We are wending our way home from a vacation in Chicago, traveling I-70 east from Columbus, Ohio. Overall, Chicago was a good destination for a vacation. Nevertheless, having done Montreal and Toronto during our last vacation, Portland and Denver on recent business trips and New York City many times I am citied out. On my next vacation, I want a few weeks far from civilization.
Nonetheless, if you have to visit a huge American city and have deep pockets then Chicago is a terrific destination. It has the virtues of New York without most of its downsides — like the hellish 24/7 noise, the incessant congestion, the filth and the rats. (I am speaking only of downtown Chicago. The rest of the city, from our views of it, was far less enamoring.) While in Chicago, we saw terrific museums and took in two musicals. The more memorable one was the touring version of the new Broadway hit musical Wicked. The other was an irreverent but very funny Second City musical version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Aside from four nights in Chicago, we spent three nights in the Ohio suburbs. Each stop was convenient to traveling and the people we were visiting. Our overnights were in Maumee (a convenient rest stop south of Toledo), Springfield (a suburb on the north side of Cincinnati) and Dublin (on the periphery of Columbus).
I am afraid that the driving part of our vacation left a lot to be desired. It also left me sad and more than a bit nostalgic. Driving used to be an adventure. Now driving across America is a bland, frustrating and sometimes abrasive experience. I should wax poetic at the marvel at our interstate system. Undeniably, it is overall a convenient and usually quick way to zip across the country by automobile. Our transportation infrastructure, even if often congested, is still a marvel that is reached neither in size nor in scale by any other country. However, driving the interstates today, at least here in the Midwest, struck me as a sad and extended experience in the mediocrity and homogenization of modern America.
You can get a feel for the values of a state by traversing their toll roads. On the Pennsylvania Turnpike, you feel doubly squeezed: by the often-narrow road and the high cost per mile for the toll. Pennsylvania goes for minimalist rest stops that are often crowded and dirty. Getting back on the toll road may mean putting the pedal to the metal because the merge lanes do not last long. Fortunately, Pennsylvania has greatly improved their turnpike. While it can be considered fair at best, it used to be downright poor. The surrounding scenery helps to make up for road itself.
The Ohio Turnpike has both the best rest stops and the best-maintained toll roads. We travelers actually feel welcomed on their turnpike. Admittedly, large stretches of it may be flat and boring. At least much of their turnpike is three lanes in each direction, so you do not feel like you are going to be scraped by a passing vehicle like you do in Pennsylvania. While Ohio’s tolls are not cheap, you feel like you got your money’s worth. Their rest stops are attractive to the eye. They offer a variety of restaurants that are well maintained and uniformly clean. The gas prices on the turnpike plazas reflect street prices off the pike. The good citizens of Ohio have decided that travelers should not endure either a second-class road or second-class services on its toll roads. I appreciate these kinds of values. Perhaps I will retire in Ohio.
Contrast this with traveling on the Indiana Turnpike. In Indiana, you get the feeling the state just wants your dough, and as much of it as they can get for the least amount of money. The road quality quickly degrades. Unfortunately Indiana, as experienced from its interstates, does not speak well of the state. If I were to judge the state by what I saw along its interstates, Indiana would rank near the bottom of desirable states to live. The values of Indiana seem to be large annoying billboards, cheap fireworks, adult superstores, strip joints, casino gambling and, oh, religion too. Go figure. There is not much of anything bucolic to see on their turnpike other than cornfields. As you pass through Gary, you may have to roll up your windows to avoid the chemical stench. In short, from the interstate Indiana gives the impression it is a state full of trailer park trash values. If this red state is an example of Republican utopia, Republicans are welcome to it. If I were in charge of promoting Indiana, I would be thinking about making some major changes.
Venture off the interstate in Indiana to buy gas and it becomes impossible to distinguish one place from another. It soon all runs together: garish billboards, large signs for restaurants and hotels hoisted hundreds of feet in the air, neon lights, harsh industrial lighting, and the ubiquitous but deafening drone of accelerating trucks. Alas, in this respect Indiana is like most other states. Junk food is cheap and plentiful, which may explain the girth of the people I encountered. Unless you are close to a city, trying to find a place to purchase something resembling healthy food off Indiana interstates is a largely a pointless endeavor. You had better be hungry for McDonalds, Wendy’s, Taco Bell or KFC if you are traveling through Indiana. If you are lucky, the exit may have a Subway.
