Paying the toll

When I hear someone harping on a pet topic for the sixteenth time, I start wondering, What are the topics that I harp on? If someone who knows me well is sitting next to me, what subject matter fills them with dread when they hear it introduced, because they know precisely which pompous and self-satisfied words will pursue from my mouth?

I have a feeling my antipathy to cars is one of these pet topics. I can’t resist melodramatizing the harm they cause to society (you can see an example of this in the tangentially relevant post describing downtown Addison). A friend of mine has suggested I write a book about cars and the decline of civilization. We’ve even chosen a clever title: Paying the Toll.

Yet everything I experience reinforces my grief about cars. Lately I have been crossing town frequently to visit my watery boyfriend (pictured above at sunset). I make this journey by bike, usually in the dark and half-light of dawn. Well, I was driving along my route the other evening and realized something odd. Although I was driving this ponderous, powerful, multi-thousand-dollar engineering marvel, I had less control and less visibility than I did on my little human-powered shred of aluminum and rubber, at least at that time of day. My windshield was disastrously dirty, so if anything vaguely luminous faced me I was blinded. I was lower down, I couldn’t hear things outside the car, and these pedals couldn’t stop and start this machine as fast as my own two legs could operate the gears of my bicycle. The main superiority of my car was as a shield to me if my irresponsible driving did cause a collision. Forget any other people around.

These physical differences are not the only ones between driving and bicycling. I realized as I drove through the neighborhoods that an entirely different mental process is taking place. When I drive my car, I pay attention to an entirely different set of stimuli. I am behaving as if I am on a larger scale, trying to get from one point to another in the simplest trajectory, as if I am removed from the actual environment like a video game player. I look for large shapes and big moving objects. The streets are simplified. When I ride my bike, I can hear voices and birds and I can see little cats. I can hear whether any cars are coming before I reach an intersection. I have time to think and react to things.

Of course this is why motorists build expressways, to remove the things that might cross our paths, because we don’t have time for them when we’re getting from one place to another. We create an environment that is not suited to pedestrians. But in neighborhoods, cars are operating in an environment that is not suited for them. This is why neighborhoods have 20-mile-an-hour speed limits and speed bumps. Pedestrians in this environment have signs and bumps as protection against the handicapped operators of machines that can kill other people but not themselves.