driving

I hate driving. I hate being driven a little less. You’re stuck in a confined space (belted in, no less, if you’re sane), for an extended period of time, without access to such items as the internet, video games, or hot stone massages. While in this confinement and enforced physical activity, you are subjected to an elevated level of risk dependent on the competence of your driver, other drivers, and environmental conditions. The space within a car is not constructed to encourage socialization. all seats face forward, none face one another. The outside world is just that, outside, beyond a barrier of metal, glass, and plastic, and moving too fast to have any meaningful contact anyway. You have to share your environment with others, spatially, musically, and climatically. Worse yet, if you’re the one driving, you can’t even read (not that you can always do that when riding in a car, sometimes it’s too bright, sometimes it’s too dark), because your attention has to stay locked on the road for your own safety, as well as that of your passengers, fellow motorists, pedestrians, cyclists, and skaters. Worst of all is sitting, waiting for the gridlock traffic to inch along to its final destination.

Toss on the environmental and economic costs of constructing, maintaining, and operating a vehicle, as well as the infrastructure on which they run, and perhaps you can begin to see why I would prefer to do without. When I played simcity as a kid, I quickly stopped building roads, and made it all rail. Most of these only get worse the more that people contribute to the problem. I’d rather be part of the solution.

Now, I’m not stupid, I know that group transportation has serious problems. Waiting in the cold rain for a bus drives that point home rather nicely, as does sitting on a bus which has broken down due to the unreliable handicap automatic lifting device (which, under the best of circumstances, makes for very slow boarding), as does sitting in a broken down underground train, waiting for the power to come back on (I eventually got out & walked to the last station. It was really cool, I might like to do it again some day, when I’m not in a hurry).

And I know there are certain services for which vehicles are basically irreplaceable, emergency services for instance.

But I have the growing fear that in order to do good for the world, I’m going to have to bend on this matter; that I will fundamentally be throwing away opportunities to provide net improvement to the world because I hate driving, and I hate generating these uncompensated costs for the world.

It’s a dilemma structure I first recall reading about in Lord Foul’s Bane (Stephen R Donaldson). My older sister stopped reading the series in the first part of the first book, where the protagonist, after being healed of his leprosy, rapes his host’s daughter. I didn’t even know what rape was at the time, and I sort of shrugged it off. An early desensitization, perhaps. Totally off topic.

In this fantasy setting, called imaginatively enough, The Land, there is a council of lords, tending supernatural powers derived from the earth. There was a previous council, but in a (failed) attempt to kill the big bad guy, Lord Foul, Kevin Landwaster got pissed, and leveled the continent, while leaving little post-apocalyptic how-to manuals scattered around, with increasing levels of challenge/effect. His successors had made a vow not to repeat his terrible tragedy, by never letting anger or passion get involved in their work. Not unlike Wicca’s “An it harm none” clause. It later turns out that to go anywhere with the aforementioned how-to manuals, the council of lords needs to let their potentially destructive passions find their way into their work. At the very end of the third book, they say in essence “fuck it, we’ll do this our own way”.

I turned down a number of possible tutoring style jobs in the bay area (mostly around the SAT) because I didn’t have a car, and didn’t want to get a car. But the things are damn useful. And if I’m in some environmental regulatory role, I might well have to be one of the people who goes to the site to check things out. I might want to be one of them as well. Bike just wouldn’t be fast enough. Nor allow me to haul as much stuff. Nor would public transit be tenable for most such work. Hmmm.

Talking to a few politician’s assistant type people, they talk about how they (and the representatives they serve) often find themselves needing to drive hours away. I can do it. I probably will do it. But I don’t like the idea.