Bill Yoder writes:
My favorite excuse of my high school students for not having time to do their homework is "I have to go to work." When asked why they have to go to work, it's "I have to pay for my car." When asked why they have to have a car, it's "I have to get to work." It's hard to defeat such circular logic. Too many kids are hooked on cars at age 16, and live the remainder of their lives enslaved by the concept of "freedom of the road."
And Ken Kifer asks:
How did people become so dependent on motorized transportation? If we believe television and movies, every American family before the car had a horse and wagon or had horses and saddles for everyone. But this is just our car culture projected backwards. It took too much time and trouble to feed and care for a horse every day (in the Westerns, the horse can magically travel for days without food), so most people lived in towns where they could walk to all their destinations. Walking long distances was not a rare event and was seen as an enjoyable activity.
Some cities were not forced to join the car culture until quite late. In Pittsburgh in the 50's and even the 60's, it was possible to ride a streetcar or walk to every destination and to just use a car for vacation trips. I say "forced" because, in Pittsburgh and other cities, the streetcar routes were discontinued while still quite popular. As a young boy, I walked city streets to school every day, and I never encountered any dangers. My parents thought nothing of walking long distances too. After getting to my grandparents' in Cannonsburg by streetcar, we would walk a mile up a steep hill to their house and then walk to every destination after we got there. Unfortunately, after we moved to Alabama in '55, public transportation was poor and sidewalks absent, so I was the only one who maintained the habit of walking everywhere.
Leave a comment