Reality Bites

Sometimes on days like Friday, when the tulips stretch toward the warm sun and the air is filled with the sound of chirping birds, it is possible to forget for a moment just how doomed our culture is. But then, like a wad of shit dropped from the ass of a passing pigeon, reality smacks us in the face.

Take Friday’s centerpiece story in the Wall Street Journal “Strangers on the Train: Highway Work Forces Chicagoans Off Road—Commuters Bemoan the Loss of Quality Time in Cars; Ms. Dennis Lugs In a Cake,” by Ilan Brat. (Note: The Journal is like that, with the long headlines and two-phase subheads. It’s kind of fun, actually.) The story is all about how car addicts, who used the Dan Ryan Expressway as their daily fix, have gone cold turkey on mass transit while the road is being rebuilt over the next two years. The $600 million Dan Ryan reconstruction project has essentially halved the capacity of the city’s busiest expressway while it is rebuilt from the road bed up.

Things are not going well for many of these new transit users. The quotes in the WSJ story make one wonder “How did they find these morons to interview and say these things?” But then, finding them probably wasn’t that difficult. In fact, all the Journal reporter probably had to do was get on the train and pick the first person he saw.

“‘This was a very, very big step for me,’ says [Ann Schue], 42 years old, who has never been on a train in her life before she recently started taking the Metra rail service ,” according to the Journal story. “‘I’m still very. . . ,’ she says, choking up, then pausing to compose herself. ‘I miss my car.’”

As we learn in the article, Schue owns a 2003 Ford Expedition and makes a 90-minute, one-way commute from her home in Homer Glen to her job at the University of Chicago in Hyde Park, a a distance of about 33 miles – one way.

At the end of the story we learn that Schue now gets her driving fix on the weekends, hopping in her Urban Assault Vehicle and driving 34 miles (one way?) to a mall just for the hell of it, even though there’s a mall six miles from her house. “I don’t even know why,” she says. “I went just to go.”

Such is the pathetic state of the American Way of Life. We are so addicted to driving that when forced onto mass transit by circumstances beyond our control we seek to retake control by making unnecessary car trips to malls 30 miles from our homes just to feel the contoured seats caressing our backs and the vibration of the road in our leather cradled asses. It’s our little way of sticking it to the man, except we’re really sticking it to ourselves.

The WSJ story takes a sympathetic tone toward those struggling to give up their cars. Brat observes that Chicago is an unusual Midwestern city in that it has a well-developed mass transit system, but it is a typical Midwestern city in that hundreds of thousands of commuters would just as soon stab themselves in their own eye with a rusty fork than abandon their gas-sucking commutes in heavy traffic and take the train or the bus. “The change for many of the new riders is wrenching,” Brat writes, observing that Schue was among those “forced to trade” her SUV commute “for the clatter and crowds of a double-decker commuter train.”

Another poor soul, David Pettiford, gripes in the story about losing the cocoon of pleasure provided by his Dodge Durango SUV and having to take the Metra instead.

Frank Pierson lives five blocks from the el, but prefers driving to work and paying $18 dollars a day to park. Now he’s resigned himself to the train. Mary Dennis lives in Northwest Indiana and has been driving the 72 miles round-trip to and from her job in the Loop for the last 20 years. (The story, by the way, says her trip is 36 miles, but that’s misleading because 36 miles is the one-way figure. It’s the same throughout the story, which is to say it’s misleading.) In the article, Dennis complains of having to tote a three-layer cake in on the train for an office birthday party. By the time she got downtown, the cake had shifted and settled. Is there no bakery in the downtown area capable of baking a birthday cake and delivering it to the office? Maybe she’s just that stupid. But the Indignant Citizen thinks it’s not so much a question of intelligence. It’s habit. She never stopped to think outside the bubble of her 20-year experience, which has been to buy the cake in Indiana, put it on the back seat and drive in. When confronted with mass transit, she tried to apply her old behaviors to the new environment.

This is going to be a common problem as oil prices rise and people are faced with living lives very different than the ones with which they have become comfortable. In the post-cheap oil era, we are going to have to make other arrangements, as Jim Kunstler says. The old models for doing things aren’t going to work. Living five blocks from the el and driving won’t be a choice for Frank Pierson anymore. He’ll be lucky to be able to take the el to his same job. Driving won’t be an option, the choice having been made for him by market forces beyond his control, and perhaps beyond his understanding.

All of the people in the WSJ story, all of us for that matter, face the prospect of leading very different lives by the time the Ryan Reconstruction is finished. We are not prepared to hear this, to accept it or deal with it. Stories like this one in the Journal don’t help matters by airing the whinings of a few people who’ve grudgingly given up their cars for mass transit. Politicians, our elected “leaders,” aren’t preparing us, either. Democrats have a chance to offer a real alternative to the bullshit and lies of the past six years by confronting Americans with the New Reality and offering Solutions, but there is no indication any liberal is up to that task.

Instead we will try to ride the status quo to the End of the Line, with people like Ann Schue leading the way in their SUVs and papers like the Wall Street Journal holding their hands. At the end of the article, Schue is told by the reporter that traffic on the Ryan hasn’t been as bad as forecast. “Really?” she says. “Can I go back?”

No, Ann, you can’t. None of us can. And we’d all better get used to it.