Eliminate jaywalking laws: "The core problem lies with street design, not human behavior."

Yes, we've been here before.

    

Walking is not a crime: Dunman and others on the scourges of jaywalking in auto-erotic America.

Like the jaywalker said: "People don’t obey the rules when they’re driving. Why should I?"

But any little chink to be taken from the imperialistic edifice of automobile supremacy is worth a well-aimed Molotov cocktail here and there. 

9 Reasons to Eliminate Jaywalking Laws Now, by Angie Schmitt and Charles T. Brown (CityLab)

They’ve rarely protected pedestrians, and their enforcement is racially biased. Two street safety experts say there are better ways to curb traffic violence.

On Sept. 23, Kurt Andreas Reinhold, a 42-year-old Black man, was trying to cross a street in San Clemente, California, when two officers from a special “homeless outreach unit” stopped him. An altercation ensued; minutes later, Reinhold, a father of two and down-on-his-luck former youth soccer coach, was shot and killed. In a cellphone video of the confrontation, Reinhold can be heard demanding, “Where did I jaywalk?”

This is a particularly troubling example of a pattern we see all too often. Black and Brown people, especially men, are routinely targeted by police for jaywalking or simply existing in public space. Often these stops result in an escalating series of fines and fees. In other cases — as in San Clemente, as well as in Sacramento, Seattle and New York City — they can end in violence.

Especially at a time when there is intense focus on police brutality and racism, Reinhold’s death should prompt us to pause and consider who is truly served by jaywalking laws. Their effectiveness as safety measures appears to be limited: Despite heavy handed and selective jaywalking enforcement, pedestrian deaths in the U.S. have increased rapidly in the last decade. As two of the top experts on pedestrian safety in the country, we think it is time for cities to consider decriminalizing jaywalking or eliminating the infraction altogether.

Here’s why.

1. Jaywalking is a made-up thing by auto companies to deflect blame when drivers hit pedestrians.
2. The concept of jaywalking encourages drivers to be aggressive toward pedestrians, and for third parties to ignore or excuse pedestrian deaths.
3. Our streets are not designed to make walking safe or convenient.
4. Pedestrians are almost as likely to be struck and killed at an intersection as mid-block.
5. When pedestrians jaywalk, they are often behaving rationally.
6. Jaywalking laws are not enforced fairly.
7. Jaywalking stops are frequently explosive.
8. The focus on jaywalking reflects the lower political status of those who walk — not the societal harm of the activity.
9. The safest countries globally allow jaywalking.

snip

Eliminating jaywalking laws may sound radical, but it’s been discussed before in cities such as Seattle. Other places, like Berkeley, California, are experimenting with new models for traffic enforcement that deemphasize police in favor of crash investigators who are trained to help promote infrastructure changes that improve safety. New York Attorney General Letitia James has advocated for removing police from traffic stops, and a new survey shows a majority of New Yorkers support the idea.

Wider reforms and changes to traffic safety enforcement are needed, from increasing diversity within law enforcement to enhanced data tracking, police training, inclusivity and investment in new social and criminal justice programs. Such efforts must be implemented with a vigilant eye towards reversing existing inequities: Early results from so-called “unbiased” enforcement efforts, such as intelligence-led enforcement, used by cities like Oakland, California, show disparities in traffic stops remain. The time is now, not later, to revisit or eliminate laws like jaywalking that are primarily used as a pretext to stop Black and Brown people — and rarely protected any pedestrians in the first place. 

Walking is not a crime: Dunman and others on the scourges of jaywalking in auto-erotic America.

Photo credit: Vox (below).

I walk.

I walk a lot.

There is me, and there are hundreds of vehicles. Conscious of the disparity between 235 lbs and several thousand, I try to pay attention, but every now and then, I'll get distracted. except that I'm not moving very fast, and comparatively speaking, the vehicles are ... and at this late date, is it necessary to remind readers of how often all of us are distracted while driving?

Of how drivers talk, text, sing, and play with their cigarettes?

Of how they approach an intersection with a one-way street and look only in the direction of oncoming traffic, and almost never the other -- where a walker may be trying to cross?

Of how while distracted, they're usually traveling at an unsafe speed, especially in densely populated urban areas?

When you're walking, you see all of it, because you must do so for the sake of your own safety -- and for the sake of your own safety, you use your own two feet as intelligently and resourcefully as you can. Jaywalking isn't a crime. It's a defense mechanism to circumvent wheeled stupidity, plain and simple.

The Vox piece referenced by Dunman is worthy of a highlight.

