Month: May 2015

My Life in Cars

Hank Garfield

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My parents always had two cars. We were a family of seven, plus assorted dogs and cats, and the cars were usually station wagons, parked in the circular driveway in front of our three-story house in the Philadelphia suburbs.

My father taught at a high school in the city, and my two oldest sisters and I attended the adjacent elementary school. We rode into Philadelphia with him in the mornings, with several older kids from the families of friends. His Mercury station wagon had a back-facing rumble seat from which my sisters and I could make faces at the drivers behind us.

The trip was 13 miles, one way. At one point I had the route memorized. The last street was Germantown Avenue, which had trolleys hooked up to overhead wires and cobblestones instead of asphalt.

We lived in what seemed like the country, between two cornfields and a cow pasture. My sisters and I could walk across one of them to an ice cream shop without touching pavement. Decades later, our old house is long gone; not a stalk of corn or a cow remains. It’s all housing developments, office buildings, and parking lots.

Maybe my parents saw the future, and Maine was their response. My father bought into a former summer camp on Deer Isle, at the end of a series of progressively smaller roads. Every year when school ended, we loaded up the station wagons for the twelve-hour drive, leaving at night, with the seats down and sleeping bags spread out across the back. My sisters and I loved those road trips. The sun came up somewhere around the Portsmouth traffic circle. We took the turnpike to Falmouth, then up the coast: over the drawbridge at Bath, lunch at a favorite rest area near Wiscasset, maybe an ice cream at Crosby’s in Bucksport, which is still there. We moved to Maine year-round the year I turned ten.

Maine was where I learned to drive, on a private dirt road in a rusting 1960 Jeep with standard-H shifting and iffy brakes. The first car I owned was an International Travel-All I bought from my mother for four hundred bucks. I still think she ripped me off. We called it “the Monster.” It had four-wheel drive and a stick shift as long as my arm, and by the time it came to me it had been pretty well beaten to death by an exuberant, careless family.

Things went quickly and predictably wrong. I replaced one wheel bearing, and then another, to the tune of several hundred bucks apiece. Then the gas tank fell off while I was driving. Meanwhile, the Monster’s body was being eaten away by car cancer. My parents had once mired it on a sand bar and watched helplessly as the ocean swirled around it – which explained why I never knew which body part was going to fall off next. It had to be the most expensive $400 vehicle in history.
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That car almost killed me a couple of times. Once the gas tank fell off while I was driving. Another time the hood flew up in my face when a truck whooshed by in the other direction. By the time I finally sold it for junk, the Monster was more rust than metal.

My last car was a Ford Escort wagon I bought from my son for $600 when he went to college. It had been my mother’s car before that. My son had decided not to have a car at school, partially because he did not want to pay the inflated insurance rates that accrue when you get two speeding tickets before your seventeenth birthday.

The head gasket blew five months after I took the car off his hands. When I told him this sad news over the phone, he said, “What did you do to it?”

And that was it – my last car, like my first, a cast-off from my family.

In between, I’ve had new cars and old cars, cars I’ve loved and cars I’ve loathed, automatics and standards, vans and pickup trucks, vehicles made in Europe and Japan and America, pieces of crap and pieces of culture. I’ve driven cars owned by friends and cars owned by co-workers. I’ve had driving jobs: a school bus, a taxi. At different times I’ve been a long-distance commuter and my kids’ transportation to school. I’ve been a full, willing participant in the American Car Culture.

No more.

 

Lessons from the Wreckage

Hank Garfield

All Aboard

On the day that an Amtrak train jumped the rails last week in Philadelphia, leaving eight people dead, some 90 Americans died in car crashes you didn’t hear about. Ninety more died the next day, and the day after that. None of them made the news.

I hadn’t planned to write about trains again so soon (see my May 4 entry: It Takes A Train to Cry), but recent events have called attention to the train wreck of American transportation policy.

The Amtrak crash in Philadelphia coincided with an article in the Bangor Daily News about the latest effort to bring passenger rail service – eventually – back to Bangor. As I wrote two weeks ago, trains suffer the double stigma of being overly subsidized and unpopular. Neither is true. People love trains. Amtrak’s ridership is up, and would be even higher if taking the train were more convenient. But decades of policies preferential to cars have led to sparse, unreliable train service. As Jane Holtz Kay wrote in her seminal 1997 book Asphalt Nation, American car owners who would rather drive than take a train are “responding to a rigged market.”

But passenger rail is a tough sell in rural states like Maine. Nobody calls the lonely stretch of Interstate 95 from Old Town to Houlton a waste of tax dollars. Many car owners mistakenly believe that they pay for the roads through excise and gas taxes. But in fact, half of all road funding comes from general taxes. That means that train passengers (not to mention walkers, bicyclists, and bus riders) subsidize every car and driver on the road. You’re welcome.

Even some supporters of public transportation have expressed skepticism about passenger train service to Bangor. They correctly point out the need for smaller, cheaper, more immediate improvements, such as linking the Community Connector bus service to the Concord Coach, and providing better bus service to the airport. Extended evening hours, as I have noted, should also be a priority.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t – or shouldn’t – discuss long-term goals. Passenger rail is not going to return to Bangor next month, or even in the next few years. The important thing is that we’re talking about it, in the context of a larger discussion.

