Why Automobiles are Inherently Godly and American

The Washington State Auto Dealer's Association chose Hawaii as the venue for its annual meeting, and I'm so glad I got to tag along with one of their keynote speakers this last weekend.  I snorkeled next to Honu, large sea turtles who nonchalantly grazed on algae just inches from me, and I contemplated how completely and admirably our society relies on cars.

  Cars Express our National Character

Cars represent our craving for initiative and independence, American national traits ingrained by immigrants who took huge risks to come here, pioneer this country and strive for success.  Deprive us of our cars, and you thwart that fundamental enterprising spirit.

Because the individuals who chose our land endowed the national character with their industrious and competitive stock, we cleave to our cars.  We love the power they offer, the personal control, the ability to harness and direct energy.  Our nation thrives on verve; the chance to plot one's unique direction and arrive there is the engine of our economy and the purpose of the engine under the hood.  Cars allow mobility and robust change; we should encourage and honor use of the automobile rather than foment politically-motivated disdain over some phony environmental threat.

I do believe gasoline-powered vehicles affect the environment (I grew up in a smog-choked Los Angeles that improved once gas additives were controlled).  But instead of forcing people onto government-run public transport, policy should encourage using our creative spirit and ingenuity to make our individual cars environmentally green, as well as cleverly and satisfyingly designed.  The billions taxpayers are forced under threat of imprisonment to pay toward constructing now-empty light rail stations should go toward enhancing and improving highways.

  

Cars Let America Spread Out--and Prosper

Here's the nearly-Darwinian reason why even Al Gore can't and won't force Americans to give up our cars:  their evolution enabled our nation's survival.

In the early years of North American settlement, cities formed to allow efficient specialization of tasks.  Proximity let the candle-maker, the fabric weaver, the grocer and lumber vendor conveniently distribute their wares.

As the nation's population burgeoned, automobiles met the need to colonize our open spaces , first with cities, and then with suburbs. A unique American culture formed inside suburbs' proverbial picket fences, figurative moats around each man's (and family's) "castle."

Unsettled spaces and autos allowed us the unique privilege of freedom from meddling; an expectation of privacy and its liberation from censure I believe fed our already self-selected industriousness and entrepreneurial energy. Thanks to corporations competing to make cars affordable, after World War II families could buy spaciously situated homes with front and back yards, space enough to acquire, spread out, and, with this buffer from the world--relax. One-car garages morphed into two, then three-car garages.

The average size of a home built in 1970 was 1,500 square feet. By 2000, it had grown to 2,200 square feet. By 2008, the Census Bureau reports US average home size expanded to 2,473 square feet.  Everyone's heard the term "McMansion;" residential narcissism recently spawned the jaw-dropping MTV series "Cribs," where teens tour tv-voyeurs through their folks' conspicuously consumptive houses, loaded with science-fiction amenities.  Andrew, for example, knows the water at his bathroom sink is hot because it lights up red; blue water's cold. Another bath in his home boasts a gushing waterfall and remote controlled toilet. His bedroom includes an actual tree house, and outside is his custom-built hobbit-cabin and a warehouse holding a full-size basketball court with electronic scoreboard.

Andrew's parents and all the workmen and service personnel who built and tend the estate all depend on cars.  No Light Rail could bring any of them to Andrew's house--or even to the vast majority of transformed-countryside developments that compose and ring every metropolitan area.

Cars Help Us Emulate God

It's not only our immigrant heritage that makes it intrinsically American to crave the autonomy and independence that automobiles afford.  Just as God's essence is creativity, we humans have a similar yen to create, using our individual capabilities forging technology, devising solutions to environmental problems, and advancing efficiency.  We want to go where we want, when we want, with or without whomever we want. This is the essence of creativity--striking off on your own to take a risk, start something different.  Traveling at set times on a fixed rail may serve confined cities, but people who need independence, privacy, space and flexibility--freedom!--want cars.  Those in Manhattan who can afford it take the subway when convenient, but also pay the $431 average (up to $800) monthly fee to park their cars in a garage.