The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of "jaywalking", by Joseph Stromberg

... "In the early days of the automobile, it was drivers' job to avoid you, not your job to avoid them," says Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia and author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. "But under the new model, streets became a place for cars — and as a pedestrian, it's your fault if you get hit."

One of the keys to this shift was the creation of the crime of jaywalking. Here's a history of how that happened.

Joe Dunman does a great  job of shining a light on another Fischer administration misstep: Blaming walkers for the behavior of drivers.

On LMPD’s jaywalking crackdown: We should not convert our police into well-armed tax collectors, by Joe Dunman (Insider Louisville)

... The idea that pedestrians don’t belong on the street and should only cross at narrowly defined places is a recent invention of the automobile age. Earlier this year, an illuminating article by Vox explored the history of traffic laws and jaywalking. In the old days now long gone, cities were a space for people, not cars. Now, especially since the Urban Renewal age of the 1960s and 1970s, all public space belongs to the almighty automobile. Where once it was the primary duty of vehicle drivers to avoid pedestrians, we now expect people on foot to get out of the way or risk death.

Not unexpectedly, there's this. How do supposed "Democrats" rationalize it?

It may or may not surprise you that the brunt of “broken windows” policies like jaywalking crackdowns falls disproportionately on the poor and non-white. Minor violations are used as an excuse to harass and financially exploit. In New York, 81 percent of the 7.3 million minor citations and summonses issued by police between 2001 and 2013 went to black and Hispanic people, who comprise much smaller minorities of the city’s total population.

Two years ago, NAC pointed to the following. It's worth a reprint. The passage below emphasizes solutions, but there is more to it. Hit the link, and learn.

Walking is Not a Crime: Questioning the Accident Axiom, by David M Nelson (Project for Public Spaces)

Solutions
There are many things that can be done to keep pushing the message back to a place that values human life first, and speed and efficient movement of automobiles second. On the policy side, get a Vulnerable Users Law introduced into your state legislature. Vulnerable Users Laws shift the burden of evidence onto the more dangerous individual. Drivers are responsible for cyclists, cyclists for pedestrians. I’m a huge fan of these laws, because pedestrians are put on a pedestal. They’ve been popular in Europe and are catching on in the United States.

You can also pursue other policies like Vision Zero, famously applied in Sweden and currently being campaigned for by Transportation Alternatives in NYC. Essentially, Vision Zero is a directive to eliminate all pedestrian and cyclists fatalities in quick order. The central premise being, “that no loss of life is acceptable.” Concerning law and order, you can find local lawyers to represent and advocate for justice on the behalf of pedestrians and cyclists injured or killed by drivers.

You can work to lower the speed of traffic. More specifically, advocate to decrease the range of speeds driven over a segment of road. A fundamental belief in traffic engineering is that differences in operating speed causes higher risks of crashes. Spread can be reduced by lowering speed limits and using roundabouts instead of signalized intersections. The end result is travel times remain the same but maximum operating speed and the range of speeds are significantly lowered. Other geometric changes include narrower lanes, pedestrian refuge islands, neck-downs and Rightsizing.

However, only so much will be accomplished until our local papers and the nightly news starts putting pressure on state DOTs and public works departments to keep our citizens safe on foot. So, first and foremost, pay closer attention to the way that pedestrian deaths are portrayed by the local media in your area, and don’t be afraid to put pressure your local news outlets when you see improper coverage that blames the victim. It is easy to find language in your State Statutes that debunk published misconceptions about crosswalks and jaywalking. We all have the right to walk—and like most rights, it’s one that must be defended.

Here, there, everywhere: "Creating real transportation options" for all residents.

Specifically in this case, Denver, but the implications for Louisville metro are fairly clear.

Is the ORBP boondoggle finished yet?

Locantore: It's not about congestion; it's about freedom, by Jill Locantore (Denver Post)

... ultimately, congestion isn't the problem we should be trying to solve. The bigger problem is that many Denver residents don't have any options other than driving to their daily destinations. Automobiles have long symbolized freedom in the American imagination. Yet in our devotion to building communities oriented around driving, we've engineered the ability to walk, bike, or take transit out of many of our neighborhoods. Now here we are enslaved to our automobiles, obsessed with fueling them, parking them, and making sure they don't get too crowded on the roadways.

In West Palm Beach, "downtown traffic counts indicate steep drop in vehicular trips."

And then there's peak car.

Despite increase in downtown residents, downtown traffic counts indicate steep drop in vehicular trips, by Jesse Bailey (Walkable West Palm Beach)

Vehicular traffic counts in and around downtown have been trending down since 2005. This downward/flat trend has continued after the recession ended in June 2009, and even though GDP is well above the peak reached at the previous cycle of economic expansion ...

... As West Palm Beach continues to grow and receive private investment, now is the time to incrementally expand transportation investments in and around downtown that facilitate walking, biking, and transit. Imagine what we can achieve with an expanded trolley, the SkyBike bike share system, and implementation of the walkability study to make downtown more walkable and bikeable. A more prosperous and livable city is literally at our feet if we seize the opportunity.

He's taking the brakes off his car.

Thanks to R for the submission. I intended to do more with this one, but at times the One Man Polemical Band falls a bit behind ... and it's been that kind of week.

I’m an Anti-Braker, by Robert Moore, Jr. (Encouraging an Informed Polity)

Guys, I wanted to let you know about a personal decision I recently made. I don’t really feel like discussing it, but I want to put my position out there. Please be respectful. This is a really long post, but please read the whole thing.

I’m taking the brakes off my car. This isn’t a rash decision, so please listen up.

A few weeks ago I saw a car accident - two people went through an intersection at the same time. Both slammed on their brakes at the same time and collided. Fortunately no one was seriously injured.

But then it occurred to me - if they had just gone through the intersection, they wouldn’t have collided. The brakes CAUSED the accident!

"There is an evolutionary pressure pushing motorists towards hatred of cyclists."

At Facebook, on the topic of Jeff Speck's Downtown Street Network Proposal, a person who lives in Jeffersonville and works in Louisville wrote, "I love downtown New Albany! Please no bicycles."

Including Bike Lanes

Cycling is the largest planning revolution currently underway. . . in only some American cities. The news is full of American cities that have created significant cycling populations by investing in downtown bike networks. Among the reasons to institute such a network is pedestrian safety: bikes help to slow cars down, and new bike lanes are a great way to use up excess road width currently dedicated to oversized driving lanes. When properly designed, bike lanes make streets safer for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians alike -- page 39, Speck New Albany proposal.

So, why single out cyclists?

Moreover, why do drivers become so angry with cyclists? The BBC's Stafford says it is because cyclists "offend the moral order."

Do you agree?

The psychology of why cyclists enrage car drivers, by Tom Stafford (BBC)

Something about cyclists seems to provoke fury in other road users. If you doubt this, try a search for the word "cyclist" on Twitter. As I write this one of the latest tweets is this: "Had enough of cyclists today! Just wanna ram them with my car." This kind of sentiment would get people locked up if directed against an ethnic minority or religion, but it seems to be fair game, in many people's minds, when directed against cyclists. Why all the rage?

I've got a theory, of course. It's not because cyclists are annoying. It isn't even because we have a selective memory for that one stand-out annoying cyclist over the hundreds of boring, non-annoying ones (although that probably is a factor). No, my theory is that motorists hate cyclists because they think they offend the moral order.

Delightful heresy: Urban values as accommodating automobiles in an environment dominated by people.

To rethink implies having the first thought, and as this pertains to New Albany's traditional ruling class, it's where the problems rend to start.

As you read, consider how the Gahan team already has commenced botching the rethink by refusing to THINK first: What sort of urban area do we want this to be? Here's the crux of it, and a ready-made mission statement for getting down to first principles.

We need to rethink our urban areas. They need to be redesigned around a new set of values, one that doesn’t seek to accommodate bikers and pedestrians within an auto-dominated environment but instead does the opposite: accommodates automobiles in an environment dominated by people. It is people that create value. It is people that build wealth. It is in prioritizing their needs – whether on foot, on a bike or in a wheelchair – that we will begin to change the financial health of our cities and truly make them strong towns.

By all means, read the whole essay.

BEST OF BLOG: FOLLOW THE RULES, BIKERS, by Charles Marohn (Strongtowns)

I spent much of the year working on the sequel to the Curbside Chat that has come to be known as Transportation in the Next American City. Where the Chat explains why our cities are going broke and how embracing an incremental approach to growth can put us on a path towards building productive places once more, Transportation in the Next American City explains why our auto-based approach to transportation is yielding negative returns and how our cities, to be prosperous again, need to be built for people, not cars. It is a radical rethink that I initially struggled with but have found a voice for as I've been forced to explain it to multiple audiences.

In which the 1985 Ford F-150 finds a worthy new home.

For a brief moment, we were the owners of four Fords, so something had to give. First up was my father's truck (84,000 miles); thanks to Stephen J. Powell, it now has a worthy new home. Next, I hope to trade a 1996 Crown Vic and 2009 Fusion for an F-150 of more recent vintage. We'll see. Maybe there'll be enough left over to purchase a new bicycle.

But first, a CeeSaw digression: "The Fascist Automobile vs. Bicycle Rebellion."

Councilman Bob "CeeSaw" Caesar has uttered so much white-bread blather over the years that it would require a full-time archivist to annotate the quotes, which we'd then be throwing into the fireplace, anyway, better to save on a long winter's heating bills.

One time just after we first clashed over the one-way street grid, and in CeeSaw's best 1960s-era verbiage, borrowed from a time when he undoubtedly occupied the city's defense ramparts all alone, besuited, starched and buttoned-down, heroically facing the long-haired hippie freaks advancing like drugs-and-free-sex zombies toward his well-ordered foyer, Caesar referred to me as anti-establishment. Or maybe it was counter-cultural, or both.

His scorn was as palpable as my pride.

The point, however, is that my flaming radicalism of the sort that sends cautious jewelry buyers scurrying is as quaint and peaceful as Bob Caesar's "but really, I'm still a Democrat" innate Romneyism when compared elsewhere.

Like here.

The Fascist Automobile vs. Bicycle Rebellion (Rebel Metropolis)

 ... Instead of leveling the playing field by democratizing our common street space the way bikes do, automobiles prompt us to often engage in sociopathic behavior that’s hostile, selfish, dangerous, and downright fascist.

Say the word "innovation" in New Albany ...

... and they generally think you said "syncopation," so they start dancing the Charleston -- say, wasn't flapper dancing a Bicentennial showcase event?

"If it works, keep it" and "it's all I've ever known and so I'm terrified" are two very different things. As I reminded Bob Caesar last week, it isn't like his long reign as arbiter of all that's good and decent downtown let to streets paved with gold (those turned out to be the ones leading to his domicile in Silver Hills.

No, it took different people, different money and different ways of thinking about development to so much as take the hesitant baby steps of recent years. When you read the first two comments in the discussion below, you see ideas -- streets comprise a real estate portfolio, and that parks needn't be big and expensive to be desirable -- that fully qualify as the AntiCaesar.

Just get out of the way, Bob. Your time has passed, and we must adapt and experiment now if we're too have any hope of surviving the effects of the bridges and tolling regime that you, yourself, tragically joined in imposing.

Dynamic Duos: Michael Bloomberg And Janette Sadik-Khan On The Future Of Walking, Biking, And Driving

Michael Bloomberg, Mayor
Janette Sadik-Khan, Commissioner, Department of Transportation

Sadik-Khan: The streets in a city like New York--6,300 miles of streets--it's the largest real estate portfolio the city has. So we have to make it more efficient. That's why designing in bike lanes, bus lanes, new capacity on the seven-line [subway] extension--it's all about using that existing resource, but looking at it differently.

Bloomberg: And it's not just roads. It's parks. With our PlaNYC, a park for everyone within 10 minutes was our [goal]; to get that, you have to take schoolyards and convert them into parks in the off-hours, simply because there's no room to go build new parks in the dense parts of our city. There are a lot of those kinds of things, and they impact the economy, they impact the psyche of the people who live here, they make the city more attractive.

Bike lanes and a perceived loss of retail access.

It isn't so much that this essay applies to the exact situation in New Albany. After all, we've been careful to place our bike lanes where they barely matter. Still, if for no other insight than the first paragraph, it's worth a read.

No, Bike Lanes Don't Hurt Retail Business, by Eric Jaffe (Atlantic Cities)

City retailers tend to overestimate the importance of parking to their business. They fail to see the many downsides of free parking (congestion and low shopper turnover, among them). They believe more people arrive at the store by car than actually do. They may not even realize that while driving customers spend more per visit, non-drivers spend as much or more in the long term.

And yet whenever a city considers installing a bike lane, rest assured some retailers will protest the perceived loss of automobile access.

From PPS: "Walking is Not a Crime: Questioning the Accident Axiom."

A longer Sunday read, applicable to bicyclists, too, and overall, well worth the time to read. The excerpt below offers solutions only, but please, read the whole piece.

Walking is Not a Crime: Questioning the Accident Axiom, by David M Nelson (Project for Public Spaces)

Solutions
There are many things that can be done to keep pushing the message back to a place that values human life first, and speed and efficient movement of automobiles second. On the policy side, get a Vulnerable Users Law introduced into your state legislature. Vulnerable Users Laws shift the burden of evidence onto the more dangerous individual. Drivers are responsible for cyclists, cyclists for pedestrians. I’m a huge fan of these laws, because pedestrians are put on a pedestal. They’ve been popular in Europe and are catching on in the United States.

