Bicycle Licenses: Green Transit FAIL

With no ado, please read this quick letter to the editor on the NYT re: the ongoing debate over bicycle lanes in the Big Apple.

Ok, this is stupid. Any longtime readers of this blog should know by now that transit is one of my pet peeves. Automobiles are stupid, expensive, inefficient machine systems, the hidden costs of which have only been made clearer to me since I began reading Ivan Illich's "Tools for Conviviality." And, having immigrated to the Twin Cities in 2008 - the best metro region in the United States for biking - I naturally have nothing but respect for the alternative, low-cost, low-tech, high-input transit tool. Bicycles require less infrastructure. Physical or bureaucratic. Anyone can pick one up, learn to ride it, and be much more mobile than a pedestrian, while not ever having to stop for an oil change.

And they don't cause potholes.

So even the mere mention suggestion that cyclists be "required to wear vests with visible identity numbers," especially as "more revenue for the city," is infuriating. This would de-democratizes what is virtually an equal-access tool. And those are fucking hard to come by in this corporate-dominated oligarchy. You may as well require licenses to buy a god-damn screwdriver.

We ought to be moving away from cars, not attempting to make bicycles more like them. Cars are dangerous. Accidents involving bicycles are rarely, if ever, fatal - unless they involve automobiles. Bicycles are for people who prefer to opt-out of the institutionalized mess composed of insurance companies, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and car dealerships. There's no defensible reason for litigating this form of transit.

Why for the love of God do New Yorkers even own cars. why. why. why.

If I had that kind of access to mass transit, I would sell my car. And I was raised on car culture, suckled on the oily teat of Southern California. There was a time when I identified very strongly with the freeway lifestyle ... until I've come to see how much waste it creates.

More and more I am coming to see Minnesota and the Twin Cities as a shining bastion of progressivism, one of the few states where the slash-and-burn budget experiments are failing to take root. Our economy is relatively stable and slowly recovering, there is a fair division of labor between NGOs/nonprofits and government, a high literacy rate, thriving immigrant communities, high literacy rates, grassroots culture, wide expanses of wild space and a responsible hunter culture, and a strong respect for the environment that springs from both conservative and liberal camps. And not to mention a strong, intelligent radical layer that is rarely reactionary (with some exceptions).

As for Mr. I-was-almost-murdered-by-a-bicycle, automobiles often have front and back lights, and "noise-emitting warning device[s]," yet they maim and murder far more people than bicycles. Had he been hit by a car, he wouldn't even be alive to make the complaint. There is still no substitute for vigilance, and no amount of legislation is going to force him to look both ways before crossing the goddamn street.

Maybe he could try unplugging his goddamn iPod from his head when he's out on the town.

Losing the Green Future

Yet another of those sacred pillars of the American Empire is evidencing some particularly ominous cracks: the auto industry. As domestic automakers were some of the biggest losers and/or crybabies of the Great Recession, the character of the industry was profoundly changed. The federal government had to quasi-nationalize General Motors, long seen as the figurative engine of the American industrial economy.

this is called a factory. we used to have these in this country.

(But of course, the industrial sector in the United States has long been in decline. Just ask Wisconsin workers.

Or, for that matter, take a look around many places in rural America. Or Northeast Minneapolis. Or the Southern California urban sprawl where I was born. You can see the hollow shells of industry everywhere like the concrete exoskeletons of shellfish behemoths. All the crunchy capital and gooey labor long since fled to friendlier - aka more oppressive - climates.)

But the problem with the automotive industry isn't strictly its finances, despite the war on United Auto Workers the last few decades. It isn't government regulations, which every industry encounters eventually (if the government knows what's good for it). The problem isn't even design. I have no patience for the arguments that Americans only want big gas-guzzling SUVs and hostile-looking mini monster trucks. Those are the fault of advertisement campaigns and the dismantling of city planning and the cancer-like spread of suburbia as much as it is any dream of the American public.

The problem is systemic. The problem is the auto industry's linkage and co-strategery with oil interests. This is an alliance that has dismantled public transit in key metro regions (especially Los Angeles, where commuters sit trapped in their cars for hours with right-wing hate radio pumped through their car speakers).

By de-socializing transit, the capitalist system in America not only placed the burden of commuting on each family, but also spun a nationalist narrative that equated freedom with machismo and geographical dominance. Goading said families into accepting this burden. Even valuing it. To the point where the car loan is right up there with the other heavy hitters in the world of modern debt slavery: medical bills, student loans, and the car loan's dialectical opposite: the sacred home loan.

