Transportation Disruption 2016 - Couverture souple

Moser, Cliff

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1520397321 ISBN 13 : 9781520397320

Editeur : Independently published, 2017

Synopsis

Mobility My commute is almost three hours a day. That’s that way we talk about commuting. Like we own it. My commute. It’s mine. I pay for it, it belongs to me. I don’t share it. It is only mine. I live in Berkeley, California and work in Palo Alto, California. I ride a bike to Ashby BART station and catch the 5:58 AM San Francisco / Millbrae train. I arrive at Millbrae Bart Station at 6:50 AM. I walk over the bridge to the Caltrain station and catch the 7:02 to Palo Alto. I usually arrive at the Palo Alto train station at 7:30 AM. I then grab my second bike, which I keep in a Bike Barn ($8 a month), and ride two miles to my hospital project’s construction trailer. At 4:45 I repeat the same trip in reverse. I work with people who travel to Palo Alto from all over the Bay Area. Most of them drive. They own their commute. But with cars, they own it differently than I do. One of my co-workers drives 90 miles each way from Rohnert Park. He owns a hella commute. He crosses the Golden Gate bridge ten times a week, almost 500 times a year. However, there are two of my co-workers who also commute without a car. One, commutes by bike and Caltrain from Gilroy, California, the southernmost end of the line for Caltrain. The other co-worker travels from Sausalito, California, north of San Francisco. He beats my multi-modal mobility; taking the bus to the Ferry, the Ferry to San Francisco, hops on a bike share bicycle, rides to the Caltrain station at 4th and King, and then trains it to Palo Alto, where he catches the Stanford Marguerite shuttle to our construction trailer. His commute, both ways, if every goes well, is four and a half hours. He sees the Golden Gate Bridge twice a day on his commute, but from the water, if it’s not too foggy, or dark. Mobility is necessary for work. But in the US in 2016 workers are required to get to work on their own. There may be subsidies that help defray the cost of commuting, but it is expected that along with knowing what time to show up, what to wear, and what to do at work, you are required to provide your own transportation. That transportation expectation is delivered by driving one-self from home to the job in an automobile that one has purchased, or already owns. Furthermore, the US economy is dependent on automobiles. Workers make the raw materials that go into cars, workers make and sell cars, workers work to finance cars, bankers provide loans for cars, insurers insure cars, governments and designers and construction companies provide roads and parking for cars, police ticket for parking, drunk driving, reckless driving, courts enforce fines and fees, and every two to three years, the cycle is restarted as old cars are churned and new cars replace them. Not only a necessary part of our economy, but cars are also deeply embedded into our culture. Without a car, a worker is trapped without mobility. Acquiring a driver’s license is still a rite of passage. And the DMV exists as a trope to demonstrate how bad bureaucracy can be. We need our cars. The economy needs us to buy cars. Our culture needs us to strap ourselves into our cars and plummet privately to our jobs (or stew in non-moving traffic along with everyone else driving to work). Unfortunately, this agreement means that while they’re always available, only a short walk away rain or shine, snow or summer, our own private sanctuary. However, we only use them two to six hours a day. Otherwise we’re paying for infrastructure to store them for that other 18 to 22 hours – 60% to 90% of our investment is stored. But this is our covenant with the car. We’ll agree to buy the beasts, to bolster the economy beginning with the extraction of raw materials to the final days in traffic court. And our local, regional, state, and federal governments will use our taxes to provide the roads and storage. This ownership of commutes was never sustainable. These essays were written while thinking about a future without car ownership.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Independently published
• Date d'édition: 2017
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1520397321
• ISBN 13: 9781520397320
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 117
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Manufactured by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.fr/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg