1/30/13 – Structural addiction to the gas-guzzler

It’s interesting how structurally addicted we are to the automobile in this city. You really notice it in extreme weather conditions. It is especially apparent in the winter when it snows.

We have roads made solely (mostly) for the automobile and when it snows we can hardly drive on them and we are dependent on the snow plows to clear an adequate path for us to do our daily tasks – get to school, drive to work, get groceries, etc. If the snow plows don’t plow the roads what can we do? Well, the other day it was ice rain and it basically made the freeway like an ice skating rink. Guess what happened? There were driving delays up to two hours due to multiple car crashes and pile-ups. Fortunately since I’ve switched to riding Frontrunner and TRAX I avoided the majority of this. However, my sister had to deal with it in her commute from our home in Draper to Salt Lake City (Downtown). She thought I was driving that day so she called me to warn me how bad the roads were. She said she had to get off the freeway to take side streets and she saw twelve crashes on her way. TWELVE!

The weather makes us late to work, it makes us more susceptible to unsafe conditions that put our lives and the lives of others in danger, and it causes more pollution with the snow plows driving everywhere in their diesel operated vehicles. 

But most of us don’t have a choice but to drive… Why? Because we are structurally addicted to the way our cities are designed. Fortunately I have the ability (and time) to take Frontrunner from about a ¼^th of a mile from my house, transfer to TRAX, and ride it all the way to school up at the University of Utah.

You don’t even have to plow the TRAX rails, the train has a small set of blades they can put on the wheels / in front of the wheels to move snow as it moves. It stops us from putting toxic poisons in the air from snow plows and driving our own vehicles. It’s just something I’m becoming more and more aware of as I take this course of Green Communities.

I know we all can’t stop driving and start riding transit due to our accessibility to it. But knowing it is part of my job in the near future to help change our structural addiction to the automobile and create more ways we can travel to/from work and home and reap the benefits of saving money on gas, limiting the pollution we put into the air, and reintroducing community through our social contact with others instead of isolation.

This is something that really stuck to me from our class discussion. It totally makes sense and it is clearly something that needs strategic redevelopment and redesign. So we have more transit options available to us (including walking) so we can live where we want and choose a mode that works best for us.