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Jan 22

The cars were slipping and sliding around yesterday as we got six inches of snow. They will be slipping and sliding around today. It will take a few days to plow all the streets and roads for them.

Who ever thought that basing the Minnesota transportation system on the traction of rubber tires on asphalt was just not thinking.

Yesterday the trains in the area had no trouble getting around in the snow. Their steel wheels cleared a path for them on the rails. Who ever thought that dismantling the streetcar system in favor of vehicles that depend on the traction of rubber wheels on asphalt was just not thinking about winter.

It is an obsession and it is so costly. All the work and fear to keep roads and streets passable for cars in winter. All the salt and chemicals that must be layered on the surface to melt the snow and ice. The complex procedures needed to scrape hundreds of miles of streets clear in a few days, before another snow falls.

A transportation system based on rail makes much more sense for Minnesota. In the days of streetcars, major streets were plowed by the streetcars themselves. They cut right thru the snow. With the light rail line now running, it is easy to see how well this works. All the street around the rails has to be cleared and scraped down to the surface with multiple passes of plows, while the white coating of winter can stay on the part of the street around the rails and between them.

I woke up today, like I wake up after every large snowfall, to see that the snowplow has come by. The street I live on has no boulevard, no planting strip, so when the snowplow comes by it leaves behind hard packed snow on the sidewalk. Today the hard packed snow that the plow put on our sidewalk goes almost the entire width of the sidewalk. When I stop feeling angry and finish writing this, I will have to shovel that snow away.

This snow is very heavy and hard to shovel off the sidewalk. Neither my partner nor I drive, so we try to keep our sidewalk clear and shoveled for other pedestrians like us. So our sidewalk had been cleared last night, but now it is full of snow again, thanks to the plow. This happens to us every snowfall.

Some of the property taxes I pay go to the work of clearing snow off the streets. My taxes just shoveled all that snow from the street onto my sidewalk, and now I have to shovel it off.

Not everybody in Minneapolis drives. Twenty percent of the city's households do not have cars. Everybody in the city has the capacity to use sidewalks. You do not need a car to use a sidewalk. So it seems only just that the city should plow the sidewalks, and that the gas companies and the car companies s should have the job of clearing the streets. These companies can include the cost of clearing streets in winter in the price of their products, so that only people who use those products would have to pay for that service. While they did that, they could also include the price of traffic law enforcement, of the medical costs of automobile accidents, of the costs of building the roads and the streets themselves, and the costs of the environmental impacts of their waste byproducts.

Of course if that happened, using a car would get quite a bit more expensive. The costs of driving would closer approximate their true costs. That might make more people switch to walking, transit and biking to get around, which is how my partner and I get around. Only the extreme rich would be able to drive, if the cost of driving really included all the costs of driving. If all those other people gave up car driving, the U.S. military would have no reason to protect oil interests in Iraq and could go home, and the U.S. would be able to join the other nations of the world in taking serious steps to avoid any worsening global warming.

If that happened, we might just get a transportation system that really made sense for the weather we have here in Minnesota. We might just have to build an all-rail transit system.

January 23

A day after the heavy snow and the streets are fully passable for cars but sidewalks are a patchwork - some are nicely shoveled and clear and others are full of snow. As pedestrians we have to weave our way back and forth, sometimes walking in the cleared streets where the sidewalks are impassible.

At one apartment building the parkinglot is cleared down to the asphalt but they've left the long sidewalk that curves around the corner unplowed, unshoveled, in deep snow that show only the footprints of one person who decided to stay on the snow-covered sidewalk rather than curve into the clear street and walk with the cars. The people who manage that building, or at least the people in charge of shoveling it out, don't think a great deal about pedestrians. They care that tenants might be able to walk from their cars into the building, but they are obviously not so concerned with pedestrians who might have to walk past their building to get form point A to Point B.

When I see someone walk outside a house and directly into a car, it hurts me. I feel it in the gut. I wonder if that person feels the shame of that, the irresponsibility of that, the absurdity of that, the damn it all of that. Many people rarely use their front doors because their back door is closer to their car and they never leave their house but to go straight from house to car. This is so troubling to me. This is such a strange way of living. This is not normal. This is not how the majority of people live on earth. This is how the most selfish people live on earth.

We leave our house and walk three blocks to the bus stop. We have to walk that landscape that is shoveled in spots and not shoveled in other spots. We walk that narrow underutilized band next to the busy streets with huge cars carrying, for the most part, one person each. The cars slide around in that muck made by snow and sand and salt and shovel, and nobody inside those cars thinks about what a mess we have made with this intolerant form of transportation, how bizarre and unwieldly this way of life can be.

