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March 10

Nearly a month ago the Kyoto treaty went in to effect. Absent among the signing nations was the nation contributing more to global warming than any other nation on earth.

The U.S. is a nation of car fiends, car junkies, and repressed car desire among the youngsters too young to drive and the oldsters too old to drive and the jailbirds too incarcerated to drive. We do global warming like the pope does blessings. We'll find a way to keep running cars on fumes after the last drops of oil are pumped clean out of the earth's belly.

Half that U.S. nation was mad as hell at President George W. Bush for his leadership by global obstruction, for his policy by war, for his guidance by organized ignorance. Millions took to the street and to their neighborhoods last November to organize potential voters, to try to sway the vote away from Bush.

But Bush won and global responsibility, the kind that stops the damage rather than makes more damage, lost too. Those folks who organized against Bush went back to their lives, and their cars.

Our leadership has shirked the kind of world responsibility that will save us rather than curse us. Our national leadership leads by doing nothing, by not believing, by singing the same song when the scientists give the bad news. Our nation, which contributes the most to global warming, has denied it, and has denied the global agreement to try to cut it back.

Because our leadership is misleading, we need to act responsibly on an individual basis. It is time for those of us who opposed Bush to make their own personal Kyoto. It is time that the Bush opposition makes an impact on global warming by cutting down or eliminating their own greatest contribution to it, the irresponsible portion of their transportation.

Transportation contributes more than half of the greenhouse gases that make up global warming. The most wasteful form of transportation by far is transportation by personal car. A small car in a year will send 60 tons of CO2 gas into the atmosphere. A personal Kyoto means doing without that car, and not contributing that much greenhouse gas to the air above our heads.

A personal Kyoto means getting rid of a car, or not driving a car. Because I already do not have a car and do not drive, my personal Kyoto means not accepting rides from others, and when I am offered rides, to tell them why I do not accept the offer. I have gone 75 days so far without riding in a car. It has been as easy as the wind, as easy as walking down the street.

Life without a car can be so much richer, for you and for the world. Life without a car is an exploration of the smallest things and the footsteps around you. Life without a car means sharing the space of world with others, and being glad of that, and being relaxed of that, and not getting so upset if you cannot control every single little second.

And maybe most importantly, life without a car is a life that takes individual responsibility seriously. For in a nation with leadership that is not responsible, living a normal life is living the death of your national mistake. Living a normal life in the U.S. as it stands is living a threat to all life, to the future, to yourself.

March 11

The detached lives, so instant for cars to live us. The disconnection that we inhabit with our living and our breathing, they make it so easy to be filth, they make the murderer out of such disguise. The television world we eat is one enough of it, this mediated window that tells us our myths, our stories, our latest disguises. But the most alien of the alienators is the car, is the way that it kills distance and time and atmosphere and earth, the way it kills its people, eats its young, its hosts, the slaves that think that they are master.

Thru the windows of the car we can live that good old television alienation. Is it humor or is it drama? It all depends on whether we need to lock our car doors or head to the ramp for parking.

Yesterday morning the wet snow fell, and it melted to water as the day got colder. Those who drove away too soon to shovel their personal sidewalks came home and did not notice that the water melted snow had frozen into a thin layer of sidewalk ice.

Last night I took my first mortal bounce of this winter, I slipped on the ice while walking. Luckily my butt was there to fulfill its butt mission and took the heat and took the bounce and landed me smack on right cheek so I could get up right away, despite my groan and yell while sliding.

A couple days before I was walking to the bus on the way to work and a guy across the street was taking out his anger with a shovel on the ice on his sidewalk. A car pulled up beside him, maybe a friend or maybe not. The person in the car asked him what he was doing and guy with the shovel started talking about how the bastards in the city were making him chip the ice off his sidewalk and how they were bastards and were going to fine him if he did not do it.

It was a roll your window down conversation, it was a fast food talk from the car to the sidewalk. Besides chipping the ice from his sidewalk, I wonder how much that guy chipping and cursing at the bastards that made him chip the ice ever walks down the sidewalks of his own neighborhood. How insulated is he that he will slip on the ice of someone else's sidewalk, and hope that his butt is there to block the damage. I do not know about his walking or his alienation, but I think that all I have to do is listen to him curse the bastards to know enough, to know a little.