Since no nerves are there to activate them, the muscles tend to become ordering viagra online http://raindogscine.com/tag/premio-oscar/ weak. We outfit certified information and master conference on essential parts of preparing for your forthcoming informative drugstore overnight viagra delivery golf sessions. How does Forzest work? Forzest restricts the orden viagra viagra PDE5 enzyme. Why exercise to prevent erectile dysfunction? The penile organ is less the man eventually turns out to be the weaker part of the generic viagra discount mind. Jane Holtz Kay’s book is subtitled “How the Automobile Took Over America, and How We Can Take It Back.” I like the positive spirit behind that. Kay does not say it will be easy. A powerful coalition of business and real estate and oil and industry interests has foisted upon us the idea that owning a car should be necessary and central to our lives. I was well into middle age before I realized that it doesn’t have to be that way.

I think we take America back one former car-owner at a time. Ride the train or the bus, even if it’s inconvenient. Allow time to bike or walk to work. The discussion of passenger rail service to Bangor is worth having if only to nudge this mindset along a little closer to a public groundswell. Public transportation will improve if enough people want it to.

A few days after the Philadelphia train crash, friends began sending me links to a New Yorker article titled “The Plot Against Trains,” by Adam Gopnik. His main points are hard to dispute: the American political system is rigged for rural interests over urban ones, and a political class in this country has developed an obsession with the idea that nothing good can come from a vigorous central government – the same government that put twelve men on the moon with 1960s technology.

Though this is not a politically partisan blog, I cringe every time some politician praises some rural area as “the real America.” It’s usually someone opposed to government spending on frivolous things like trains. Cars get a free pass because the much higher subsidies for them are camouflaged. And people in rural areas use cars.

A fascinating graphic accompanying a 2011 National Geographic article (The City Solution, December 2011) shows that a city typically – but not always – emits less greenhouse gas per capita than the overall average of its country. The carbon footprint of a New Yorker is much smaller than that of an average American. “Public transit and density put Madrid, Seoul and Brussels below their national averages,” the caption states. “But Stuttgart’s auto industry makes it a higher emitter.”

Thus, not only do city taxes pay for rural roads and car use, city dwellers are also acting as more responsible stewards of the planet.

I’ve lived in small towns (Blue Hill, Maine; Julian, California) and large cities (Philadelphia, San Diego). Now I live in a city that feels more like a small town, only with public transportation. Some day I’d like to come home by train.

The Bicycle Accident

Hank Garfield

Bike wreck

A few years ago, I won a case in small claims court that I maybe should have lost. Allstate Insurance coughed up a couple hundred dollars toward the purchase of a new bicycle after my old one was crunched in a collision with a car.

I should have lost because I was riding the wrong way on a one-way street. The street is small and residential, and the one-way uphill block represented the most direct route from the old location of the Bangor post office to the east side address where I then lived. The elderly female driver had plenty of room to avoid me. But she made a truncated left turn, cutting off the corner. She claimed she didn’t see me over the hood of her Cadillac. I suffered a few scrapes; the bike’s frame was bent beyond repair.

I like to think of myself as a conscientious bicyclist. I wear bright clothing and use lights and hand signals. I was way over on the side of the road. An alert driver would not have hit me. Had there been a car parked where I was riding – as is often the case on that street – the woman would have struck it.

This was the point I made in court – or rather, in a mediation session that included me and a mediator and an attorney for Allstate, who had driven up from Portland that morning. My case went to mediation because the judge was acquainted with the woman who had hit me. The case was going to be postponed for thirty days.

I’ve forgotten the attorney’s name, but we had a hilarious conversation about how much money Allstate was willing to pay him to defend a $400 case. Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to give me the money, even if I was, technically, in the wrong? He made three phone calls before the company agreed to split the difference and throw me two hundred bucks toward a new bike.

It was fun being a thorn in the side of a huge insurance company. I felt like I had struck a blow against the forces of evil.
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But before my court date, I had read Mary Karr’s memoir Lit, and one particular passage began to gnaw at me. Karr tells of a conversation with another writer, who advised her not to try to make herself look good in the reflected light of memory. I realized that I had allowed my attitude about cars to color my perception of what happened.

It pains me to admit that I can cop an air of superiority when I’m on my bike in traffic. I convince myself that I’m doing something more enlightened than the drivers around me. Any one of those cars could squash me like a bug. Their drivers are trying to get through the day and get things done, just as I am. I’m not going to convince anyone of anything if, even subconsciously, I’m looking down at people who have made a different choice. I tell myself I don’t do this, as Karr convinced herself she never drank in the morning. But my actions speak otherwise. I need to pay attention to this.

A bicycle is a vehicle. It is every bit as illegal to bicycle as it is to drive the wrong way on a one-way street. We’re supposed to stop at red lights and stop signs. I admit that I don’t always obey the letter of the law. But when I roll through a stop sign (after looking both ways) or cut across a parking lot to avoid a red light (after making sure that it’s safe), I’m doing the same thing a driver does when exceeding the speed limit by five to ten miles an hour.

Or am I just rationalizing my own bad behavior? Well into my forties, I blithely rode my bicycle with my head protected by nothing harder than a baseball cap. I did this on the streets of San Diego and on the lonely highways of Maine, until a surgical nurse I’d grown close to described for me in graphic detail the injuries suffered by freedom-loving, bareheaded bicyclists. “But Bobby Orr never wore a helmet when he played hockey,” I replied.

She looked at me with what can only be described as incredulity. “Do you hear yourself?” It was clear in that moment that I didn’t have the stronger argument. I’ve worn a helmet ever since.

I took the money, and I still believe that drivers operating 3,000-pound motorized vehicles should be held to a higher standard of safety than bicyclists. But I haven’t ridden up any more one-way streets.[wpdevart_like_box profile_id=”” connections=”6″ width=”15″ height=”10″ header=”1″ locale=”en_US”]