January 24

Standing near the Metrodome and waiting for a bus that is slow in coming, I look out at all the surface parking lots here. I remember when I first saw this area, almost twenty years ago, when the Metrodome stadium was new. I remember how there were many surface parking lots but few took up entire blocks like most of them do today. Instead, there were many grand old brick warehouses still standing from what was once a thriving warehouse district. Big strong buildings meant to last, they were, and in my first few years I saw them one after another demolished to make way for more surface parking.

What kind of a people would destroy their own buildings, buildings made with sweat and hard work, buildings made of materials that would withstand centuries, and leave behind a blank tar emptiness. I can understand destroying buildings to make bigger, grander buildings in their place; people have done that since they started building structures. But to tear them down and leave behind this cap for the living earth, this barren plain with only white stripes, is impossible for me to understand. What kind of greed could make people do that and not be upset at their wrongness, and not scream in pain for their blindness.

Cars do this to us. They make us destroy great things in service of their appetite for space and speed. They make us change our environments into ashtrays for their storage. They have made us pound such alien places out of our city in subservience to them. They require us to sacrifice our entire world and its future, just so we can go back and forth for a daily commute.

The bus does come and takes me away from this moon world of parking lots and to the movie I was headed to. A movie made not even sixty years ago, but one set in a world where nobody drives cars, where cars have not yet begun reshaping cities into such bland places. We can change again, we can go back, we can shrug off these cars, it is easy, I do it every day. We can get back to the real cause of life, to making cities that work for people and not for storage of these slick steel monsters.

January 25

It has been a month now since I last rode in a car. The night of Christmas day and Kristine and I were out in a place where there were no buses, her mother's house, so we accepted a ride home. I have not ridden in a car since then.

So when I say that I am trying to go a year without riding in a car, I am not saying a whole lot. I do not ride in cars very often. Last year I rode in cars maybe twenty times in all. This is very unusual for a resident of the United States. It is unusual, but it is not difficult.

I have heard a few political leaders say recently that one of the issues we need to deal with in the coming months and years is global warming. I have heard this both from national and local leaders. They say that we must do something, meaning government must take an action, and that it must take some action in the not so distant future. But it is the global warming that we have already done in the past that will still be accelerating world temperatures far into the future.

It is what we do now individually that should be most important, not what we must do as a government in the years ahead, or at some point in the coming year. We must stop our burning of fossil fuels now; we should have cut back years ago. And it is not all that hard. It is not that horribly difficult to start right now.

More than half of global warming gases come from transportation, so that would logically be a good place to start. Being that most people get around with single occupant cars, which work inefficiently and contribute more than their share, this should be a logical place to begin. But I hear nobody, politician or anybody else, telling people that they should go without cars this year, that they should get rid of their car as a way to fight global warming. Nobody at all is saying this.

It is not difficult. I have gone a month without riding in a car and I am in perfectly good condition. No giant foot has come out of the sky to squash my heresy. But it is also much easier for me, for I never even started.

I have never had a driver's license. I have never owned a car. A month without riding in car is not all that unusual to me. It is almost impossible to comprehend for most of the people I know, who cannot even think of going anywhere without first getting into their car.

It is not difficult to do, it is only difficult to get your mind around. It is possible not to drive in a car, not to have a car, not to contribute all that global warming. A small car will put 60 tons of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere in a single year. Just cutting back one car for a year makes a huge impact.

It is not easy to do without a car. I am living proof of that. It is time that more people became living proof of that. It is time that everybody became living proof of that. It is for the sake of our planet. It is the quickest way to deal with global warming now.

Jan 26

Why do I hate cars? Do I really hate cars? I do not hate cars, but I do hate how we use them.

A hundred years ago, it was not the case that everybody got around in a horse drawn carriage. Sometimes I get the impression that many people think this, that people think that before people rode cars they rode carriages, and that is how they made all their trips. But before cars took over, people mostly walked. Walking was the means of almost all transportation one hundred years ago.

There were streetcars, but they did not really emerge on the scene until the 1880's, just a couple decades before cars made their appearance. Streetcars allowed cities to spread out a little, but the changes they made were pretty slight compared to the changes made by car transportation. And with streetcars, walking was always part of the trip that you made.

Before cars, cities were compact so that people could get around by walking, and make almost all of the trips they needed by walking. And they did not have to walk very far to get what they needed. Only sixty years ago, within three blocks of my house, there were two hardware stores, a department store, several grocers, a movie theater, five bars, a bakery, and several restaurants. And that is in a neighborhood that nobody would have thought of as anything but a residential neighborhood. Most of the buildings around here are houses, and that is the way it was sixty years ago too.

