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Chinese10 Years Later… Musings on the Car Culture
This month marked a critical anniversary for me, one that has prompted me to look back on the past decade of my life and ask myself how things came to be as they are today. How did I become a person who was content to live without a car and who felt so strongly about that decision that he would take time to advocate that others follow suit? What could have happened ten years ago that would prompt such introspection?
In December of 1996 I was given the legal right to drive a car.
That’s right, ten years ago I turned 16 and embarked on that right of passage that every American teenager since WWII dreams of: getting my drivers license. Not only that, but as an upper middle-class suburban kid, I also got my first car. Now I wasn’t as spoiled as the teenagers on MTV’s My Super Sweet Sixteen, so I got my dad’s 1988 Toyota Camry (with 100,000 miles on it) instead of new Beamer, but a car is a car, and I was pretty darn happy. I could finally drive to school for the rest of my sophmore year instead of riding what me and one of my best friends affectionately called “The Bus of Freaks”. The Bus of Freaks was the yellow school bus that Miss Tamara Thompson drove while suburban kids blasted Bone Thugs N Harmony, passed around nude pictures of Pamela Anderson printed from early internet porn sites, smoked weed, and left my buddy and I with enough material to compose a lengthy comic book entitled “Get Off Da Bus” in Mrs. Simmons English class.
Free at last.
And isn’t that what cars are really supposed to be all about? Freedom? For a teenager, there’s no question that getting a car marks a turning point in your life, from being driven around to driving yourself around. It’s the difference between an adult and a child, one is in control of their destiny the other is still being told what to do. With a car a young person can finally do what they want, when they want, wherever they want - only limited by the infrastructure of cement and asphalt, which as we all know is ample. So why, ten years later, would I deny myself such freedom?
I was never a huge fan of driving. I never hated it (I still don’t hate the act of driving, accelerating a vehicle in undeniably fun), but I certainly didn’t love it like many others I knew. I always thought the amount of money kids would invest in their cars was ridiculous, for such stupid things that I just didn’t understand like speaker systems, chrome wheel hubs, and plastic spoilers. And although my parents paid for my auto insurance, the costs of ownership I did have to pay left a bad taste in my mouth. I’d much rather have spent my money on Sega Saturn games than gas to get me back and forth from school. Once college came around, my feelings towards cars continued to diminish. Freshman year I discovered a car was pretty much useless on campus, and got around effectively using my bicycle and my feet. I got a used Volvo sophmore year, and although I initially loved it, by the time my junior year came around (and my Volvo’s fiery demise) that love had grown into pure hate.
The car culture is pervasive though. No matter how many problems cars give you, you still feel that you couldn’t possibly live without one. Oxygen, food, water, and a car. These are the things people need to live. Our culture tells us a lot of lies, to me that’s the biggest one. I learned that when I spent a summer in London my junior year of college. Car-free for an entire summer in a place where there is a transit culture instead of a car culture, I effectively worked, shopped for groceries, went out to bars, and did everything else that modern humans do, but without a car of my own. And I loved every second of it. The romance of the wind lifting a pretty girl’s hair before a subway car arrived was an infinitely more poetic vision to me than that car-culture sonnet of the blonde in the passenger seat of the convertible. I realized then that a culture could grow from mass transit, and with that I took my first psychological steps towards the public transit lifestyle.
Then came Los Angeles. Birthplace of the car culture. This is where I decided to move after graduating college. You can’t live in LA without a car. Public transit sucks in LA. LA is so spread out. Because of this, I had my shiny new Honda Accord shipped out and parked it in front of my new apartment in East Hollywood. And that’s where it sat for 2 years.
I had come to Los Angeles a few times before, once when I was 17, a year after officially joining the car culture. Each time I made a visit, I battled the freeways, awed and amazed by the sheer amount of lanes and vehicles populating them in farthest edge of the car culture. Althought it’s cliche, I had no idea Los Angeles had a subway. When I visited in 2000 (with the same buddy I used to ride The Bus of Freaks with) , I stayed in Downtown Los Angeles and traveled to Hollywood and Universal city… by car, even though there was massive subway infrastructure to all those places at the time. Apparently, LA forgot to tell tourists they could get around without a car.
After living here for but a few months, I quickly realized that in Los Angeles, contrary to the myth, a car is more of a burden than a neccessity. My shiny Honda Accord quickly became a dirty, dull, and dinged up Honda Accord. Parking tickets would pile up, auto insurance costs drained my accounts, and gas prices skyrocketed, all these cost of living increases for something that didn’t improve my quality of living. When I did drive I would end up frustrated, angry, and stressed - fearing for your life every moment you’re behind the wheel will do that to you. I didn’t like Los Angeles when I drove. In fact, I hated the Los Angeles I saw from the drivers seat.
But I love Los Angeles.
Ten years ago I couldn’t wait to escape The Bus of Freaks. But what I didn’t realize was how I made one of my best friends at the bus stop waiting for that bus, or how some of my best creative work as a teenager was inspired by those bus rides, or how when I got my car taken away from me for making prank phone calls, I still had a way to get to school thanks to that bus. The car culture convinced me that I needed to own a car of my own, but countless times in the past decade, life has proven otherwise. I’ve come to view the car as a luxury, much like an airplane - something I’ll take advantage of when I really need one, but there’s no reason for me to own my own airplane! There’s no denying the massive contribution that the car has brought to modern life, the comforts we enjoy today would be impossible without the automobile. But, as we venture towards the future, I think we can see that individuals can get way without personal car ownership. There’s no reason individual humans should feel they need an expensive, heavy, complicated piece of machinery to survive. To use the buzzword of our time, it’s just not sustainable. Ten years later I’ve realized that living life without dragging around a 1-ton hunk of metal is an easier, happier, and more logical life. Especially in Los Angeles.