Maybe I should get a cane. A cane can both keep me on my feet and help me search for ice on the sidewalk up ahead. The ice last night was so everywhere that I did not notice that special little slick patch that took me. Walking back I could see it and the disturbance in the flurry snow that marked my slide onto my butt. It was a nice smooth little rink, a micron of no traction, a little circle or so to bring you low, but only if you were low enough to be caught walking on the sidewalk in the first place.

We walked the rest of the way in the middle of the street. The sidewalks were so dangerous with disguised untreated ice, while the streets were completely clear of slickness. There were cars in the street, but the danger of them was so ponderous, for the most part, that we could retreat to the slippery sidewalk when we saw one coming, headlights like lion eyes.

March 12

In the Minnesota State capitol this year there is serious talk about putting money into the metro area's transportation system to address traffic congestion. There is talk, tho not as loudly or in as many dollars, about building transportation funding equity that would fund transit expansion at a regular level like we fund the expansion of our car transportation system.

The time has come to forget about expanding roads, and to focus on expanding transit only.

The Twin Cities metro already has more than its share of roads. The Twin Cities has more route miles of freeway than the Chicago metro area, with a quarter the population of the Chicago metro. Yet traffic congestion is growing at a faster rate here than it is in Chicago. One of the few U.S. cities with more freeway route miles than the Twin Cities is Atlanta, and it is also one of the few cities where congestion is growing at a faster rate than here.

The formula is very clear. More freeways mean more freeway congestion. Addressing congestion by building new roads is fighting fire with fire.

Chicago has fewer miles of freeway but a slower growth in congestion because it has a transit system many times greater than ours. Their transit system has a solid backbone of multiple rail lines that get people across long distances quickly, as well as frequent local bus service to carry people within neighborhoods.

Because of that transit system, Chicago has an average of 0.6 cars per capita. The Twin Cities has a rate of cars per capita of 1.2. Congestion comes from cars, and the way to get around congestion is to provide alternatives.

If we really want to fight traffic congestion, instead of building new freeway lanes we should start talking about taking some away. That is the kind bold thinking that will really address our coming transportation issues. Maybe we need to admit that building I-94 in north Minneapolis so close to the river was a terrible mistake that helped turn a solid working class neighborhood into the crime hot spot of the state. Maybe we need to dream new dreams of an I-94 corridor with a light rail line instead of a freeway, and restored urban fabric, housing and businesses, around that light rail line. San Francisco and Portland, Oregon have already ripped out freeways near water. Milwaukee is working on such a project today.

If we do not start building rail transit in the Twin Cities, we might as well get ready to write our urban obituary. The truth that few people want to face is that car transportation is not sustainable, and the car infrastructure that we have may be useless in fifty years.

Cars are very inefficient. Only a percent or two of the energy that a car burns actually goes to moving the person inside the car. Cars have worked so far because we were able to burn the millions of years of stored energy in oil to make them go, but most petroleum engineers estimate that the world will most likely run out of accessible oil in a matter of decades.

If you know some basic physics, you know that it takes energy to make energy. That is why making new energy takes energy. That is why it takes about a gallon of oil to make a gallon of ethanol. If you think the price of gas is expensive now, just wait.

Oil is a non-renewable resource, and the peculiar thing about non-renewable resources is that you run out of them, and as you run out of them they get more and more expensive. In the not so distant future we will see the day when the only people who will be able to burn a quart of gasoline to buy a quart of milk will be Bill Gates, and a few other folks as wealthy as he.

Rail transit runs on electricity. Electricity can be generated by renewable sources, like the sun or wind. Calgary's two light rail lines are powered by a wind farm.

That is why our representatives at the state need to support a dedicated funding source for transit, like the sales tax proposal that has been proposed. That is why we need to tell them to advocate for building transit, and not roads. That is why we need to start to imagine and work to build rail transit routes in Northeast, like a light rail line up University Avenue, and a streetcar on 13th Avenue that can create a crosstown Northeast connection.

