And thus begins my very first "blog."

I have decided to start keeping a journal. I do not want to call it a "blog," only because I don't like the word. Also, this is less of a weblog than it is a journal or notes on things I find interesting, especially in cycling culture, if there is indeed a "culture." Upon further evaluation, there is not so much a cycling culture as there is a culture of people who misunderstand the bicycle, the cyclist, or any other form of transportation that doesn't involve a car. This culture is called Car Culture, and, as it seems to me here in the United States, it is the only culture that exists.

Perhaps I am being too radical. My mother would call me completely crazy for saying this about cars; actually, she has. But her opinion only furthers my resolve, because it proves to me just how brainwashed we are by the motor vehicle. Giving up your car? Gasp! But, we NEED cars!

Firstly, I would like to bring to the attention of anyone reading this (which is nobody yet, because I have never told anybody about this journal or posted it anywhere, but maybe I will in the future) about the book "Carchitecture: When the Car and the City Collide" by Jonathan Bell. You can pick it up at the library if you want to take a look at it, that is where I first saw it. Upon perusing this book, I was shocked, even though I see it all day every day around me, at how much architecture and pavement and structure is solely given to, or given up, in lieu of the car.

The first sentence of this book begins, "We are simultaneously at one with our cars and at odds with the automobile." I was pretty hooked from that first sentence, and needless to say the book grabbed me for a few hours after that. The author is objective in his representation of the automobile; its symbol of freedom, the harsh reality of sitting in traffic, its integration in and dominance of the urban fabric, not to mention the danger it poses to pedestrians (and other drivers, or human beings in general).

Think about it. Every time you see a drive-thru, a strip mall, a Burger King, KFC or McDonald's, et al, with drive-thrus, all of that exists because of the car. All the ugliness, all the in-between rural towns (also called "passing through" towns) turned wastelands of parking lots is because of the car. If we didn't have the car, we wouldn't really need fast food, or on-the-go food. We wouldn't need the drive thru. We wouldn't have strip malls that are basically just giant parking lots. We wouldn't have any highways or freeways or streets that human beings are not allowed to walk in lest they be mowed down by a car.

Of course, Jonathan Bell was a lot more objective than I. I suppose I am one of the few people who feels crushed by the car's overwhelming presence, especially as a single occupancy vehicle. What is the most effective way to move fifty people? One bus, one subway car, or fifty cars occupying a half mile of square footage? It's disturbing to me. I did not used to be this way until I started actually having to drive regularly, and then turned to cycling as an alternative.

I, like all people, grew up not really thinking of the car as anything else but an inevitable presence. You ride in one when you'r a kid, you ride in your friend's parent's car, and you think nothing of it. I got my license (though I always hated driving because I didn't want to die), and my parents acted as though fear of death while driving was some kind of irrational fear. The old mantra "everybody does it" somehow was meant to absolve the car from being dangerous. I was not afraid to be in a car while I was not driving, in fact I thought nothing of it, I just didn't want the cause of my own death or the death of others to be something that occurred when I was behind the wheel. Is that too much to ask? More often than not, when it comes to driving, we are forced to do something we don't want to do.

Except, sadly, most people don't mind doing it.

It is interesting to me that the population is so duped by these monstrous and dangerous vehicles that not once has "going green" or "decreasing your carbon footprint" involved giving up your car. Instead it's "Go Green: Buy Another Car" in the form of a hybrid or a Mini Cooper. The very mention of living car-free and using transportation money to build a system of sustainable bullet trains, bike ways, and other alternative and safer transportation instead of building more roads and highways that will invariably get clogged sooner or later (If you build it, they will come) is unthinkable to our population. We would rather purchase a new vehicle that only gets moderately better gas milage than our old one, and send the old one to a landfill, or wherever cars go. Furthermore, car accidents account for more than 42,000 deaths in this country per year alone and about 1.2 million worldwide. Many more are injured. One plane crashes, kills 200 people, and it's all over the news, there are investigations to find out what went wrong. A car kills someone and it's traffic. One strain of bacteria from a food processing plant that kills 4 people makes front page news and gets everyone throwing out all their meat or lettuce or whatever caused it. It's okay to kill someone in a car accident if you weren't drinking. It's truly disgusting. Not that I am downplaying the people who have died from botulism or strains of bacteria from food, or those who have died in plane crashes, but those are isolated incidents that happen to 0.0001 percent of the population, meanwhile you dance with death every time you get in the car and don't even care about it!

Maybe I am biased. I grew up half in Florida and half in New York City. I got my license in Florida but never owned a car or really drove. Right after I got my license my family moved to Manhattan and I was absolved from being tied down to a car. Suddenly, it was freedom. I never needed a car. When people say the car means personal freedom and going where you want when you want and giving that up would mean giving up personal freedom to choose, I have to laugh. I was riding the subway wherever I wanted. I never needed to rely on parents or anyone to give me a ride, or pay my insurance, and all the other responsibilities, or rather, hindrances that come with a car. I could go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted without relying on a 1,000 pound vehicle to get me there. I was in Brooklyn, in Manhattan, in Queens, wherever I wanted to be 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I never had to ask for gas money or insurance money or beg my parents to buy me a car. THAT my friends, is freedom.

Besides, it was more of a burden to own a car in the city than to not have one at all. My mother eventually got rid of our car in NEw York because its entire existence was basically being moved from one side to the other on street cleaning days.

After high school, I went to college in Washington, DC. I did not own a car the entire four years I was there. DC is a small city, and they have a good metro system. Most of my friends there didn't have cars either. Again, it was more of a hindrance than a convenience to have one on campus. You had to pay 350 to park it on campus, and then if you actually drove anywhere it was like trying to park in NYC when you got there: meters, no parking, etc. Plus no one drove because then they couldn't drink if we went out. 

My memory of cars is of useless, pointless, expensive hindrances and wastes. They take up time, and you get punished relentlessly for owning one in a city, via parking tickets and the like.

After college I moved to Los Angeles, and I have been here for one year. As the fates would have it my career has taken me here. 

I had to buy a car.

The dealer was pushy, the car was expensive; why do we pay thousands of dollars for these things? I am thinking of moving back to New York. It may seem like a silly reason, but the reliance on a vehicle out here is absolutely suffocating. It has made me cry on occasion. It is a total deal breaker and I miss the freedom of the New York City subway. 

Gas is now 4 dollars a gallon. My insurance is kind of high because I never owned a car before. My monthly payments are draining me. I had to get the window fixed once because it no longer rolled down. I have to bring it in for oil changes. I have to find parking on the street. I have gotten six parking tickets. Why am I a slave to an inanimate object? How can other people just accept this? Do people enjoy this in their life? Either it's apathy or worn out acceptance, or people are insane and they actually enjoy driving? I don't know. 

I can't even rant enough about it. I could write a dissertation. I can also point out how Los Angeles messed up royally with their urban planning. I take the metro when I can, which amounts to about once or twice a month because it doesn't go anywhere you need to go. They have FOUR subway lines. Are they serious? Do they not know LA takes up 42 square miles? Does everyone have their heads in the sand, here? What is going on?

Sometimes I don't even want to leave the house to go somewhere because I don't want to just sit there in my car.

I started riding my bike, almost religiously. 

I love riding my bike. However, drivers hate cyclists. It makes me nauseous that people would rather kill you than have you delay them for ten seconds. 

This lifestyle of car culture is not sustainable.

I will leave the car/cyclist discussion for another day. In the meantime, enjoy this video of a bunch of cyclists on the 405, one of the most clogged freeways in the country, right here in Los Angeles: