American Rouge

Here's a piece on actor-activist Kal Penn starting his new gig with the White House Office of Public Liaison; he's a savvy and smart Obama backer and will probabaly do well as a public servant. However, this closing line of the article gave me some pause-

When pressed about preparing for his first day on the job Monday morning, he said, "I brushed my teeth; I did floss, used mouthwash ... took the bus to work, same thing that everybody does."

Not quite, Kal. Personally, I tend to ignore my teeth in the morning and brush mosly at night ;-).

No, it's the taking-the-bus part that I take exception to. Like a lot of small-towners or suburbanites, I drive to work. I don't have the option of taking the bus to work for my night classes, since the bus lines servicing my part of Lexington close down before my classes end at 9:40.

I could take the bus in for my 8AM class if I wanted to take one bus up Tates Creek in SE Lexington to downtown, then take another out Broadway/Harrodsburg to the SW to get to the Sullivan campus. Of course, it would take me about an hour to do that bus routine as opposed to the 10-15 minute commute that a straight run along the New Circle Road beltway. It would also mean starting my commute about 6:30AM rather than 7:30, thus getting up at an oh-dark-30 hour after teaching the night before. No thanks.

Big cities are more condusive to mass transit, since parking is a major hassle in big cities. Also, if your job is in the city center, the hub-and-spoke nature of many transit systems that are geared around getting people in and out of downtown will work for you.

However, if you don't do business with the city center, a lot of transit systems are poorly designed to get you from 4-o'clock to 8-o'clock on the suburban dial. You can go into the center of the dial on the minute hand and back out on the hour hand, but you can move well along the perimiter of the dial unless outer loop routes cover the areas in question.

Modern liberalism doesn't like suburbs. It is too car-dependent, uses too much energy and gets people into a cocoon of domesticy that can get in the way of community. However, our non-elite culture isn't lived in subways and busses; it's lived in minivans and mall quadrants. Not everyone's life fits into the mass transit network;their work, churches, schools and shopping are often cumberson to do via mass transit and sometimes flat out impossible.

I'll plead guilty to a reductio ad absurdum here (and also using one the nastiest dictatorships of the 20th century; when you use the Nazis to label your foes, you're reaching) , but I'm reminded of the Khmer Rouge's empting out of the cities and making everyone peasent farmers; the fact that a lot of city folks had no agricultural background didn't matter, everyone was ordered out of the corrupting urban pool.

Liberal policy seems to envision folks settling along mass transit corridors and away from a suburban framework; suburbs are seen to usestoo much land, too much gas and sets up too individualistic a lifestyle that doesn't care for the community.

That's not going to work well in a lot of areas, for mass transit doesn't fit many cities and many lifestyles. You have to work near a mass transit line that hooks up with your home or else have a nasty-long commute and may have to pick your church, your shopping and your health professionals along that commuter line.

I don't think so, Tim. That's not as rash as the Khmer Rouge, but it would take a drastic change in American culture to get us to be mass-transit centric outside of high-density corridors like the Bos-Wash megaplex.

Comments

[Richard H]

I have also noticed that the folks currently in power are trying to remake everyone over into their own urban image. I don't live in the suburbs (unless they've gotten to the point of defining everything non-urban as suburban) but in a small town (abt 4.5k). This is agricultural country - things and people are spread out. Greyhound's closest stop is in a town 15 miles away. We are, however, fairly close to an Amtrak station: it's only about 45 miles away. We have one taxi in town.

Though we have a fair number of well-off folks around (though not as many as last year before the local major employers had trouble (the biggest one is in bankruptcy, the other has shut down till who knows when), the general population is not financially well off. Though I;m a middle class professional myself, I count myself in the number of those who can't afford to dump my (100k +) vehicles in favor of a new hybrid or plug in. I'd like a hybrid - but they just cost more than my budget allows.

It'd be nice to see some political leaders who are cognizant of life outside NYC, Boston, Chicago and DC.