Month: December 2016

Using the Bus System isn’t hard if you’re willing to Walk

Hank Garfield

 

Winter is the time of year I’m most thankful that I don’t own a car.

It’s also the time of year I’m most grateful to friends willing to give me rides when the temperature drops below zero. This includes the lovely Lisa, who refuses to let me walk the half-mile or so to the downtown bus stop when conditions are at their most brutal.

Does this make me a hypocrite? Probably. But as I’ve written before, we are quick to condemn hypocrisy in others and slow to acknowledge it in ourselves. Vegetarians have been known to wear leather, environmentalists to use oil, and conservatives to live out their late years on Social Security and Medicaid. Most of modern life consists of compromise between our beliefs and our situations.

We live in a world of cars, whether we like it or not. The founding father of the car culture is not Karl Benz, who invented the automobile, but Henry Ford, who brought cars to the masses. The car itself is a technological marvel, an order-of-magnitude improvement on the horse. But too much of a good thing is still too much.

By the late 20th century, the United States was crisscrossed with limited-access highways from sea to shining sea. Outside of a few east coast cities, car ownership has become an American expectation. You can’t build a business without adequate parking, or a house without a driveway. Many jobs either require you to own a car or offer you a free parking space at work and no discount if you don’t use a car to get there. Traffic is the first topic of discussion when planning public events.

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I have many disagreements with the millennial generation: their indifference to spelling and grammar, their naïve politics, their preference for football to baseball. But I commend them for their willingness to take on the conventional wisdom that we all need cars. In significant numbers, they are pushing for walking communities, neighborhood stores, and robust public transportation. They’ve seen through the advertising and the cultural peer pressure, and come to the sensible realization that cars can be shared, or rented, or bypassed in favor of buses, boots, and bicycles.

Which brings me back to the point I started writing about. Winter is the worst time of year to be dependent on a car. You are forever shoveling it out, scraping ice off the windshield, and skidding on snow-covered streets. While I’m grateful for rides to the bus stop on frigid mornings (and more than willing to shovel the driveway in return), I’m glad to be spared the expense of snow tires and antifreeze and the stress of winter driving.

For the past several years I’ve tried to do my Christmas shopping downtown. This year, a few gifts necessitated a trip to the commercial area around the Bangor Mall. I boarded the Mount Hope bus at 1:15. Fifteen minutes later, I disembarked at Bull Moose on Hogan Road. On foot, I navigated a shopping area designed for cars, first crossing Hogan Road (four lanes and no crosswalks), cut behind K-Mart and in front of Best Buy, emerging on Stillwater Avenue near the Goodwill Store. From there I hiked to the L.L. Bean outlet, and then caught the Stillwater bus back to downtown. The whole trip took less than 90 minutes.

It did require knowledge of the bus schedule, and the willingness to walk in a part of town that discourages walking. Had I missed my bus I would have had to wait an hour for the next one. And it was a mild day for December. I would not have made the trip in the subzero wind chill temperatures that descended on Maine a few days later.

For a reasonably healthy person, the bus can be combined with a good pair of boots, or, weather permitting, a bicycle, to complete errands as conveniently as one could with a car. It’s better to have a thriving downtown business district that offers what the Mall area does, but that will happen when people change their driving habits. It gives me something to hope for in these dark days of December.

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Happy Holidays from the Tailpipe of the Nation

Hank Garfield

Writers should avoid using the word “should.”

It’s easy to tell people what they should do. It’s also presumptuous, and often counter-productive. People don’t like to be lectured.

This blog has always been centered on my personal experience of living without owning a car in Bangor, Maine. It works for me. The same decision might not work for you, or most people you know. But it works for me, despite the obstacles.

And notice that I do not say “living without a car,” because cars remain part of my life. They are part of everybody’s life, like electricity and television – and the air we all breathe.

But recently I saw Maine referred to as “the tailpipe of the nation” in my local newspaper. The phrase referred not to cars but to power plants in the midwest and south, mostly fueled by coal. Their emissions ride the prevailing winds to Maine, like the sailing ships of yore. We’re downwind from everywhere.

In their opinion piece, contributors Paul Shapero, M.D. and Jeanette MacNeille, a longtime volunteer with the American Lung Association in Maine, called for tougher regulations on these plants. Citing high rates of asthma in Maine, and worsening air quality on warm summer days, they make a persuasive argument. Moving now to increase carbon caps will also spur the development of cleaner energy sources that will further reduce emissions in the future, they claim.

Green is also good for the economy, they argue. Innovation in renewable energy will create more jobs than any short-term revival of the coal industry. Seems reasonable.

Still, the majority of pollutants in Maine’s air come not from power plants but from motor vehicles. According to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, “mobile sources” emit half of all hazardous air pollutants in Maine. These sources include cars, trucks, buses, boats, trains, farm equipment, and recreational vehicles. The DEP’s page at maine.gov clarifies the point: “Car and truck emissions are the largest contributor of air pollution generated in Maine.”
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Electric cars won’t get us out of this dilemma, because the electricity to run them has to come from some power plant somewhere. It would seem to make little difference whether air pollutants come from a handful of smokestacks or a whole lot of exhaust pipes.

