Letter from Pedestrianica.4

Everyone knows the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. And the fastest way to get from Point A to Point B is by car. This letter should really be a diagram, but for now, I’m just going to write my way into it.

Because this letter is not a straight line. But then it’s not a motorist, either—we’re in Pedestrianica, aren’t we? We’re going to do some meandering. Still, this will be quick, I promise: when walking, we try to keep our sights set, no matter how obscured, on Point B.

To accommodate cars, cities become a convoluted tyranny of angles. Think of all those turns you must make, softened though they may be by the guiding voice of the Garmin: rarely do they stray from 90 degrees. Your route, when mapped, looks like a series of steps:

        _|

      _|

    _|

  _|

Ridiculous, you say, and you’re right, and you list off a dozen exceptions: Streets that bleed into one another, that merge or veer in an ordinal direction. Scenic drives that follow the curves of rivers or bluffs. Corners with their elbows lopped off to allow for smoother turns (and longer crosswalks).

There’s a 6-way intersection near my house that I swear was designed to kill crackheads. There’s a liquor store there, and a lot of marginalized foot traffic, and though there does seem to be some sort of traffic light somewhere, we pedestrians still have to look in a lot of different directions to make sure no cars are careening towards us. This intersection frees the motorist from that 90-degree tyranny: you can turn up the diagonal street without even tapping the brake. That’s why you’re driving, right? Momentum.

Another interesting way to cut corners is the gas station parking lot. Here, if you are a motorist, if you’re waiting in line to make a right-hand turn, you can use this corner lot as a kind of warp zone, speed right on through and knock a couple minutes off your commute. If you have a more immediate goal in mind, if you need to suckle for a minute at petroleum’s pricey teat, you use this space to engage in a series of awkward maneuvers. You back up, then inch forward, then back up, then inch forward, then erratically lap the lot on your way to a better pump.

Your range of motion—best seen in spaces like these—while forceful, has its limit. 

As pedestrians, we too use this space to cut corners, but warily, as we never know from what direction you might veer. Taking the long way around can be just as tricky: the skin between gas station and street is manically permeable, a series of ins and outs that void the safety of the sidewalk, and that never cease.

Because beneath the apparent order of the right angle looms a chaos, a violent unpredictability that city planning fails to tame. Cars, by nature—even the sleekest—are clunky, are stilted and averse to curves. Paradoxically, though, they are sprawling in the amount of physical and mental space they take up.   

Letter from Pedestrianica

I go for a lot of walks. It’s how I get places, for one thing, but it also serves as a sort of therapy, a varied repetition that soothes and gets me safely past the blocks (after blocks after blocks) in my head. It can also help alleviate anger, but then again maybe it can’t: I’m talking about a theoretical world here, I’m talking ideologically. I’m talking about a world without cars.

A world with breathable air. A world without the relentless, numbing drone of motors. A world where we aren’t on that constant grave-robberly quest to unearth oil, waging eternal war, slaughtering entire populations, and, woops, poisoning oceans in the quest to get our next hit of gasoline.

A world with fast, reliable, comprehensive, cheap public transit. A world where we can bike without fear of dying. One where freeways become so extraneous, we make them parks. Where the transportation needs of the elderly and people with disabilities are given priority.

A world that is crisp rather than blurred, where we linger and pay attention to the spaces we inhabit. Where we don’t have to look for parking. Where we don’t have to look both ways. A world with some room to really move.

Am I being a diva here?

Self-righteous, maybe, I’ll accept self-righteous. And hyperbolic. But I’m just one small body in the face of a nonstop flow of hurtling, two-ton chunks of metal (how’s that for hyperbole?). There’s a power dynamic here, one that I never hear talked about, but one that becomes conversely clear in times when I ride inside those chunks of metal.

When we're behind that windshield, we are God.

We can’t go on like this. And this seems so urgent to me, and obvious. It’s seemed obvious for most of my life.

"Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries," Roethke said.

There was one walk I went on, a walk around my neighborhood the other night, in the company of a thousand other people. The Occupy Oakland movement had just voted to declare a citywide general strike for Wednesday, November 2, and I joined them as they walked around downtown in celebration. It was the kind of march that took up the entire street, the kind you usually need a permit for, but there was an odd absence of cops, which must have felt extra freeing to the marchers who’d suffered through the cops’ fascistic tactics the night before (those who weren’t in the hospital or jail). We walked: past the jail and past Mexicali Rose, past apartment buildings with people dancing on fire escapes. Past a club where my friend Gabby had gone to dance, and after seeing us all out walking, decided to come say hi. Past an enclave of condos the city subsidized but never filled. Past the freeway onramp, where a debate ensued over whether we should storm the interstate (I’m not the only one who wants to make it a park). Past my house, how convenient: goodnight.

Mainstream media pundits have complained about the OWS movement's lack of a focused message (here is a great article about why those pundits are mattering less and less). So let me walk around the block for a minute and complicate their message even further. On second thought, though, how complicated is this? One of the movement's favorite chants is “Whose streets? Our streets!”: cars, more than anything else, embody the unhealthy, unjust ways in which we occupy this planet. And the reason we all need our cars like we do stems from money. Los Angeles once had one of the most efficient streetcar systems in the world. Prior to GM's buyout of their public transit system, Los Angeles—the city whose name now conjures immediate images of gridlock—once strove for the same thing I want.

