothole

Someone pulls the rope too hard

It clatters on the window

The tiny ding still pulls the bus to the corner

It may be madness

It may be entertainment

That guy in the back seat

Just raves out his rap

The light inside is now so bright

Look back, look front

You are the last passenger left

On the bus

March 1

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