On The Art of Taking Away Your God-Given Right to Drive

Austin Contrarian writes:

I understand that people bitterly oppose tolling roads. I really do. I was discussing congestion pricing the other day with one of my co-workers. I told her that if I were dictator, the first thing I’d do is congestion price I-35. She told me the first thing she’d do is have my wife put arsenic in my drink. Since she is an intelligent, well-educated attorney who lives in the ‘burbs — and would benefit from congestion pricing as much as anyone — I have little hope that it will ever be politically palatable.

Sadly, this is very true. Even among people whom I’d normally consider as fairly left-of-center, the idea of congestion pricing or gas taxes or any kind of mass transit can be very unpopular. There are plenty of well-meaning folks out there who are happy to recycle, even interested in saving the spotted owl, but won’t support policy choices that make driving more difficult or more expensive.

Yet even here, attitudes are changing, slowly. I was watching the film Singles again recently, and there’s a scene early on where Steve (Campbell Scott) is introducing Linda (Kyra Sedgwick) to the SUPERTRAIN. Steve is a transit planner, Linda is an environmental activist.

STEVE
Let me ask you a question. You think about traffic? Because I do, constantly. Traffic is caused by the single car driver. Single people get in their cars every morning. They drive and wonder why there’s gridlock. This is what I’ve been working on. If you had a supertrain… you give people a reason to get out
of their cars. Coffee, great music…they will park and ride. I know they will.

LINDA
But I still love my car, though.

Of course, this is just a movie, but it’s remarkable that in 1992, it doesn’t occur to Linda that driving to work is doing more damage to the environment than anything she’s fighting against in her day job. Nor does it occur to Steve to use the global warming argument to convince her to take the train.

If you re-shot that scene in 2009 (the year that the SUPERTRAIN finally goes live!!), you’d obviously include a bit about global warming. I think that’s progress. The connection is being made. Maybe more slowly and painfully than we’d like, but it’s being made.