What I want is a world without cars.

The reasons for this are many, and to be honest, right now, I don’t even know where to start. So this is just the first of many Letters from Pedestrianica, the name I’ve decided to give this carless world I’ve been talking about. Even now, as I write this, those wavy red lines have attached themselves to the undercarriage of carless: Microsoft Word has decided that carless is not a word.

The software feels the same way about the word, classism. But at the rapid rate political discourse now seems to be shifting, we’ll see how long that lasts.

Welcome to Pedestrianica. It’s a mouthful, for sure, as we lift ourselves up out of the smog. But who knows what sort of things we’ll articulate, one day when we walk together, that day when we’ve finally freed ourselves of our dull and cumbersome cars?

Rant.3

Oooooo, BART’s in trouble. The San Francisco Bay Area subway system has long been my archenemy. It’s not that I have anything against mass transit—I’m dependent on it and sincerely wish we had more of it. It’s just that BART is both ridiculously low functioning and outright hostile to its riders. Their draconian move last week to quash protests by turning off cell phones is no surprise to me, nor is their indignant defense of their actions. This is just business as usual for BART, and it’s time they are held accountable. Now that they are—finally—under fire, while we’re at it, can I air out a couple complaints?

1. They shoot their passengers. Repeatedly. And get away with it. Repeatedly. Most of this list is quibbles, so I’m just going to get this one out of the way at the start. In 2009, BART police shot an unarmed young man execution-style while he was face down on the platform. They more recently shot a drunk old man and refuse to release any details about the incident. I think it’s generous to say that BART cops are ill equipped to deal with the public, yet they continue to carry around guns. 

2. They shut down at midnight. Even on weekends. It’s a wide bay to cross, and there are no carless ways to traverse it late at night besides a $50 cab or an hourly, limited bus. So if you go across the Bay for the evening, you’d better make sure you’re on that train by 12. Again, even on weekends. This leaves people no option but to drunkenly drive long distances when the bars close down. It would be interesting to see if there was any decrease in accidents involving drunk drivers if the trains started running a couple hours later. BART’s overly defensive excuse for their limited hours is that they need to close down to clean the train cars.

3. Those cars they spend four hours cleaning every night? Yeah, they’re carpeted. At least I think that’s carpet under that thick layer of black crust. Their seats are upholstered (somebody needs to let the bedbugs know about this) and when impacted, they release huge clouds of ancient dust. This supposed plushness is one of BART’s attempts to be something snootier than a mass-transit system. BART, if you need a consultant, you know where to find me. Let me start with this shocker: In high-traffic situations, non-wipeable surfaces are really hard to maintain.

4. Another BART luxury is the LED signs they have in their stations. These scrolling signs will tell you to keep an eye on your backpack and to alert BART police if you see suspicious activity (suspicious activity such as, say, BART police?). They also let you know when the next Giants game is and what’s currently playing at the opera. Only rarely, though, will you catch a glimpse of when your train is due. Just one more clue that the system’s engineers either didn’t give a fuck or didn’t have the practical knowledge of one who frequents public transit.

5. Their bathrooms are closed. At probably 80% of their stations, BART has decided to stop maintaining their bathrooms. Their reason, according to their LED signs: you guessed it, security. This means that after riding a 45-minute train, you might have to end up pissing on their luxurious carpet.

Now that BART has joined the likes of Visa and the Church of Scientology as targets of Anonymous, I’m hoping for some validation. I mean, I’ve spent years complaining to my loved ones about BART’s general shittiness. My dream is that the spotlight they’re now in will grow more and more unflattering, and their management will one day soon be forced into disarming BART police, running later, ensuring the public they won’t again infringe on first-amendment rights, and re-opening their damn bathrooms!

Wedding Review.3

Mercury was in retrograde, that was the word on the street, and so I almost didn’t make it to this one. Having neglected to line up a ride with a coworker, I took a train and two buses, then walked across the Golden Gate Bridge, then several miles through the country to arrive a half hour late. Getting off the second bus, tourists almost trampled me, as anxious as they were to leave their landmark viewing. Once across the bridge, I was confronted with a tunnel, a Pedestrians Prohibited sign, and a parked patrol car. I walked through the tunnel anyways, relieved to never feel the cop roll up behind me. The rest of the way, I held my thumb out; the one person who picked me up took me several hundred yards.

The ceremony had already started by the time I finally arrived—I saw them gathered far out in a mucky field. I stood at the front door with a platter of cocktails and watched them slowly trudge their way in. A little old man was being pushed in an off-road wheelchair with large, pontoonish, seafoam-colored wheels. The women’s stilettos plunged far into the soft earth. Something about it all made me think of Guns N’ Roses’ "November Rain," only artier, less drenched.

These were the kind of people who put out a tray of wheatgrass on the welcome table, then proceeded to drink seven handles of gin. Thank Goddess, they said, over cake that could make you shit glitter. By the end of the night, the women, their ankles so long unsupported in so many unforeseen ways, were melting against either their boyfriends or the walls.

I went home in a coworker’s car, the flat of wheatgrass in my lap.