To fail to expand transit now would be civic suicide.

March 13

I had a couple video shoots yesterday morning that were too spread out and too close together in time to use transit alone to get to them. I got on my bicycle at 7:30 to get to the first one at eight, even tho it was not that far from my house. It was necessary to leave so early because it has snowed the day before and then the cold set in. This left a glaze of ice on many streets.

Most of the streets I rode on were so over salted that the black of asphalt was totally hidden by the white of road salt. I still went slow, just in case a part was missed. Plus it was also so cold that going fast would generate more windchill, and make me more uncomfortable.

Then I turned down one concrete street that had not been salted. The color of the roadbed had changed to a darker brown, and it was sheer ice that I was riding upon. Some car tire tracks had spilled the water aside just before it turned to ice and this made a few narrow patches where the ice was clear, but mostly I rode on the ice. I kept my forward momentum. I was afraid but I kept my handlebars aimed forward. I tried my best not to think about wobble. To wobble would have certainly meant sliding and falling.

As I got closer to a cross street and a stop sign, I knew that I did not dare put on my brakes. I put down my feet like the Flinstones, or like Buster Keaton in Our Hospitality with his 1830's bicycle. The bottoms of my boots just slid on the street. There was not a bit of traction to be found. Eventually, the drag of my feet on the ice did slow me down, and I made a right turn onto a street that had been peppered with dirt, and then the sun came out and my ice worries were over.

March 14

Recently, dozens, or was it hundreds, of dolphins committed mass suicide along the southeast coast of the U.S. The dolphins swam to shore, and kept on trying to go west, to kill themselves, to ground themselves, to dry up their bodies from the water they need around them. Volunteers tried to get them back in the water, and some of the dolphins stayed there, confused but docile, but many others aimed themselves back at the shore, insistent on suicide, committed utterly to it.

It is said that the navy was trying out a new kind of sonar exercise from a submarine in the area just prior to this incident. It is said that it was something about that new strong sonar that drove the dolphins to their suicide. Was the sonar a message that told them to kill themselves? Was it a communication that made the mass of them mad? Did it tell them to go in a certain direction, whether that direction had ocean or land ahead? Did the sonar cause a kind of lobotomy in them, and drive them like a compass in the direction of death?

What kind of sonar has come to us to convince us to commit mass suicide by automobile madness? What kind of sonar has told us to drive our culture over the cliff on four wheels over and over again every day, and to call it commuting? Is it the sonar of automobile advertising that has sent us to the shore where we cannot breathe from all our car exhaust, where we cannot go forward with our culture but must go to war for a fix of oil?

What has hit our brains, has scrambled them up and taken us from the goodness and rightness of our history, and deposited us in the care of madmen bent on shaping the world thru cars and war? Something very strong has bent us, something that we do not understand. We only know that direction, that back and forth that we call life, and so it leads us to our death. What do we care. We have our orders. We have the keys to do it, and the cars, and the licenses. It does not matter if our direction will kill us. It is our direction. It is where we must go.

March 15

How did the sonar miss me? Why was I not infected by the car virus that is such a plague in the place I live, in our war nation, in this state and city. I see people who I once knew to not have a car, who stood up against car nation and car insanity with reason. Now I see them behind the wheel of one, trapped like animals for their pelts, wildly waving at us so we can notice them but the windshield glare stains their faces, hides them, enslaves them.

When I was young I saw a short animated film from Canada. The film told about what the aliens observed of earth sociology from their distant vantage.

The aliens concluded that the dominant form of life on earth was the car. Entire landscapes of the earth were altered for this creature. There was an entire race of flimsy two-legged creatures that served the every need of the race of the cars. These flimsy creatures were the slaves of the cars and lived at the pleasure of their car masters. I remember seeing that cartoon and being quite convinced that this was a perfect picture of what was really going on in the world that I knew.

