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The Bird

Jubilee Today:
Transportation

Going Forward Without Going In Reverse

One day I wanted to go to church that was 15 miles from my house. I reached for the bike, but the tire was flat, and I only allowed enough time to ride to the trolley station a mile away from home, trolley most of the distance, then bike the last mile. I abandoned the bike, then walked to the bus stop a block from my house. It was Sunday so the buses were on a long interval. I asked for a ride from a stranger, who obligingly gave me a ride to the trolley stop. I caught the trolley with only a couple minutes to spare. On the way, I called the one person I had a number for, and asked him for a ride in the final mile. He obliged. We got to church with minutes to spare. On the way home, I caught a ride with some folks who always did lunch after church. Lunch was a good deal of fun. I asked for a ride to the trolley station, even if it required I wait for my friends to finish off their social time. That time included some homemade brownies. Was worth the wait! Then I trolleyed home and walked the last mile. One trip to church took walking, rides from friends and a stranger, and public transportation. I really had to try to get to church that day, but was awake through it all! What a day!

—Ed Lucas, paraphrasing his blog article, Going To Church

Most any American knows about the phenomenon that is the traffic jam. But it wasn’t always so. Cars had to be sold by the millions over decades. Cities had to be built in the image of the automobile, with road design departing from the human scale of old cities, in favor of the requirements of a car moving at a given speed. All of a sudden, the human image was lost in the cities and on the freeways.

Working toward a green energy solution is good and necessary, but even if every car on the road was “green powered”, we might still be left with the frustrations of the traffic jam, or the danger of being a pedestrian on a street full of cars, or worse, to be left out of it all, perhaps with age or disability prohibiting us from driving, while still living in a world built for car travel.

Part of what is missing from the public dialog is the quality of life yet to be reclaimed in more human scaled transportation options. Going beyond the answers of technology or massively expensive road building or civic renewal projects, we might want to insist on discussing the aspects that appreciably improve our lives for not much money.

We’re familiar with the options. Biking, public transportation, walking, carpooling, combining trips… all these are quite doable in some way or another, or in combination. None cost very much. Most will tend to spark face to face encounters with real people, seemingly a quaint or dangerous thing these days. (We’ll lean toward the quaint and spiritually satisfying side of it.) Some rely on our God-given mobility, others are just wiser use of any given car. Each requires a bit of compromise as compared to just jumping in a car and zipping to a destination, but each is liberating just the same, with biking and walking restoring a kind of qualitative experience lost when in a two-ton box on asphalt courses, ever regulated by lights and signs. Urban dwellers already know that if the city is designed for pedestrians, a car is mostly a superfluous item, a money sink, a liability.

JEM’s vision for how to practice jubilee certainly covers our transportation options. We can look to the right technology to move a body or some goods, instead of always defaulting to the auto. Biking and walking are clearly beneficial for health; bus and trolley passes are relatively cheap and good for those who have fixed income; carpooling and combining trips are wiser use of a vehicle with any capacity to be used more effectively. Minimizing car use is good for the environment, but also good for one’s personal budget. Dispensing with a car might save thousands of dollars. Sharing a car in a cooperative arrangement might save many households a great deal of money.

It also needs to be said that in a society so racked with fear, leaving the perceived comfort of our urban road cages has the ability to let us meet our neighbor again, to interact on the roads in a more civil and graceful way. The opportunity for a richer experience in transporting ourselves is one that technology can’t provide, lawmakers can’t legislate. Moving about the landscape is one of the quintessential parts of being human, offering us encounters that instruct us at a mystical level—if we are open to it.

Rebuilding our cities to make pedstrian friendly spaces is important but not something to take for granted, particularly in our economically-strapped era. It is expensive and doesn’t happen overnight, if the will to do so is there at all. Don’t let that stop you from petitioning for traffic calmed business districts and local building codes to allow for mixed use zones. But for those who can circumvent the cultural conditioning to drive everywhere, a rich life awaits in the creative and often cooperative aspect of getting where you need to go by other means.

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