An underlying reason is that Americans, with our sense of the possible, value time.  People love their cars largely because a driver's in control and can minimize waiting, not subject to a governmentally-set timetable or schedule.  That's why traffic can be so frustrating--here you are in your own car, administering your own affairs--and then all these other cars get in your way--they limit and constrain what you had planned to do.

Americans' cars express our drive to determine how we change the world, often producing something valuable from nearly nothing--and how we allocate our time.  Some tasks can be accomplished in a noisy terminal while waiting for a bus or train. Most creative activities can't.

We are hampered in emulating the creative nature of God by losing or wasting time we could spend creating.  Clearly, most people waste scads of time (watching "Cribs"?) and create very little.  But we lose our collective zeal when enforced lines and imposed schedules become a daily expectation (Russia under Communism comes to mind).

It's worrisome, then, when politicians and politically-correct pundits insist dependence on governments' management of our time and transport is more noble, patriotic and humanitarian than our automotive independence.  Giving up our cars dulls the American independent spirit, shrinking us nationally into more limited options and smaller worlds.  Those who would eliminate God and religion from the marketplace seek to eliminate our Godly urge to act independently and creatively. (Thus it's not more humanitarian, but perhaps more humanistic to push Light Rail.)

If there's consumer demand for high-mileage cars that run on, say, kudzu (my personal suggestion for biofuel), some entrepreneur will invent it and clean up, uncovering lots of rusted cars in Southern fields while adding to our national prosperity.  Hooray for the car dealers of America, whose difficult efforts to serve the public fuel the innovative, independent spirit that keeps our nation zipping along...

An Adventure on Seattle's New Light Rail

A gloomy Sunday in Seattle, perfect for a ride on our city's new Central Link light rail system, which opened to great fanfare on July 18 this year. After thirteen years of fits and starts and voters approving and then junking (three times) and then okaying and then resenting the $4.7 billion it took to open the 14-mile, 12-station train line, my husband and I wanted to experience it. 

The route goes from downtown Seattle to Tukwila, a town near SeaTac airport. A station close to the terminal is slated to open in December.  Projected daily ridership is 21,000 by the end of the year--the figures so far, though, show a slight decline from an August high of about 14,800. Given the extent of debt for its creation, Seattle might have dug itself into more than one kind of hole.

While it's a subway through downtown, Link rides above-ground through the lowest-income parts of town and industrial areas. Built with no parking whatsoever, riders are expected to walk, bicycle or bus to a station, with suitcases in tow, walk down three flights to tracks, and juggle luggage during the ride (cars have no racks).  At the last stop, airport-bound passengers must disembark, then find the bus that stops at the far end of the airport.

My husband and I boarded at the downtown terminus, Westlake, purchasing tickets ($5 per person) from a machine tucked at the top of a steep stairway.

We descended (there's no escalator down, only up) to find that buses and Link share the same two transit lanes. It wasn't clear where along the curb Link would stop, but after watching five busses pass, the sleek new trains noisily pulled up about 25 feet from where we stood.  We jumped on, settled into two seats in the nearly-vacant cars (which each hold 200), noticing an empty liquor bottle on the floor.  A young man at the end of our car proceeded to eat a sandwich, change his clothes and shoes, drink wine from a bottle, and then peruse his laptop computer before alighting.

At the first three stops, no one boarded, but at the next, a family entered, two parents and two little girls, one holding tightly to her mom's hand.  The elder girl, about 8, debated where to go, stepping out of the car--just as the doors closed.  The parents frantically pounded on the closed door as the train pulled away, their screaming daughter running alongside, falling behind as the car accelerated.

At the next station, just three minutes away, the family jumped off; the conductor announced that the parents of a girl left behind at the previous station should return, an easy task as the opposite-direction train would arrive just a few feet away.  Clearly, this little drama would end happily, and we could return our attention to the now-visible outdoor scenery.