As consumerism rose and real wages stagnated the last 30 years, consumer debt became one of the quiet underpinnings of the U.S. economy. Now more than ever U.S. workers are searching frantically for good deals on commodities and services to make ends meet. The more progressive elements of the working class - including college graduates, many of whom can't find the high-paying jobs they were promised - also want to do their part to help the environment.

climate change has turned my home region into a tinder-box

But government initiatives to expand green, high-speed mass transit between urban centers keeps getting cock-blocked by teabaggers hissing about budgets that have come unbalanced (because of right-wing corporate tax cuts, mostly). And the working class hasn't woken up to the reality of car ownership yet - and it will be a struggle to do so, considering our suburbs have developed along auto, not mass, transit channels. (Massive retrofitting required - but that would also bring jobs back in massive numbers, if we can figure out how to pay for it....)

So the U.S. auto industries do a little bit, as part of their green PR campaign, to capture the green progressive demographic. Problem is, they want to offset R&D and capital and production costs by marketing hybrids and electrics as luxury cars. As if the fate of the planet, and the species, is a luxury.

Not exactly doing their duty as a human institution to make their own sacrifices for the good of the planet. While we spend our own hard-earned cash on new lightbulbs, energy-saving appliances, and candles for brownouts (something we Californians are pretty used to), they generally look for every feasible way to lower their own costs, including passing off that cost to consumers and the environment. Would they ever consider operating at a loss to fund green research and low-cost, low-emission transit options?

Not in your life. So don't believe any talk of "shared sacrifice." As in so many other realms - budget cuts are one popular example right not - there is more sacrifice to business than from business.

But, as long as the environment remains fashionable - and it should, considering it's not exactly poised for a rebound anytime soon - rest assured automakers will continue their lackadaisical wandering towards cheap green transit ... eventually ... in their own good time.

That's where China comes in. Apparently the F3DM, while doing next to nothing to redeem the stereotype of boring communist consumer goods (more of an industrial-era thing, you know, silver is the new Fordian black), is the first mass-produced hybrid. In the world.

You heard right. Cheap hybrids for everyday folks.

they also have high-speed rail.

A little bumpy, yeah, but what working person doesn't have something that's falling apartment? Nice things are for rich people - just look at Comrade X and his coffee pot. I'm being a little facetious, yeah, but it would be nice to own something so cheap that we didn't feel trepidation when trying to open it up and customize the damn thing.

All this once again underlines the role of government in business. As if the fat profit sharing GM autoworkers are going to get didn't hammer it home well enough for you. (Remember, GM was the one that got nationalized.) For Chrissake, as if the very internets you're reading this on wasn't evidence enough that government involvement in business can be good for both business and workers.

'Course the Chinese gov't treats their workers far, far worse than we do here (uhh, right?) and that needs to be changed. But this is just further evidence of a fraying American empire, unable to meet the stringent demands of the 21st century - the very century it has played such a central role in creating.

A couple other slick readings for you: ECW's discussion of last year's holes, which includes a good rendition of oil's significance true significance, and a recent post from Mr. Thomas L. Friedman that I, frighteningly enough, almost completely agree with: use Libya as an excuse to get off oil dependency once and for all. Friedman even says "history is back," which has interesting repercussions. Slowly the amber lets go of the Middle East, coagulates around the United States....

Send the Donkey to the Dust-Bin

While X is on the subject of the uselessness of the two pro-business parties, I thought I'd throw out the idea of what a real working people's party would look like, if it were to spring out of the movements and sentiments of right now.

It would require the broad enlistment of rank-and-file members from these sectors of society:

• Trade Unions, both from the big, traditional industries and the more grass-roots efforts;
• The LGBT movement, from the couple who wants their marriage recognized by the state to the transsexual triad that recognizes their oppression is one more way to divide the working class and therefore they will not subscribe to gender-normative consumer culture;
  
• Every immigrant, legal or not (whatever the term you want to use), their family and friends, of every race and color and creed and ethnicity, who knows that Democrats and Republicans alike only enforce borders when it suits their own conquest of wealth;
• The anti-war movement, whether its members be freshly angered by the raids in Pakistan and Yemen, or burnt out on nine years of protest without a single goddamn acknowledgement from the System;
• Community activists and environmentalists, who know that free trade and the destruction of the environment are two sides of the same coin;
• Some Marxists and socialist, although admittedly this portion of the left as a whole has failed at really stepping in and assisting the working class - for a wide variety of reasons, some the fault of the Marxists (or "marxists") and some not - the sectarian portions cannot and will not take a notable part.

And what, pray tell, would this party's platform look like?

