DRIVING

"Ye who, borne about in chariots and sedans,
Know no fatigue but that of idleness."
-- William Cowper

The vehicles of our great nation annually burn about 139 billion gallons of gasoline and 41 billion gallons of diesel fuel, a total of about 180 billion gallons. (Year 2004 figures, easy to find because the petroleum industry likes to brag.) The total federal, state, and local expenditure to build, operate, and maintain our streets and highways, including all support services such as police and emergency services, is probably in excess of $700 billion a year according to a Department of Transportation estimate, although data to support this figure is nearly impossible to find. It's pretty obvious, then, that motor fuel taxes aren't footing nearly as much of the bill as is commonly imagined. It looks like a tax of about $4 a gallon might cover the tab. A report by the International Center for Technology Assessment suggests an even higher estimate.

I wonder how much of this fuel is burned by vehicles carrying only one human body and little or no luggage, plodding through congested traffic at speeds little if any faster than what a decent bicycle could be pedaled? In my own personal case, probably at least half. But the big rub is, we've carefully custom-designed our highway system for motor vehicles to such an extreme that bicycles and pedestrians are impractical or impossible, and in some cases even illegal! It almost looks like our national transportation system was designed by OPEC.

What do you call a street with neither pedestrian walkways nor sufficient shoulders to operate a bicycle? I call it a hillbilly cowpath, but you're welcome to your own choice of disparaging terminology. By that definition, we are practically a nation of hillbilly cowpaths. We have gotten so accustomed to using our cars for all bodily movement outside of the confines of our own private property that the quote at the top of this page probably applies to most of us.

The Thomas Johnson Memorial Bridge over the Patuxent River in southern Maryland, lovingly referred to as the Concrete Rainbow by the local population, was built in 1977 and has no pedestrian walkway and only a 2-foot wide relief area on either side of the main traveling lanes, not only too narrow, but too trash-filled for bicycle operation. Riding a bike on this bridge is technically legal but not recommended by the State of Maryland. I've done it once, and I don't recommend it, either. This bridge is only one example of the thousands of points in our national highway system that are virtual blockades to anyone trying to travel by any means other than motor vehicle.

The more we prevent anybody except motor vehicles from using the roads, the worse congestion we're gonna have, because a transportation system based entirely on motor vehicles is inherently self-congesting. Building more highways and more lanes onto existing highways doesn't seem to help because that just gives people more opportunity to drive like nut-cases and use up the extra lanes without increasing actual traffic-handling capacity.

I wonder how much "Road Rage" there would be if motor vehicle usage were so expensive and severely restricted that most people had to ride bikes? Just think! How belligerent could anybody be on the road if even the slightest act of belligerence required monumental muscular effort instead of the mere burning of an extra nickel's worth of fuel?

On September 11, 2001, a terrorist suicide mission ruthlessly slaughtered an estimated 5,000 of our nation's citizens. For this we're going to war. Every year, we ruthlessly slaughter about 40,000 of ourselves on our highways. The enemy has done unto us only a small fraction of what we're doing onto ourselves. Not only that, but a portion of our enemy's funding probably comes from their host countries selling us the fuel to power the vehicles we use to kill ourselves with. If we're going to win this war we'd better get started right here at home before we exterminate ourselves right before our enemy's very own eyes.