While there are still many cornfields in Indiana and Ohio, it increasingly feels like the cities are encroaching on each other. (Cincinnati and Columbus are good examples.) Each place where we stopped overnight seemed indistinguishable from the others. The nearby restaurants and theater chains were largely the same that we have at home. There was nothing particularly memorable about Maumee, Springdale or Dublin. They offer bland uniformity and convenience for the traveler, but not one thing that will make you turn your head. You would think they would be cleverer at marketing. Those who drive I-95 to and from Florida certainly know about South of the Border.
We found the truck traffic on the interstates to be often overwhelming. I have to assume that the railroads are having a hard time attracting customers. It seems that all of our freight is now moving by truck. We recreational drivers spend much of our time jockeying around the voluminous single, double and even triple trailer trucks. Between the laboring trucks and the heightened volume of the summer traffic, we found that the cruise control had little value.
Perhaps things are different in Europe. If we were to vacation there, as we hope to at some point, perhaps every place where we stop will feel different, look different and have a unique character. However, the more I travel the United States, the more homogenous it feels. It feels particularly this way when I travel it by car. Perhaps these are simply expressions of our deepest values. Perhaps we are truly one United States now in fact. From our highways, the evidence seems overwhelming. It seems that in America we want our travel experience to be like our fast food: familiar, mediocre and predictable.
The late CBS News correspondent Charles Kuralt used to travel the highways and byways of America. In every community, he seemed to find a unique culture or story. Maybe that is still the case. You probably will not find it along America’s interstates. They are best breezed through and forgotten.
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August 20th, 2005 at 08:01pm
Posted by
Mark |
Sociology |
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There was a time not too long ago when most people did not need an automobile. They got where they needed to go by hopping on the neighborhood trolley. Most cities and towns above a certain size had trolleys. Trolley rides were ubiquitous, cheap, environmentally friendly, quick and convenient. After seeing the DC Trolley Museum today, I could not help but wonder why we were so boneheaded as to get rid of them. We must have been out of our minds.
Oh, I know about the economic reasons that caused trolleys to disappear. They are well documented on Trolley Stop, a wonderful website full of details about our recent trolley-filled past. The automobile did them in. As automobiles became cheaper, those with automobiles often turned their cars into illegal forms of public transportation. They offered people rides for a bit less than the trolley charged. Their cars were called jitneys. Later on after World War II, cars became reliable enough and gas became cheap enough that cars finally became more convenient for many people than the trolley. Trolley ridership declined to the point where they were no longer economically sustainable. The car became king.
So here we are half a century or so later. For many of us the car is a painful and expensive necessity because we have no other options. Instead of taking us where we want to go quickly, they instead often take us where we need to go slowly. When my mother was in the hospital in June, I decided to visit her on a Friday evening. What was I thinking? A twenty-mile trip from the Northern Virginia to the Maryland suburbs during rush took me two hours, much of it on a merge ramp trying to get onto an already clogged Washington Capital Beltway. It boggles my mind that people who commute from Maryland to Virginia do this every day. They do it because they do not really have any other realistic alternatives. The trolley lines are long gone. If there were buses that could take them, they would be stuck in traffic too.
Now the only place that you are likely to find trolleys is in a museum. The DC Trolley Museum, in far northern Silver Spring, Maryland on Bonifant Road is blessed with dozens of working trolleys used in Washington, in cities across America, and overseas. They have a small but educational visitors’ center. But why read about trolleys when you can ride one instead? Most visitors to the museum buy a ticket and board one of the trolleys that pull out of the garage every hour or so. From the ding ding of the trolley’s bell to the call of the conductor to the squeal of the trolley’s brakes as it rounds corners, you can get a taste for public transportation in our recent past. It should make you wistful.
Trolleys were not just creatures of the cities. Trolleys created the suburbs. Back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was not expensive to extend trolley lines. So trolley companies extended them into the country and housing followed. Washington suburbs like Chevy Chase are a direct result of extended trolley lines. Many trolley companies found they needed to create interesting destinations for their passengers. The Glen Echo Amusement Park in Cabin John, Maryland was one of many such parks created by trolley companies. The profits from the parks helped keep the trolley system financially solvent.
In their heyday, trolley lines also gave stiff competition to the passenger railroad systems. At the DC Trolley Museum, I learned that there were profitable trolley lines between Hagerstown and Frederick in Maryland and many major and minor cities. These “interurban” trolley lines connected with their more urban cousins. They were also usually less expensive to ride and more centrally located.
Although trolleys were originally pulled by horses and mules, they eventually became all electric. In our increasingly polluted cities, they would now be a blessing.
In some places, trolleys are making something of a comeback. They are now referred to as light rail. Portland, Oregon is one of many cities making use of light rail. During a recent visit, Portland’s light rail system left me delighted. It took me from their airport to downtown but it also goes to many other places in the city. It cost me $1.70 and 45 minutes of my time. I could have spent $40 by taking a taxi. However, the light rail system was much more fun. It was also satisfying to see how the downtown area of Portland accommodated light rail on its streets. Some of its streets are designated for light rail use only.