The bars are still here, but most of the other businesses are gone. Most of the storefront buildings that housed them remain standing, tho some of those commercial buildings were demolished. Many of the storefronts that are still around have been converted to residential use, and a few are art galleries.

Sixty years ago you could get almost anything you needed within that three block radius from my house. Now you cannot. Now those small businesses are gone, and you have to make a much longer trip to get the things you need. Those businesses did not close because the people had all left, they closed because they couldn't compete against bigger businesses a little further away. Those bigger businesses had something else that the little storefronts tucked in between houses in my neighborhood did not have: parking.

I do not hate cars; I hate how they have taken over every single kind of trip. A car is a great tool for going distances of from 5 to 25 miles with a small group. For basic needs, it is more efficient to be able to walk a few blocks to a neighborhood store. For longer trips, it is more efficient to use some kind of mass transit. But because cars are used for every single trip, whether short or long, they have completely reshaped our cities to serve only them. Because cars are so misused and overused, our cities have been contorted into places that only work if you turn them with a car.

Because I live without a car, this situation makes my life quite a challenge. What would make it less a challenge is if more people, if most people, used their cars for only a few select trips, only for trips where using a car really made sense. If walking came back in style, many of those storefronts in my neighborhood could reopen as stores. If more people used transit for longer trips, we would have a transit system with more options and more frequent service. But most people have chosen the most wasteful and non-sustainable form of transportation for every single movement they have to make. This choice has turned cities into fairly unpleasant places. This is what I hate.

January 27

Thirty-seven U.S. soldiers and 11 other U.S. citizens died yesterday in Iraq. No weapons of mass destruction killed them because no weapons of mass destruction ever existed in Iraq in the first place. To get rid of the weapons of mass destruction was never the reason our military went to visit Iraq.

These people did not die yesterday to bring democracy to the Iraqi people, because bringing democracy to the Iraqi people was not the reason we went to war. The only democracy that the U.S. will allow in Iraq is a U.S.-approved democracy, which is no democracy. We did not go to Iraq to bring them an uncomfortable election watched by a superpower's occupying army. It would be silly to think so.

The reason we went to Iraq was clear to many people from the beginning. Our war policy showed the reason perfectly when U.S. troops first got to Baghdad and circled the Oil Ministry Building to protect it. The museums and libraries with all their priceless antiquities could go to the looters, but the black gold was suddenly under the best protection the Pentagon could provide.

All thru the U.S. invasion, special efforts went to protect the oil fields. Our army was not about to let the Iraqis set them on fire like they did at the end of the last war. The U.S. army was Johnny on the spot to protect the oil, which is the real reason we went over there to fight and die and blow up the place.

And oil is a very good reason to go to war, to spend $280 billion so far, to spend far more than 1,400 lives so far. Oil is a non-renewable resource. There is only so much of it left inside the planet, and a good percentage of the remainder is under the ground of Iraq. Great parts of the U.S. are only negotiable with cars, a form of transportation so wasteful that cheap oil is the only fuel that could ever make them grunt and vroom.

So every drive is a salute to the war in Iraq. Every trip in a car is the thing that makes this war so necessary. You show your support to the troops and their deaths and their bombing missions when you drive your large and wasteful vehicle. You blow their bodies in the air when you fire up your ignition.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe we are spending all that money and sacrificing all those lives just to bring democracy to the Iraqis. Didn't the British sacrifice many lives to bring democracy to us? Maybe that is not the way the American Revolution is traditionally viewed, but I wonder how many U.S. citizens really think about how absurd it is that a world power would go to war on a country to bring it democracy? Can they really believe that, or are they too blinded by their need for oil to detect the hypocrisy?

There is a real way you can show your opposition to this war. You can stop burning oil. The best way to do that is to stop driving a car. To stop accepting rides in cars. To distance yourself from the war economy, from the war calculus, from the war equation. Get out of the car and wash the blood off your body.

January 28

Where I live, the buses run every half hour. It is nice that they run, but half hour frequency has some real drawbacks.

Like yesterday. After waiting ten minutes after the time the bus should have come, I decided to just walk to work. As I walked along the bus route, I'd look back at each bus stop sign and check for a bus. Nothing. I saw little groups of people standing at some of the bus stops and waiting. Some of them had these strange helpless looks on as they'd stare in the direction that the bus was supposed to be coming from. I got all the way to the bus stop that I would have gotten off at, and still there was no bus. By then it was getting near the time the next bus would come, the one that ran thirty minutes later.