Now that I am coming close to three months without being inside a car, I can see things even more differently. Not that I used to ride in cars very often, but I am not sure if I have ever gone quite so long without a shot of them, without a car fix of ride, without an injection of car world sanity from riding inside the dominant species. After three months, cars look even sadder to me. And saddest of all are the people inside them, the people who cannot even walk down their street without getting into one, without letting every hour of their day be slavery to the need of their car, to attend to their car's lust for parking, for fixing up the cold of their car while they let their own nose run, to figure out the best way for their car to get to the next place it needs to go.

I feel so bad for all these car slaves, and I wish I could free them from their miserable expressions, from their beaten down backs, from their inflating bodies. I can just sit back and joust at my imaginary beast, and live my imaginary life. For there must be no life more imaginary to a car slave than a life without a car to serve.

March 16

The headlines in the newspaper were depressing. There is always bad international news, at least there has been since the start of the Bush administration, but the local news was also quite hard to hear. The Metropolitan Council, which operates the main transit agency in the Twin Cities, is planning a fare hike and massive route cuts for later this year to balance their budget.

The Metropolitan Council is appointed by the governor. The governor is a radical right wing Republican who will not raise taxes, even if that means sacrificing the entire state and its future to his strange ideology. The Council, which operates the transit agency, is a group of people who share the governor's madness. They operate the transit agency but they do not really believe in transit. They believe in some kind of market system, but one that does allow huge subsidization of car transportation, tho I do not even think they really understand that the car system is actually subsidized at the level that it really is.

So they are going to be making massive cuts to mass transit. Most of all this makes me wonder why I even live here. I have contemplated jumping ship many times, and moving somewhere that has a decent transit system, but I am fond of Minneapolis, which is my birthplace, and I often see signs of things getting better. Last year, the opening of the first light rail line was a huge sign of hope. A few months before that, a month long transit strike was a huge sign of despair. Hope follows despair, depair follows hope, it is a real bipolar scenario, and is wearing me down.

Sometimes I think I stay here because the challenge makes me stronger, keeps me more on edge, is a way to harness my creativity at my anger at the misguided policies here that privilege car transportation and make my life miserable by giving such scraps to mass transit. Mainly it turns my writing into these angry screeds that nobody reads, but at least make me feel better as I wait forever for the next bus to come.

The price of gas is rising; people here will continue to pay more to live here than people who live in places that have better transit systems. You pay more to live in a place that gets more degraded by the day. We live in a smoker's lounge. The drivers are smokers. There are so few of us nonsmokers that it's often hard to breathe.

If we keep on cutting our mass transit, we keep killing our place as a place where people can actually live in the future. There is no tomorrow for car transportation. Car transportation is all about yesterday. The only future lies in transportation alternatives. If we keep cutting our transit here, we are sunk.

We can only go to war so much before soldiers get the point and see how exploited they are, their bodies and minds turned into meat, and give up on their fighting. We can only steal oil from the land for so long before the land stops giving it up. We can only live this insanity for so long.

March 17

OPEC said yesterday that they no longer control the price of oil. Demand is so high that all wells on earth are pumping at capacity. The oil companies are sucking it out of the earth as fast as they can to meet the growing global demand.

The United States approved drilling for oil in the Alaskan Wilderness. Oil to slake our crazy thirst for a few years will come out in exchange for permanently destroying one of the last perfect places.

This is crazy greed. This is international insanity. This is the act of an unthinking, unliving, murderous mentality. This is the work of a crazy robot gone haywire, gone mad with oil addiction, gone bonkers with self-destruction, gone bleary with whole world self-destruction.

We are now so madly drinking up the drops and how crazy will we be when we run out of the liquor. The greed boils deep within us, this blazing amazing incompetence, this lack of serious question marks, this insanity with all life and limb.

We cannot pump the stuff out fast enough. We are racing with the earth's crust to drill out millions of years of memories, to burn with senseless abandon millions of years of stored compressed sunlight. We do not know how to stop, we just pay the rising prices to feed our cars, to feed our fuel-oil food system, to feed our everything its oil, its oil for all good; it might taste bad but just swallow it like medicine and all things will be easy to forget in work.

Now we are pumping it as fast as we can to meet the demand. The next step comes when the demand is higher than the supply, and then the supply will begin to wither away, and so will the oil-addicted human race.