As the train wobbled and bumped nauseatingly, a panorama of dilapidated homes, graffitti-splashed warehouses, cars on cinderblocks, cheek-and-jowel-stacked "affordable" condo construction, strip malls with signs in unknown Asian languages, treeless avenues, paved lots of service vehicles and semi-trailers defined the view.  This was a Seattle I hadn't considered, a broken-down town with none of the sophistication, energy and intellectual dynamism of, say, Ravenna, Magnolia, Fremont, Queen Anne, Greenlake, Capitol Hill--all  neighborhoods pulsing with character and style.  Central Link light rail takes passengers through the seamy, sometimes necessary but gritty fringes scrambling to maintain.  I thought about vacationers, flying to Seattle to see the sights, traveling from the airport balancing their rolly suitcases on their laps, forming their first, mistaken impressions of a city sad and decrepit.

Still, the ride was exhilarating.  I'm a closet anthropologist; seeing how others live, glimpsing their backyards; passing by loading docks, distribution centers, diners with uneven neon, storefront churches, all excite me.  I loved every moment.  It was at least 40 minutes since we left downtown, but it blinked by, and soon we arrived at Tukwila.  End of the line. I snapped a few photos as the 4 pm sun slanted beneath the gray blanket of clouds, suddenly brightening the miles-around view from the elevated station.  Trees were yellow with autumn, Cascade foothills outlined dark behind.  A handful of passengers boarded the two connected cars equipped to hold 400, and soon we were on the return ride, back past the graffitti, the sprawling assembly and dissemination plants, the urban ticky-tacky condos. So much to notice, largely bleak and unattractive but nonetheless compelling.

Just $5 for an afternoon's fascination.  But the junket convinced me that light rail is a complete waste of taxpayer money.  The smattering of customers, each of whom is subsidized about $130 per ride, could have taken a bus, probably much more conveniently.  No official checked to see if we'd actually purchased a ticket; I wondered, given their torn clothing and odors, whether two riders had actually paid.  Supposedly, stubs are randomly checked, but we never saw a conductor on any of the trains we rode or passed.

Everyone knows that light rail is a financial disaster. I can't find any instance where publicly funded rail lines have made a profit. Rather, they serve a political agenda--to eliminate private autos and ultimately, independent travel. It's part of a larger worldview that promotes leveling the field--eraticating differences between people based on wealth and achievement.  Often camouflaged as an effort to promote environmental causes, the crusade against cars and for mass transit really seeks to quash anything that differentiates and individualizes people and their choices.

I can understand that classic subways, like Manhattan's or Paris' are necessary--they serve cities built before cars, urban sprawl and suburbs.  But west-coast towns, like L.A., San Francisco and Seattle burgeoned because of the automobile; trying to reconfigure these cities to light rail is like trying to cram toothpaste back in the tube.

I certainly enjoyed my jaunt today on Seattle's downtown "tube." It was cheaper and lengthier than a ride at Disneyland.  Unfortuntately for taxpayers, like the attractions at the Magic Kingdom, Link light rail is also built on fantasy.  No one wants to give up his car to take four times longer and pay perhaps double or triple, with much greater inconvenience.  Even friends who, in principle, support light rail admit they don't use it.  Every time I drive by the Mount Baker Station on Rainier Avenue, which I do often, I search the station for activity. Usually there's no one, either walking near the station or on the trains. Once I saw an orange-vested maintenance man.

Seattle just elected Mike McGinn its new mayor, by a super-thin margin.  His primary promise is to expand light rail; he worked to block new suburban roads. He's a Sierra Club officer and rides his bike to work.  Though he'll rationalize Link's poor performance and lack of customers, sanity may still prevail.  Given the cost over-runs and delays inherent in building light rail (Central Link is the most expensive such project in the nation, ever), he'll long be out of office before the next segment can break ground.