A bus must have broken down. When that happens, it means waiting at the bus stop for more than thirty minutes. Or walking, which was fine, and what I did.

One of the problems with thirty-minute bus frequency is that if a bus breaks down you wait a very long time for the next one. This happens to me at least a couple times a year. Because I live less than a half hour walk from the place I work, I usually walk if I sense that this has happened. This is actually the second time the bus I was waiting for broke down, or never came, this winter. The first time it happened the bus went by me right as I got to the bus stop I would have gotten out at. I made the same time, but I had to walk instead of taking a nice ride where I could read from a book.

Half hour frequency is not a good idea for an inner city bus service like the kind I take. It is typical that service runs much more often than that, like every ten minutes of so. The service in my neighborhood is infrequent because of funding and ridership. The state of Minnesota has been cutting funding for transit for as long as I can remember. And tho many people ride the bus in my neighborhood, not enough ride it to make the transit company think that we should have more frequent service.

Sometimes people feel sorry for me that I do not have a car, and offer me a ride. What would be better for me in the long run is, instead of offering me a ride, they would offer to ride transit more often. More riders mean more frequent service. Actually, when transit companies increase service frequency on a line, ridership does go up.

If the frequency on a transit line gets to a certain level, it makes sense to replace the bus with a transit vehicle running on rail. Everything gets more efficient then, partly because trains last a lot longer than buses do. Trains ride on smooth rails while buses bounce themselves to pieces on bumpy roads. Trains can also be powered by something other than fossil fuels.

The Minneapolis streetcar system was powered by a hydroelectric plant on the Mississippi River. The Calgary Light Rail system is powered by a wind farm. This is the way we should be getting around, not by burning fossil fuels in small inefficient cars. We should have a transportation system that gets people around, runs efficiently and safely, and uses renewable forms of energy. That is not going to happen as long as people want to stick with their individual selfish cars.

January 29

I had another long wait for a bus again yesterday evening. It was rush hour and I think I missed the bus I was aiming for. It must have come a few minutes early, because the bank clock told me that I was at the bus stop in time, and yet I had to stand there half an hour and wait.

I kept on thinking, "It is just a little late and will be coming round the bend any minute," but my powers of expectation made appear no bus with the right number to take me home. I kept on looking at the bridge where the bus would come from, and I saw other buses, but I mostly saw many other cars.

I had a lot of time to look at all the cars crowding Central Avenue. I played my old bus stop waiting game of counting the passengers inside them. I didn't have to count very high to get past any of them. I could have counted almost every single one without going over "one."

If you could make all those cars disappear from that crowded street so that all was left were the people inside, that snarled traffic street would look about as crowded as a baseball diamond in the middle of a pitcher's game. It would look pretty empty, which is how I feel when I look at a street full of that many cars for very long.

I see all those huge cartons holding just one egg inside. I think about all that oil burned for just a handful of people, for just a back and forth trip. It's not like all that oil is getting used up for real travel, it's being used up to stand still, to find out nothing else about the world except that one has to go to work every day to earn a living.

Every once in a while a bus would go by. Not my bus, but another bus. Being that it was rush hour, most of all of the buses were running pretty full. Some were standing room only. Each bus was carrying at least another lane of traffic, but in a much smaller space, with much less oil.

Each of those buses is a community too. Standing on the corner I could see the light inside. I could see that some people inside some of the buses were talking, and some were listening. It was so easy to compare that to all the small people inside their big cars, and how they were all looking forward. I wonder if the writers who imagined the first zombie movies got their idea looking at people driving in cars.

I am not really going anywhere with this essay today, but that's because I'm still standing here at the bus stop. The clock is ticking away, and I can see some of the sky. The only clear sound is the sound of traffic, and it's almost like I don't hear it because it is so much a part of my ears, of my mind. It's almost like I don't even see what a poorly balanced transportation system we have here, because it is what we have. It is right here and yet it is impossible to see what a mess, what an absurdity this is.

January 30

Standing at a bus stop affects one's ego. I know this, because I do this. Particularly when you are standing at the edge of a complete car environment. It is easy to see that you are the least significant thing here. The street is not for you, the buildings with their racing stripes for design are not for you. The parking lots and parking spots are not for you. The black asphalt world in front of you is not for you. The narrow and only partly shoveled sidewalk is for you, and the bus shelter that is sometimes there, and is always heavily vandalized, is also for you. There is not much for you, and that has an effect on one's ego.

