As I was flipping through the DVR this morning looking for episodes of “The Doodlebops,” the news was playing in the upper right hand corner of the screen, and it was telling me about driverless cars. According to the news, they are working on vehicles that need minimal human input in a variety of situations. For instance, a car that can parallel park itself may be in your driveway soon. They also stressed that these cars of the future would mostly work on highways, not while cruising around your neighborhood that is full of stop signs, hidden drives, pedestrians, and surprise trees.
Now, I just want to take a second to rant for a moment about the idiocy of the direction our society is headed. People! We already have driverless cars! They are called trains. And buses. And subways. And airplanes. If you want to drive down the highway, but also want to get your laptop out, play on your phone, or read a book, we have an option for that. The problem is, our public transportation infrastructure in the country is mostly terrible. But it can be improved!
See, the thing is, nobody actually wants to improve it. People like driving their own cars, although I cannot for the life of me understand why. They think it gives them freedom, and sometimes it does. The freedom to sit in traffic for hours. The freedom to get pulled over and pay fines. The freedom to pay for maintenance and insurance. The freedom to get cut off a dozen times by jerks. The freedom to pollute the crap out of the planet until the whole world smells like China. And people have even started taking the freedom to do other stuff while they are driving (cause actually, driving is boring and a waste of time and we all know it). People talk on the phone. They text. They surf the internet. They eat cheeseburgers. They do their hair. They break up fights between children in the back seat. They put on make-up. They fiddle with the radio. They scroll through their iPod playlists looking for that one Goo Goo Dolls song that they can’t remember the name of. In short, driving is miserable.
So why on Earth do we keep going to great lengths to make driving more like riding a train, when we could just build better trains!? Remember streetcars? Trolleys? All the fun ways to get around before we decided we should all have our own cars? Jump on, read your book, jump off when you got to work. Perfect. I’m not saying there aren’t advantages to having your own car (filling up the trunk with groceries would be harder on a trolley), but when I picture two possible futures, I much prefer the vision of enhanced and upgraded public transportation over the vision of thousands of people in their own isolated little bubbles zipping around the highways relying on a computer to not kill them in a fiery crash. My computer has a hard enough time opening documents without freezing, I don’t want it driving me around. Thanks anyway.
…and stuff like this is why you’re my favorite blogger of all time. 🙂
i’m grateful to have a car that runs, but i would love even more to have truly comprehensive public transit networks in the US. I love riding the metro whenever I can–even aside from all the benefits you pointed out, I just like people-watching and riding with lots of other people. Whenever I hear people complain about crowded trains I think they’re nuts. Crowded trains are fun! 🙂
I don’t think a public transit system would work with the wretched suburban sprawl that we’ve got going on though. There would have to be fantastic PR campaigns and urban renewal programs and a massive shift in attitudes because so many people are so attached to the idea of having their *own* of everything (yard, pool, garage, mansion-sized house totally separated from the neighbors, you name it).
It’s the same mentality that keeps people insistent on having and using their *own* cars–people think they “deserve better” than to actually have to sit on a bus and be within a foot of someone else, or go to a public pool and share that space with other people, or relax in a city park and actually have to interact with other people once in awhile. A lot of people do everything they can to isolate themselves and surround themselves with material things so that they don’t have to share or interact with anyone else, and then we wonder why we as a society are so frequently lonely and prone to depression.