I Am a Passenger

I'm waxing nostalgic at the moment for no particular reason. Later this month my wife and I celebrate our 46th wedding anniversary (she says it feels longer; I think that's because the Germans use the metric system to measure. At least I hope that's why). 

For the first five-plus years of our marriage, my wife and I didn't own a car. We lived in a medium-sized city in West Germany (albeit a city that, by itself, in the middle Seventies had as many people as all of New London County, Connecticut had when I showed up here in 1991) with a bus, streetcar, and train network that made 'getting a car of our own' one of those 'nice to do' but not 'need to have' situations.

Today we live in a medium-sized city in Southeastern Connecticut with a whimsical, at best, local bus service and NO ferries, jitneys, trams, or trains of any kind so privately-owned vehicles move up the list almost to 'required appendages.'

The capital of the State of Connecticut, Hartford, is about an hour's drive from Norwich. I have no idea, if you were to attempt a journey by 'mass transit', how you would do it but I daresay it'd take more than an hour and perhaps more than a day. I've read some interesting articles on the impact of the automobile on the American Way of Life (the right to keep and bear cars should have been included in the Bill of Rights, seriously). 

When you look at our older cities and neighborhoods anywhere across the nation, you can see from the center to the outskirts, like the rings of a tree, how the internal combustion engine became the infernal comedic device in so many instances, with us as the punchline.

Ours is not a state, and this side of the Connecticut River most especially, is not a region where relying on buses and trains gets you anything more than frostbite and long hours of travel. Sort of helps you get a better understanding of how people get addicted to a variety of controlled and uncontrolled substances--and you can make a short movie of mobility junkies, getting a hit off the gas pump--taking a deep drag off the high octane bong and snorting a line of Ultra 93. Talk about Mercury Blues.

In Connecticut, our idea of addressing issues like soaring energy costs and greenhouse gases is to build MORE roads, with more lanes so people can get to where they're going even faster. As for arguments that an investment in mass transit will yield economic development benefits as well as improve our urban and suburban quality of life, we can't hear you because we've chosen to not listen.
-bill kenny