Driving by in a car has an influence on an ego. The superiority that one has in a car, the me against the whole world that builds up in a car so quickly. The ease at making noise, at making the engine of the car sound as powerful as you are, of making it roar like the lion you think you are, that is ego, and that is the experience of driving. And then there are all the other things that people do not mull quite so often: the reality that you are heavily imbibing a non-renewable resource, that you are guzzling it only to spit out most of it for inefficiency, that you are blowing up the whole atmosphere and other nations so you can get around in your chosen manner. These ideas may just be under the surface, they may not have their names named, but still they affect the ego of the driver. They affect the ego and rewire the brain and make callousness the easiest thing there is.

When I am standing in the world waiting for the bus, when I am walking that narrow sidewalk to go one place or another, at least I am in the world, I am part of the world, I can see and feel the world, even tho the world around me has been manufactured for something else, has been designed for cars and not for people. I am still in the world and I can feel where I am. I have not been in a car for more than a month, I only got in a car a few times last year, but I remember how it feels. I remember how the world around you vanishes into the movie show in your windshield. I remember how you never have to look down to see what your tires are hitting at this moment, because it doesn't really matter. All that matters are the signs and the directions, that easy path that has been shaken out of the surface of the earth for you, that has been blasted out of rock, that has been made at war out of habitat and wilderness. All that matters is you inside that shell, and you are the only one, and everyone else is enemy.

Our car society has made it so easy for us to be a war society. All the people who are so supportive of this war, who do not care, really, about the violence and madness that our war is bringing to the other side of the world, they learned their dispassion in the seats of their car. They learned their war-bearing by running over squirrels and running over Mother Earth with their two ton tanks on a Sunday morning to drive to church and pretend to be holy. They learned how to go to war by pressing down at the accelerator, by scaring a pedestrian by charging across the sidewalk in his path. They learned how to go to war just by thinking they have the right to get around with a car, with all that destruction on their back, with all that unscrupulous power in their hands and feet, they learned to accept the death of war. They made their transportation into a little war, a war against the world, and they are the general, and they are the president dropping the bombs. I can only stand on the sidelines and wait for my bus, and hope they some day get some sense, and hope they someday figure out a way to buy some feelings, for their cars have sold all theirs away.

January 31

I went to a movie yesterday. A Japanese film from 1951. There were no cars in it. People walked or took a train. That is how they got around.

I got to the movie by a combination of walk, bus and train. Near the University, where the theater was, there were a few other pedestrians, tho not as many as you might think for a nice day and a major shopping area. When I got home and walked the three blocks to my house, I did not encounter a single other walker. Many cars went by me, but no pedestrians.

My neighborhood could have been hit by a neutron bomb. There were buildings and there were machines but no people to be seen. I was walking in a post-apocalyptic society. Everyone had disappeared, everyone had gone to heaven in their cars and I had the sidewalks all to myself. Some of the sidewalks I walked still were not clear of snow and ice, and this was more than a week after the snow fell.

There are people inside the cars, but they look more like glare than people to me. People inside of cars stop being people in some way. They are not the person inside the car, they are the extension of that machine. People are just too small and weak in comparison to the car to be the boss of the car. You must not have any illusions that you are in charge, if you are a driver. The car is in charge of you, and of this environment, the whole world that you curse with those car wheels.

Cars are not capable of the sensitivity of which people are capable. A person inside that car surrenders that sensitivity once inside. The car is the ruler of the mind, the car thinks only about the road ahead and the poor person inside becomes some kind of machine-human hybrid. Do not have any illusions that you can drive a car and maintain your humanity. It is gone as soon as you get in and push the buttons, it has decayed as soon as you have merged with that machine.

If a driver maintained any humanity, that driver would see what a waste and destruction the car was upon the world, upon the mind and the built and natural environment. If the driver kept any humanity at all, that driver would usually use some other form of transportation, and keep their car for those certain times most suited for car transportation. If a driver maintained any humanity at all, that driver would not be the glare staring at the pedestrian, but would instead get out of that car and join the pedestrians on the sidewalk, and mistrust the cars that she saw on the street, and curse the cars that cut off his path.

If a driver had any humanity at all, she or he would see how destructive car behavior is, and would stop that behavior to stop the war, to stop global warming. If car drivers had any further claim on kindness and sufficiency, that car would be left to rot in some lot somewhere, and not be actively used to curse the skies and curse the dying nations that have the oil.

It is lonely in this world-eating nation when you are a pedestrian. I need other people to join me. I need other people to boycott this product that is denying them their sense of the human. I need more people to pull themselves out of the cushy car seats that suck them in, that suck them into the machine, where they decay into their car self, their machine self.

February 1

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