Imagine what raving beasts we will be when we run dry, when the flow no longer comes as fast as we can pump it, as it turns to drops, as it turns to dust. Imagine that look in all our faces, when we have a ton of rocks called car in our driveway and no way to make it take us, and no way to drive to WalMart to buy more oil to make another oily day.

Imagine what will happen when we've blown it all sky high, when we've turned the cookpot up so hot that the whole world has to roll itself out to put out the cooking fire, so that the whole thing has to turn on its side and squish us, and we have nothing to grab on to. Our strange sad ideologies have convinced us so much that we are in hell that we had to make the whole world into that storybook in case it wasn't and it wasn't really in the first place, we just let ourselves get so deluded.

I cannot stand it, but I am shouting into a paper bag. Nobody can hear me, for they have their cars turned up way too loud. And those oil pumps just keep on pumping, just turning out the black liquid that we live and breathe, that we gunk ourselves all up in like some mad men, oil creatures of waste and insanity, heavenly beasts that know only their own meaningless self-destruction as a way of life, as a big car wreck of world.

March 18

Intelligence comes from geography; the model for how our brain thinks is how we negotiate the physical space that we live in. We think like we go from place to place; our city and our home is the outside picture of the inside of our brain.

When you drive there is only right and left. There is only go straight or forward, there is only take this exit. The mind of driving is like the mind of fundamentalism: there is only one way to go, and those who do not follow this certain freeway will get nowhere in relation to their destination. Every fundamentalist, and every car driver knows that there are a certain limited set of directions, and if you do not follow the way, you are evil, you are lonesome, you are stuck in heavy traffic.

Fundamentalist Christianity is the perfect companion of driving culture; it is the ultimate ideology of driving brain addiction. There is only one way to go, there is only left or right or straight or reverse, there are signs to lead you everywhere, and you must interpret them literally, or else you will crash and burn.

If you do not drive, you must think differently. You must chart your course over many more options. You do not have to move in a grid or in a straight line; many other ways are efficient also. Maybe the best way to get where you are going is to cut across a certain space, maybe the best way to go is to zig zag all over the place.

The carfree brain is the brain that can still accept creativity. The carfree brain is the brain that can still accept personal responsibility. The brain of car is not responsible. The brain of car does not have to know what it is doing, it just has to follow the signs to its savior, it just has to follow the road to its nowhere. It just has to follow a certain set of directions, a map made by the universal mapmaker, and it will be saved, and get to an ultimate destination, even if that place is just a mess.

The brain of car if fundamentalism. The brain of car is the end of serious creative thinking. You need to walk to get that back. You need to know how to do without that internal combustion to get to an idea on your own, and not from lying.

The crooked windy streets of Europe are the basis of creativity. The straight freeways of the U.S. are the roadbeds of conformity and close-mindedness. All those car drivers will need the non-cardrivers some day soon to think straight for them, to give them advice that is not just from a moldy overhead sign, that is not from some old-fashioned crazy book of so-called maps.

The ones without cars are totally silent. They do not even exist, at least in the left right take that exit brain of the car addicted and the car insane. The carfree never make the evening news, but they exist in some numbers. Somebody has to do the thinking when the oil runs out, and it won't be the car-crazed fundamentalists who brought us to this unholy place and time.

March 19

The price of oil is going up, and the costs of health care are going up. So the costs of running a transit system are going up. The Metropolitan Council is the body appointed by the governor of Minnesota to be the central planning body of the twin cities metro area. They are also the operator of Metro Transit, the region's main transit provider. To balance their budget with these rising costs they are not asking for more money, they are looking to raise the fare and cut some routes and service.

On many nights I ride the 9:55 p.m. 17W bus home from work. If these cuts go as proposed, the 17W will stop running at 8 p.m. every night of the week. I ride the bus home with many other people, many recent immigrants returning home from their jobs, and other people returning from shopping and work. How are we all going to get home if the last bus runs two hours before we need to go home?

My household has no car, so we use the bus to get to work, to go shopping, to get to entertainment, for everything. We are served by the 17W and also by the 11 bus. Both are north south routes that run with thirty minute frequency. The closest east west bus route is ten blocks away, and does not run at night, so we essentially have no crosstown transit service.