Hopefully - and just going off popular sentiments today - something like this:

• The nationalization of BP as punishment for the global eco-disaster they have created, profits to be invested in a gigantic, national mass-transit system - and a bit fat tax on the profits of all other oil companies doing business with America;
  
• The immediate repeal of SB1070 and the strict enforcement (and expansion) of all federal laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, language, gender (and/or gender identity), sexuality, etc.;
• An immediate withdraw of all United States forces from Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Egypt;
• A condemnation of the policies of the state of Israel as regards not only the Flotilla Massacre, but also the rampant human rights abuses committed against the Palestinian people - complete severing of all weapon sales and suspension of commerce until it fucking shapes up;
• Full funding for schools, Social Security, medicare and medicade, unemployment and employment services - to be funded by the money-formerly-known-as "the military budget."

Now that is what I call "a start." With a party like that up and running, what would we need these spineless so-called Democrats for?

(Also the Socialist Rose makes a much cooler emblem than some dumb animal.)

A Different Pothole Patch

It's the 21st Century, people.

I might have to start a lot of entries like that, but I feel like our frame of reference is so often the dark ages of our past that we don't stop and ever think about the amazing level to which our global society has ascended.

That said: why don't we have an efficient network of mass transit?

I'm not talking like, "oh why don't more people ride the Greyhound."

I mean like, why can't we ride from New York to Los Angeles on high speed commuter rail.

Or even Minneapolis to Milwaukee, for Christ's sake.

Just look at the potholes in your neighborhood. Just look at em. Those rifts in the concrete that you have to dodge around every day on your way to work, school, home? Those rough patches that throw off your alignment ever-so-slightly (or maybe it feels like it's going to snap your axle in half?) every time you run it over?

That is twentieth-century technology, man.

(The twentieth-century doesn't deserve to be put in caps. It doesn't deserve a numerical shorthand. The twentieth-century was a century of blood, sweat, and imperialism. The twentieth-century was ten decades of idiocy and madness. The twentieth-century was one fucking cop-out to corporations after another.)

Yet here we are, mending and patching and filling the infrastructure. What did we do when the I-35 bridge collapsed in Minneapolis? We built a new, awesome bridge. Now, these potholes aren't killing anybody. (Yet. There's a nasty one in the alley next to my apartment, though. That fucker looks downright hungry.) Right? A pothole is relatively innocuous, right? An everyday little problem that we complain about when we want to point out how bad a job the local government is doing.

Well let's be honest. Minneapolis and Saint Paul do fix their potholes. You kind of have to in a region where the winters are so bad, the roads get severely damaged. But you know the recent budget woes will translate into worse streets. (The article's a little old now, sorry.) And bad streets translate into car repairs for the residents of the Twin Cities and suburbs. Car repairs we probably can't afford, considering we have other things to deal with. (You know, foreclosures, getting a job if we need one, health insurance bills, car insurance, the cost of child rearing, the outrageous cost of laundry in our apartment buildings ... that sort of thing.)

But then you have to think to yourself, isn't there a better way?

I mean, we're the most productive country in the history of the planet. We're such an innovative people that we can put men on the moon (and vaporize women and children in Hiroshima).

Isn't there some way to get around the potholes?

I imagine expanding the lightrail system here in the Twin Cities is a move applauded by the general population. But it isn't enough; in fact, it's hardly anything. It's like trying to set carbon dioxide emission cuts 50 years from now ... by the time it takes effect, it'll hardly even be adjusting to fit the situation. By the time the lightrail line in the Twin Cities gets implemented, we'll have god knows how many new commuters on the road. (All of them clogging the expanded 35W, of course.)

I say, quit dicking around. The mayor and the city council and most of all, the people of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, need to come out and say, rip up some streets. Rip up some freeway. Put in more rail. Put in enough rail that not one resident needs to set foot in a car to get where they need to go. Cut out these low-occupancy vehicles (we call them cars) and put in transit that will cut down on pollution. Hybrid trains, electric trains, magnetic trains, whatever.

That will put hundreds of people to work, if not thousands. And then we can decouple bus funding from new car sales. (Yes, your buses are funded by a tax on new car purchases - wrap your head around that one.) We can expand the bus coverage for the streets that are left and lower the fare.

We need to take the burden of transportation off the commuters. We can cover the cost with a low fare, a tax on the privilege of doing business here (for the big corporations), and subsidies from the federal government. (After all, they bailed out the banks and subsidize big business all the time, it's time to give a little kickback.)

While that's being done, we could add high-speed rail lines to connect to Chicago, Milwaukee, Iowa City, and anywhere else our intrepid little hearts desire.

Because this is the 21st Century.

Dammit!