Orphan Road

At first, Americans replaced Old Dobbin with a car, and that was good. We soon noticed you could use a car as a sort of small home temporarily, a happy alternative to dubious hotel bedsheets. But then we began substituting cars for transit, liveable city cores, and other amenities, until we reached our current state of regarding a car as the one essential item to own. Today, nursing home aides making $9 an hour make payments of $400 a month to get to work in a car- a bad bargain.

In a sense, cars really are like cigarettes. I have asthma. I smoke handrolled cigarettes with good tobacco- no problem. I walk past a guy on the street smoking a crap ready-made cigarette and I start coughing and choking. Those things aren’t good for you.

People with real muscle cars or classic cars don’t drive them every day. Believe me, if you have 14 coats of hand-rubbed metal-flake paint job, or you’re driving a 1932 Packard, you don’t want to rub shoulders with the hoi polloi.

Some liberals do carry their feelings of natural goodness too far. It’s important to remember that if you’re a liberal. Mistakes were made. Prohibition was in part an effort to clean up municipal politics, but actually created mobs which outlived Prohibition by a good 40 years.

Make housing as affordable as car payments, on a functional transit line, and people will buy condos instead of cars. Visit Seattle- they already do, and the transit there is just barely functional.

The problem is not with any individual car- it is with the substitution of car ownership for a transit system to get to work, or an emergency response system to get you to the hospital, or local parks you can walk to. For decades to come some people will own cars even if they can only buy enough gas to drive around the block once a year.

Most of us, however, will be vastly relieved when we don’t need to own a car.