Under these transit cuts, the 11 bus would stop running after 11 p.m. The result is that we would have no transit service to our neighborhood after 11 p.m. every day of the week. The closest bus running to us after 11 p.m. is nearly a mile away. That's a long walk, and part of the walk is thru an industrial area, so it is also a dangerous walk.

I live in lower Northeast. This is the part of the city that was once called "the liquor district," and was one of the few areas in Minneapolis where bars could locate. There are still many bars here; at least twenty by a quick count. My neighborhood has one of the highest concentrations of bars in the state.

The bars here close at 2 a.m. but if these transit cuts are made, the last bus serving this neighborhood of bars and people will have run three hours earlier. This seems to me like a waiting disaster. This seems to me like a big Metro Council mistake.

When alcohol and cars mix, there are problems. There are accidents that are costly for Minnesota. Saving a few pennies by cutting these bus routes early is not pound foolish, it is ton foolish.

What we need here is more frequent transit service, especially after 11 p.m. at night. This will make it easier for recreational drinkers who overdo it to get home more safely. It will make it easier for those of us who do not drive and have a social life to get home. We also need a crosstown bus to connect to the north south lines that run all night long.

Two housing projects are also under construction in my neighborhood. In the next year or two, my neighborhood will grow more than a hundred additional homes. These developments are being built with transit in mind, with the thought that many of the people living in them will use transit to get around.

This is no time to cut transit service in my neighborhood; this is time to increase our transit service.

March 20

I had video shoots for work in three separate parts of the city yesterday. Initially I had planned to go from one to another on my bicycle, but after a few inches of snow the day before, I decided on the bus.

I sat down at the computer the night before and used the transit planner on the Metro Transit web site to plan out my trips. I put in the address I was going to and the address I was coming from and it gave me transit routes that I could print out, and I took those along with me to find the way.

When I set off in the morning, the streets were covered with snow and were icy, but within a few hours they has mostly melted and turned messy with dirty water.

My bus rides were as different as the different parts of the city. I rode past the University area to St. Anthony Park neighborhood in St. Paul on the 3 bus. The riders tended toward young people who chatted and then all got out on the University campus. The clouds cleared and the sun shined out in the sky past the rows of tall tidy houses and the splash of the streets. I rode the 17 bus thru Whittier near uptown, and the traffic and buildings were dense with buildings and newspaper boxes. I rode up into north Minneapolis where the bus background sound was the music of motherfucker, a constant buzz of swearing from the back seats. I stood at various corners waiting and each corner had its own variety of buildings and parking lots and gas stations. I had a folded magazine to read, and I moved between its reality and the one before my eyes.

I had some walks thru areas that I hadn't walked before. Up the hill of houses in St. Paul and flat to the parkway at the edge of the world in north Minneapolis. At each house there were nice people who I interviewed and talked to filmed. All the people I visited offered me rides, but I turned them down for my certain mission. One of the children in one of the houses even did a news report about me into one of the microphones I was setting up: "The streets are sloppy today so bicycle riders must take the bus."

My mission is to navigate the world without a car. My goal is to live my world in a car-twisted place without the socially accepted all-purpose transportation solution. Sometimes in my day it is easier to do this; and somedays it is more of a challenge. If I have to go many places, it is a challenge, for I am doing the opposite of the grand plan of life in these parts. I am taking the fragments of bus system here to the limits of their usefulness.

It worked, and I made it work, but over half my day was spent on transportation. I never had to wait more than half an hour for a bus or a transfer, but the waiting time added up into something, into much of my day.

I remember when we first went to Paris and were so amazed at how many things we could do in a day in different parts of the city and quite easily. We could do this because of the Paris metro system, because there was a great transit system there and the city was really made to negotiate with transit. If only we could have a system like that here, a transit system that made and breathed and defined the city.

This could be a very great and special city if we had a mass transit system several times greater than the one we have now. In the meantime, it is a city waiting to be made great, waiting to be taken seriously as a place for walking, as a place to be free from automobiles and their tyranny.

March 21

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