he writes this week about living in a town that depends on tourists coming to spend money so there is great concern about parking problems / heh / i also live in a town that is a recreation destination plus we are so far off the beaten track that just getting here requires a car / the closest airport is 100 miles away in the next state / furthermore, the local rag, the SaltLake Tribune's front page headline yesterday was Climate : Utah's Bleak Fate

seems we are heating up faster than anywhere else / all that electricity to run the swamp coolers when it is 110 for weeks at a time and from transportation bc the distances we have to drive are so great and to get the tourists here not to mention all our food

i am pleased to note that we are beginning to address our problems and it hasnt anything to do with parking / more like growing our own food without much water / millet seems to be the grain of the future

cheers, i actually cant wait to see what is going to happen !

Katherine

Unfortunately he's absolutely right.

I'm no saint, but found it healthier for me and the environment to live where walking was an option. If I needed to go somewhere too far to walk, which really isn't ever true, I'd make a point of stopping during my necessary commute.

Yeah, I drove even though public transportation was available, but my hours varied and the buses didn't.

Its amazing how many Americans would never consider walking five blocks, let alone 40.

BTW, I found walking addictive. Several times I took off and ended up in the next town which was 13 miles away. Never walked back home. Took the bus.

I got along just fine on a bicycle until they allowed me to get a drivers license.

And I'm still blaming all of the problems of adulthood on the adults.

i don't have a driver's license. it's actually a really long story i don't want to go into right now, but suffice it to say, i get around just fine by public transportation and have done so all my life [i am 41]. you cannot imagine the shit i have caught over the years from people that are convinced i am a loser, a retard, a faggot, a communist, and oh yes, now i'm also a bad parent, because i just don't consider it a matter of life or death that i acquire the ability to drive a car.

the little one loves the bus, by the way. she has an absolute blast when we go places with other people instead of trapped inside our own little mobile prison cell. she also loves to walk. i think she's going to be okay.

And it seems to me only one more baby step to the conclusion that the real problem is neither dependence on foreign oil, nor an addiction to cars, but an addiction to passivity and acceptance of marching orders from the TV.

Benjamin Barber, a weird writer I don't mean to associate myself with, nonetheless has a good point when he talks about the infantilization of American culture and the implications for individual lives. Ad-driven television, where no matter what the drama is, it'll pause for the requisite commercials, eliminates the concept of stories so involving you lose yourself in them. For more than twelve minutes, at least. That changes the concept of drama. Saturday morning cartoons reduce kids' vocabularies and attention spans, and encourage them to think that explosions and fistfights constititute a story. Then, when they're thirty, they're still acting like middle-schoolers.

When the public begins to think of activity as changing the channel, what's left of civil discourse is ignorable by those who wish to do so.

Homer Simpson says public transportation is for losers. In the Bay Area that's not true, of course; BART is a commuter's dream most days, and certainly on average better than driving into the city and parking (this is from a person who barely managed to eat lunch because BART was late today). Teaching kids, and everyone, that public transportation is great is a cultural gift.

The Japanese are on their third generation of shinkanzen, which do 500 miles an hour. Caltrain's "Baby Bullet" trains might top 60 because they only stop four times up the Peninsula, but they're regular trains that are used to doing 35 which skip most of the standard stops.

But we're better off than the Japanese because, in the end, we don't suffer from socialized medicine. Or, come to that, guaranteed income, universal education, food for every living being, and so on. All possible, if someone figures out how to make a profit doing them, or put another way, if feeding people can be reconciled with capitalism.