Driving Crazy

You get up in the morning to do battle. All the drivers on the road ahead of you are the enemy. You must win! You must pass them all! So you get into your chariot—it might be a small sedan, it might be a monster sport utility vehicle. It may well be more metal and power you will ever use to its full capability. But you will try, on this commute to work on this day, to vanquish the infidel before you who dare to get in the way. You need SPEED! Look! That pick-up truck in front of you is actually going the speed limit! Swoop around him, even though he has just put on his turn signal to try to get around the slow moving gravel hauler that he's gaining on. Quickly pass him—right or left, it doesn't matter, you're not going to use the turn signal anyway—so you can resume your quest at 12 miles over the speed limit. Even in construction zones. The reduced-speed signs are for wimps and wusses.

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Yesterday afternoon, the traffic reporters were all a-twitter over the I-275/I-696 interchange. The interchange has been under construction since before it was built 20 years ago, but it's being worked on as part of I-275 being rebuilt completely this year. State police decided to crack down on drivers who cut in at the last minute before the construction zone and the ramps start. There would be maybe 10 cars pulled over, each driver getting a ticket for crossing the solid line that separates the lanes leading up to the ramp. Apparently, other drivers were cheering this. even calling into the radio station and maybe gloating about it. Their joy at seeing the scofflaws get their just desserts probably mitigated the frustration of the five mile traffic jam the enforcement effort caused.

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If you want to feel stress, try being the only driver doing the speed limit in a construction zone. I've had lots of practice at that this year, the busiest road construction season in memory. (Thanks to Governor John Engler, who spent his first term ignoring the crumbling roads like the governors before him, and then suddenly decided we needed to do something so he could look like the Road King.) There are people working on the road in barely barricaded lanes not 20 feet from speeding traffic, and yet very few drivers seem to realize this. They hardly blink at the speed limit signs and swerve around the fools like me who actually (get this) slow down for a construction zone. And I have to be honest, I very rarely go 45 in a freeway construction zone that's signed for 45. I'd get killed — flattened by a speeding Lincoln Navigator or Ford Expedition. But I do reduce my speed considerably. Then I watch my mirrors very carefully to keep track of the speed demons behind me. I rarely want to make people change to fit my perceptions of the world. But on the subject of freeway speeds, this is one case where I'd love to line up some people and slap them silly until they realized that they were wrong. Wonder if I can get the state police to pay me for doing that?

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I mentioned the Navigator and the Expedition above. They're MONSTERS. I can't come up with any other word to describe them. I pulled up next to an Expedition at the light. I have a pick-up truck — granted a small one, but it's not a Honda Civic. I was eye level with the top of the hood of the beast. That was still at least 3 feet below the eye level of its driver, who struck me as a suburban housewife type who has in that vehicle more power and room than she is likely to ever use.

I just shake my head. I grew up in the 70s when economy was the buzzword, and I thought, silly me, that we were going to start being responsible about how much gasoline we consumed. Then the SUV (sport-utility vehicle) comes along, and they get bigger and heavier and guzzle more gas per mile than ever. Yes I drive a pick-up. But it gets over 25 miles per gallon, and it's over 10 years and 140,000 miles old. The SUVs seem to top out at 19 miles per gallon on the highway, and that's for the small ones. Gas is cheap, and no one really can argue otherwise by any method of comparison. But it's still finite. And burning it still pollutes. And that's on top of the metals and other materials that go into building a SUV, which is considerably more than what goes into your everyday sedan.

SUVs are incredible in one way. They are pretty well designed and manage to stay on the road most of the time. This is amazing when one considers that most of their drivers are driving them as if they were sedans, yet the large SUVs are proportioned a lot like a large van or a truck. I think there are a lot of under-skilled yet lucky drivers out there.

I've been singling out the SUV segment of the auto market. But there are a lot of supersized pick- up trucks out there too, huge trucks that I know don't get much of a work-out at a construction site or on a farm. Sedans are getting bigger too. The roads are definitely getting smaller out there, with a lot less space between the vehicles.

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I guess here's what's underlying all this. I just have a feeling that everyone is living larger than they have to. We just don't need to go 80 miles an hour everywhere, and we just don't need the biggest example of luxury to do it. Spending $30,000 on a motor vehicle and then using one and a half times the usual amount of gasoline to operate it is a misplacement of resources, particularly in a world where people starve and hurt and hate. If you think I have opinions about cars and drivers, ask me sometimes about urban sprawl. We don't need another subdivision of mid-six-figure houses replacing farms, either. And don't get me started about consumer goods. If we had all that money looking for solutions to society's problems instead of feeding our addiction to comfort, the world might be a better place. It's not enough for your house to be a better place. We've seen all kinds of examples where despite all the comforts of the modern home, it's not enough to keep people from their ills.

Talk about a voice crying in the wilderness.... I look at a lot of my friends, and they're busy consuming and speeding along as fast as they can too. I sure do my part sometimes. To not chase after everything your money can buy and then some is just plain out of style in America today.

And that's too bad, because I believe very strongly that we can use things like fossil fuels and farmlands up. It's not some low-self-esteem based poverty consciousness that's working here, it's just a real sense that things are finite and once we run out of some of them, they're gone. Forever. We may have substitutes for them, someday, when we realize that "Oh gee, that really was a good thing to not use up." But they'll be substitutes and it'll be too late for the real things.

What it comes down to for me is this: People should live as if there are other people, as if there truly are consequences to their actions. Driving unsafely has consequences that can be avoided by simply driving safely. Consuming less means there are more resources to devote to other ends that might improve life for others. There's a fine line between living "the considerate life" and living for the sake of others, but most of us could afford to move a bit closer to that line, for the benefit of all.

—Charlie Songdog
August 19, 1999