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not to mention, riding in a bus now can be about as entertaining as it was when i was in school. especially if you’re looking for freaks, fred. cuz they def out there. sometimes more than others of course, and so as not to scare off newbies, it’s not an all the time thing. but when you’re lucky enuff to catch a “chee-wee bag lady” as justmynipples has called them, on your bus, just sit back and enjoy the show.
as for the rest of your post. i feel the same way, except the for not wanting a private jet, that would be well cool. of course owning an island off the coast of Dubai would be cool too, but oh well. car culture has become this profoundly over exotic lie that society has drilled into us. so much so that it takes a hike in gas prices and expensive insurance and 2 hour long commutes and cancer filled air quality to even recognize the absurdity of it, yet the absurdity has been there all along. they never show the woman with the blonde hair in the red convertible stopped in traffic and cursing the existence around her that she and her fellow drivers are causing, yet thats the image we see everday. so how is it that so many are still so deluded? are red panels, tinted windows, and shiny wheels really that important? what are we, seven?
I can get most of the places I want to go on public transit and/or my bicycle. So far I have been able to get to almost all of the places I needed to go in the last 18 months without a car.
If the “public transit system” really was a public transit system we could rely on 24/7, I would find a car to be absolutely superfluous.
After all, it costs more to park in Downtown LA than to take the bus or train to get there (even with the extra $2 in freeway zone fares). And it’s actually as fast or faster at rush hour taking the bus in the carpool lane than driving solo in the other lanes. Not to mention that the time spent on the bus can be productive and fun, two words I do associate with driving in rush hour traffic.
Count me thrilled to have never held a driver’s license and to have grownup smack dab in the middle of the San Fernando Valley. I don’t miss traffic and I don’t feel like it really takes me any longer to get anywhere. Plus, as mentioned above, the freakshow seats are first row!
thanks for this post and for keeping your blog. i’ve been without a car as long as you and live on the westside. for a while i thought i was something of a freak for not owning a car in los angelese…more so because I grew up here. it’s comforting to know that there are other people out there who use transit by choice! And also that travelling by transit doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily “giving up” anything except gas, insurance, maintenance, road rage, and parking safari.
london had a great impact on me as well when it came to really thinking about living without a car.
and yes, I enjoy the daily freak show as well!
I once read a remark “show me an old guy on a bicycle, or the bus, and I will show you a failure in life” (true in my case).
But as I ride in the summer, here in south east Dorset, a lot of cars have bikes clamped on the back for hitting country trails at a beauty spot. I constantly give way to, and wave out, cars. I forget I am not a car. I have nothing but good will from drivers.
If one is a family person with a load of kids and shopping, or ball-game kit, a car is a NEED. Car folk would hate getting soaked in sweat or rain. I hated paying big bills to keep my motorcycle on the road.
Cy Quick at mydigest.wordpress.com
Think of what you gain by not driving:
1. Exercise.
2. No traffic.
3. Experiencing the city as a city.
4. No honking or tailgating or fighting over parking spaces.
5. No gas expenses.
6. No car payments.
7. No car maintenance.
8. Helping reduce congestion and air pollution.
9. Reading on the bus.
10. Talking to strangers.
Well I think the first thing we need to remember Cy is that families prospered for many thousands of years before the automobile was invented. “Need” is a subjective term.
But like I said in my post, I don’t hate cars, and I recognize their usefulness and value and importance in our current prosperity level. My point is that individual car ownership is for the most part uneccessary, maybe even for families in certain denser urban areas like Los Angeles. Our cities should be designed so that we can get around to all our daily duties (including duties for our children) without having to rely on an car. Certainly in rural areas this is more difficult, but this blog is specifically about the massive urban are called Los Angeles.
If all our services are easily accessible by mass transit, then for our day-to-day lives a personal automoblie should be irrelevant, unless you have a dislike of other human beings or prefer the isolation and “security” that personal transportation offers(which many people do). Just understand that there are costs to that, and rationally, in an area with ample public transit resources, those costs are not worth it. A car is a depreciating asset that takes massive amounts of money from you as it concurrently loses value. For those non day-to-day activities, eg. weekend family trips to rural hiking areas, car sharing and car rental services are available and much more affordable in the long run that owning a car.
It’s sad to think that not having a car would equate to being a failure at life. If you can get to where you need to go without one, wouldn’t that make you pretty successful at life?
If you can get to where you need to go without one, wouldn’t that make you pretty successful at life?
I grew up in Los Angeles without a car at home. When we needed a car, my mom and grandmother called friends or used a cab. They never obtained drivers licenses.
My mom and her mother lived in Budapest. They never had to use a car there. They lived at the turnaround loop of what is now Europe’s most ridden tram line. The transit service was incredible.
When they came to America, the thought never crossed their minds to get a car. They had lived in New York, Pittsburgh and finally settling in Los Angeles.
The world tends to think of Los Angeles as the biggest transit laughingstock in the world, but the reason they never bought a car was that they always lived in areas where the buses were so frequent that no schedule was needed.
I had to use the bus everywhere, and many times I hated it. But, in retrospect, it ended up being a gift. I not only used the bus to get around, I started taking excursions to explore areas via public transit, and I made friends with veteran riders to know the tricks of taking the best rides in L.A.
So, I’m glad I was exposed to the buses early on in life.