My Blog

Transportation blindness

We are making frog soup of our lives and our world. The way to boil a live frog as we already know, is to put her in cool water and then gradually heat it up so that she relaxes and adapts to the heat. and before you know it she goes to sleep rather than jumping out of the boiling pot and viola, frog soup.

We cannot see that driving the car to work every day for 20 years instead of making the drastic change to get a job closer to home or to taking public transportation or biking or walking is truly making a huge difference over time. I know intimately from experience because I dumped my car 6 months ago and changed jobs and moved 1000 miles to a place that has public transit. I am so much happier than I ever thought possible and have 500 dollars less in bills each month. Plus I am finally getting a normal amount of exercise.

The time I used to spend at the gym for cardio and in traffic is spent seeing humming birds up close on daily basis and get to eat low hanging fresh sun ripened fruit wherever I go. I slow down now and plan ahead and get more done. I realize that I never needed the car to begin with.

My ex husband suggested I get a car at the age of 28 when we lived in Boston. I had never needed a car there because the subway system was so inclusive. He grew up in a normal, middle class American family in the suburbs were people drove everywhere. I grew up with a mom who did not drive. We took buses, trains, planes, subways and bicycles and used our feet all our lives with no undo restriction or hardship. We moved large objects with the help of friends or rented trucks on occasion and we socialized with friends and saw plays and operas and went to museums as much or more than families with cars.

To my well-meaning ex-husband and to our society it was a rite of passage for me to get a car, finally at the age of 28. To be a respected, mature adult meant having a car and paying off a car note. But I realize now that those values are simply ignorant and misplaced. Had I been more educated and forward thinking about environmental issues and connectedness I would have forgone the car and urged my ex-husband and I to relocate to a city and jobs with public transportation when we moved from Boston to California instead of wasting all that gas and money and gaining 20 pounds from being so much more sedentary from the age of 28 to 49!