Mondays with Mike: Driving me crazy

We’re on the Amtrak train from Milwaukee back to Chicago after a lovely Christmas day visit with our son Gus in Watertown, and a lovely overnight at the Pfister hotel in Milwaukee. This followed a lovely Christmas Eve spent eating Chinese food with our friends Steven and Nancy, who were visiting from Urbana, followed by a lovely performance by Tammy McCann and a great trio at the Jazz Showcase. This followed a lovely get together at our place for Beth’s birthday, with neighborhood pals from our Hackney’s days, all eating gourmet Sloppy Joes that I whipped up.

Gus liked his nifty combination White Sox/Blackhawks scarf.

It was, to put too fine a point on it, just a lovely holiday.

Now back to Amtrak. The train between Chicago and Milwaukee is a joy. It runs, unlike, say, the Amtrak between Chicago and Champaign, on time like a European train. Big seats, Wifi, no driving, who cares what the weather is. There’s a Zipcar across the street from the Milwaukee Amtrak station. We get off the train, hop in the car, and are at Gus’s within an hour. No Kennedy expressway, no Edens expressway, no tolls.

We’ve been carless for years now and I couldn’t be happier about it. It was weird at first—I grew up in the suburbs where cars were a necessity (and of course, the suburb only existed because of cars). I’d had a car since forever. I liked driving, until I didn’t. I did always like cars from an entertainment point of view—but not nearly as much as I do motorcycles.

The Pfister lobby was in full holiday glory.

And now, I see cars strictly as a necessary evil.

And evil, really, isn’t that much of an exaggeration. I came across this article in The Atlantic awhile back: it sums things up pretty well. It’s insane, when you step back, what driving costs us in blood and treasure. I know, I know, depending on where you live, you don’t have a choice about it.

But we do have some choices. In some places, a choice is public transportation. Almost everywhere, walking is an option.

And Beth and I walk like crazy. But in the winter, it gets a little dicey. Beth broke her hand last year in a fall. And as we age, such things are a bigger and bigger deal. In our neighborhood, the walks in front of apartment buildings, condo buildings, and businesses are well shoveled. But there are these strips of purgatory that go untended. Treacherous stretches that get iced up over freeze-thaw cycles and only go away after a warm spell or a hard rain.

For example, the proprietors of surface parking lots often don’t shovel adjacent walks—though they do, of course, plow the spaces for the cars. And we have a nice little park that serves as sort of a town square for our neighborhood, replete with a fountain that operates in the warm months. Somehow, though, the park district decides not to shovel the walks in the winter.

It makes for some unwanted adventure, especially for the elderly or, say, blind people.

All of which struck me the other morning as we walked to the Amtrak station. Holiday vehicular traffic was extremely light. Pedestrians were everywhere. The streets had been plowed clean. The empty bike paths had been plowed. But the sidewalks were spotty.

I sorta get why that is. But I sorta don’t. Sidewalks are public thoroughfares. But somehow it’s incumbent on households and businesses to keep them clean.

We live with cars and the havoc they wreak as if it all were inevitable. But it’s the product of choices. The mother of all choices was the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956. It was sold as a national security measure—it connected all Air Force bases, no matter how far flung, for example. Of course, automakers were all for national security.

That project was to last 10 years. Ha ha.

Anyway, I know it’s not going to change anytime soon. But I do think we can do some things—like face the fact that we subsidize car ownership with tax money. To the tune of $1,100 a household, according to an estimate in this article entitled The True Costs of Driving. One thing we can do is raise user taxes—gas, tolls, etc.—to reflect that true cost.

And maybe one day, that’d help pay to keep the sidewalks clean.