Cars have gotten cleaner and more efficient in the past few decades, but there are more of them now. The best way to reduce the total output of vehicle emissions is to reduce the total number of vehicles. This means expanding public transportation, and shifting a significant amount of long-distance commerce from road to rail. On a smaller scale, it means promoting pedestrian-friendly business districts and bicycle infrastructure.

But it’s easier to regulate a few power plants than it is to meddle in the driving habits of millions of ordinary Americans. We’re used to low gas taxes and free, or mostly free, parking. We’re comfortable with freeway traffic but confused by bus schedules.

Still, I believe in the power of public policy to nudge private behavior in desirable directions. This can take many non-coercive forms, from mandating bicycle lanes to expanding bus hours. Businesses can be encouraged to offer bus passes to their employees instead of free jobsite parking. Gas taxes, currently at historic lows, can be gradually increased, which will help pay for more buses and bicycle lanes as well as encourage people to explore alternatives to car-centric lifestyles.

We can sit in Maine and point the finger at upwind power plants and tell their owners that they “should” curb carbon emissions. It’s more problematic to tell your neighbor that he “should” walk to the store for that quart of milk, or take the bus to work instead of his car.

Behavior changes slowly, over time. But it does change. People no longer smoke in bars and restaurants, for example, and those businesses have thrived as a result. Mainers don’t throw beer and soda cans out their car windows, as they did when I was growing up. It’s no longer acceptable to burn our trash in open-air dumps or dispose of industrial waste in our rivers.

In each case, public policy led the way and private behavior followed. This blog is one small attempt at the opposite. I’m not trying to tell my valued readers what they “should” do. But as more of us discover the freedom from car ownership, perhaps public policymakers will take notice.

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Will We Build Metric Highways on Mars?

Hank Garfield

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On Interstate 19 in Arizona, which connects the city of Tucson with the Mexican border at Nogales, the signs are in kilometers. According to CNN, America’s only metric highway is a remnant of the Jimmy Carter era, when the idea of adopting the metric system in the United States was briefly taken seriously.

Every country in the world – almost – uses the metric system. And everyone knows why: the math is easier. All you have to do to convert between units is move the decimal point. It’s the world’s official system of measurement. Our American inch is defined in statute as precisely 2.54 centimeters.

The metric system is the one part of the French Revolution to sweep the world. Today, the only remaining non-metric countries are Liberia (founded by American slaves who returned to Africa), Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), and the United States.

My late friend Dave Alvernaz once suggested to me that the metric system hadn’t caught on here because it lacked the conceptual equivalent of a foot. Your foot is always there at the end of your leg, he pointed out, available to stick into a box or pace off a room. Three of them make a yard, and most of us are between five and seven feet tall. It’s a utilitarian measurement, based on the human body.

The metric system is based on the size of the Earth. The original definition of a meter was one ten-millionth (10-7) the distance along a meridian from the equator to the pole. Because not even this distance is constant (Earth bulges in different places), the official definition of a meter has since been tied to the speed of light. This is important to scientists and engineers seeking exact measurements of small distances on the atomic scale and large distances between the planets and stars.

All space missions have used the metric system since the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter in November 1999. Designed to orbit Mars and monitor its weather, the ship burned up in the Martian atmosphere. According to Wired magazine: “A NASA review board found that the problem was in the software controlling the orbiter’s thrusters. The software calculated the force the thrusters needed to exert in pounds of force. A separate piece of software took in the data assuming it was in the metric unit: newtons.”

The new National Geographic Network Series Mars, set in the near future, uses entirely metric units. When the crew landed 75 kilometers from base camp, I had to calculate: “Okay, so a little less than fifty miles…”
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Based on a decimal fraction of the size of the Earth, the metric system makes no more intrinsic sense on Mars than miles and feet. But it’s the easiest system to use, and it’s already the one in use by a majority of humankind. Perhaps if we had listened to Jimmy Carter 40 years ago, the Mars Climate Orbiter would not have crashed, and I would know my height in centimeters.

Like most Americans, I think in inches, feet and miles. Using the metric system is like learning a new language, something else Americans are notoriously reluctant to do.

The car culture, too, has its own language and patterns of thought, which make it difficult to change. We think of longer distances not in terms of miles but driving times: Bangor is two hours from Portland and four from Boston. It’s assumed that we are not talking about airplanes or bicycles. Car travel is part of our unspoken collective consciousness.

When I stopped using a car as my primary form of transportation, I found that I thought about the pattern of the day differently. How long did it take to walk to the bus stop? What did I need to take with me? How was the weather? When did the last bus leave downtown? What time did the sun set?

I recently saw the film Arrival. It was ostensibly about aliens but it was really about language. With a nod to Kurt Vonnegut, the film postulates that if humans can learn the aliens’ language deeply enough to think in it, they can see the Universe from a different perspective. Language drives perception, as much as vice versa.

I thought about that in the days after watching the film. And I thought that if we could begin to talk about cars and time and distance differently, without all the popular assumptions, we could perhaps begin to conceive of another way to live.

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