This is good and as it should be. Other cities could learn a lot by emulating Portland. Many of our clogged divided highways have medians that are ideal for light rail. As usage of light rail increases and as automobiles become increasingly expensive to own it may be possible to devote some auto lanes for trolley or light rail use. I think that if we build trolley lines out from the cities toward our suburbs again then passengers will come.
The age of oil is ending, but it is unlikely that mankind will stop growing. We need to reexamine practical solutions that worked well in our past like trolleys and refine them for the present.
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July 9th, 2005 at 10:15pm
Posted by
Mark |
History |
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It’s 7 AM. Do you know where your car is? Increasingly my car remains parked inertly in my driveway. Instead of driving to work I am finding I’d rather bicycle instead.
I realize I am fortunate to have this option. I haven’t really ever had it as a realistic option before. Yes, there were times when I biked to work all the time. But it wasn’t because I had much of an option. My one car family growing up meant my Mom usually couldn’t drive me. Actually since I was one of eight siblings it never occurred to me to ask. So biking was the only way to get to work short of walking for an hour or more in each direction. This was the case in my first job (1973) when at age 16 I worked at a Winn Dixie store in Daytona Beach. It was three or so miles in each direction to the store on the peninsula from our house on the mainland. In 1978 I had moved to Maryland and lived a couple miles from where I worked. Bicycling again was the only realistic option, unless my hours worked out so that I could catch the bus instead. My car at the time was too expensive to fix up. I had no credit cards and only a couple hundred bucks in the bank.
But now I can choose between biking and driving to work. And unless the weather doesn’t suit I choose to bike. It’s about three miles in each direction and largely a straight shot on a bike path next to the Fairfax County Parkway. And ironically I can get there in about the same time it would take me to drive it. That’s because when I drive I have to deal with rush hour traffic. I often have to wait with my engine running for three minutes just to get on the parkway. Then it can be stop and go for the rest of my commute. No executive parking spot for this GS-14. I’m back at the end of the parking lot, which means several minutes of walking just to get to my building.
All these issues are rendered moot by the bike. At most it adds a couple minutes to my commute. On a bad traffic day I can beat the traffic. No parking for me at the far end of the lot anymore. Rather I zip my bike up the main ramp of my building dodging the jersey barriers. I lock my bike in the bike rack right next to the main entrance. I arrive with my heart racing but feeling so very alive. My only concern is that I’m not so sweaty that I offend my coworkers.
As best I can tell there is no downside to bicycling. On most days the six miles of bicycling suffices for daily exercise. I don’t have to add a workout or a run when I get home. This gives me more time to do what I want. Rising gas prices no longer frighten me. I don’t worry about contributing needlessly to global warming or the ozone problem. The only way that would happen is if I ate too many beans with meals.
And it’s not a bad commute either. I would prefer my commute to be a bit more bucolic. Instead I hear the roar of my fellow commuters thirty feet next to me. But when peddling at 20-30 miles an hour the wind drowns out much of the noise. And in the morning the ride is usually cool and a bit bracing.
The ride home can be a bit more problematic in the summer time. Thunderstorms are a frequent occurrence in the late afternoons this time of year. I am sure a thunderstorm one of these days will drench me. But I also have the Internet now. I can see if rain is approaching by going to Weather Underground and checking their radar map. If I am proactive enough I can leave work early and dodge the rain. Once home I can telecommute until my workday is over. Or I can wait until the storm passes. These storms don’t usually last long.
There is never a traffic jam on the bike paths. I may pass one or two fellow bicyclists in each direction but as far as I am concerned I am on my own private expressway. The only thing that really slows me down is crossing the Fairfax County Parkway. Alas, there is no bridge to carry me over the traffic so I must wait at the light just like a car. But sometimes I get lucky and have little or no wait and cut a couple minutes off my commute.
I’m wondering how long I can keep it up. I won’t do it if it is raining. There will be code red or code orange days when it would be healthier to take the car, even at the expense of adding to the ozone problem. Once the morning lows hit forty or lower I may weenie out. But for now my goal is to keep riding. I could always stand to be a bit trimmer. Perhaps bicycling will be the way I finally lose those last necessary pounds. I’ll find out in time.
I find it healthy, fun, invigorating and a great way to arrive at the office full of energy and ready to be productive. I wish more of us had this option. Starbucks would sell a lot less coffee because we bicycle commuters don’t arrive at work half asleep.
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June 2nd, 2004 at 08:26pm
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2004 |
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