You can also pursue other policies like Vision Zero, famously applied in Sweden and currently being campaigned for by Transportation Alternatives in NYC. Essentially, Vision Zero is a directive to eliminate all pedestrian and cyclists fatalities in quick order. The central premise being, “that no loss of life is acceptable.” Concerning law and order, you can find local lawyers to represent and advocate for justice on the behalf of pedestrians and cyclists injured or killed by drivers.

You can work to lower the speed of traffic. More specifically, advocate to decrease the range of speeds driven over a segment of road. A fundamental belief in traffic engineering is that differences in operating speed causes higher risks of crashes. Spread can be reduced by lowering speed limits and using roundabouts instead of signalized intersections. The end result is travel times remain the same but maximum operating speed and the range of speeds are significantly lowered. Other geometric changes include narrower lanes, pedestrian refuge islands, neck-downs and Rightsizing.

However, only so much will be accomplished until our local papers and the nightly news starts putting pressure on state DOTs and public works departments to keep our citizens safe on foot. So, first and foremost, pay closer attention to the way that pedestrian deaths are portrayed by the local media in your area, and don’t be afraid to put pressure your local news outlets when you see improper coverage that blames the victim. It is easy to find language in your State Statutes that debunk published misconceptions about crosswalks and jaywalking. We all have the right to walk—and like most rights, it’s one that must be defended.

“We’ve taken the automobile, which can be a wonderful tool, and totally exaggerated its importance.”

Here's another batting practice toss for CM CeeSaw to watch, uncomprehending, for a called strike three.

From two feet to four wheels and back again (TheSpec.com)

James Street North and Upper James Street share more than a name — they capture in a few kilometres the fundamental changes the automobile has brought to Canadian cities.

Ken Greenberg, author and planning consultant, told the downtown revival conference in Hamilton Thursday it’s time to start reversing some of those changes if cities are to become livable again.

Powerful stuff. But are "sharing" ideas too "political" for timid Main Street organizations?

There's a lot to chew on here; thanks Andy.

The blog is Strong Towns, and the article is Shared Space. The ideas for debating therein remind us that in so many ways, New Albany is sufficiently degraded at this point in time to conceivably serve as a bold laboratory of innovation, and yet we are held back from doing so not so much by short funds, but from the perpetual cautious urge on the part of community pillars to endlessly repeat their previous failed tactics.

Here's the intro:

The concept of building shared space within the public realm is a radical one here in the United States, where automobiles are not only given priority, but completely dominate most public spaces. With the financial insolvency inherent in our current approach becoming more and more apparent each day, there is a need to study alternatives. The shared space model -- while a dramatic departure from the status quo -- can help us build Strong Towns while making our urban neighborhoods safer in the process.

Return of "Commuting to Nowhere."

From the Blue Ridge Parkway to the Ohio River Bridges Project, and including Spring Street in New Albany, we hear the voices of those who simply cannot imagine a future world without the predominance of big-oil fueled internal combustion transport. It's an absence of imagination paralleling that of so many military leaders during the Great War, who could not fathom combat without cavalry charges and the fixing of bayonets.

Blue Ridge Parkway: Closed To Cyclists?, by Will Harlan at Blue Ridge Outdoors.

The Blue Ridge Parkway is the single most popular road for bicyclists in the Blue Ridge. Cyclists cherish the Parkway’s 469 scenic miles from Shenandoah to the Smokies. Even Lance Armstrong pedaled the high-elevation road during his Tour de France championship training.

Unfortunately, the Blue Ridge Parkway’s newly released draft management plan could limit cycling on the Parkway. The draft plan focuses exclusively on the Parkway being “actively managed as a traditional, self-contained, scenic recreational driving experience.”

Urban Indy: "One Year of Being Car Free in Indianapolis."

Could it be done here? As the author freely notes, housing choices play a big part in automotive disuse. I continue to marvel at all the time I've spent in Europe without once being behind the wheel, and seldom relying on the cars of others to get around.

One Year of Being Car Free in Indianapolis

$20 a gallon? Main Street and Christopher Steiner think so, and it's a good thing.

Since the chances of our local Main Street organization sharing it with you are somewhere between none and less than that, you may as well read the national Main Street organization's Story of the Week here:

$20 Per Gallon: All Roads Lead to Main Street, by Erica Stewart (Main Street)

Let’s start with the automobile, and in particular, its gas tank, which is where half of our imported oil ends up. We Americans have a love affair with our cars. This is no secret, and the ways in which the automobile has commanded the development of our suburbs and exurbs is well-documented. Nor is it a mystery how Main Streets have suffered from our reliance on the automobile. As more and more of us abandoned historic, close-in neighborhoods in favor of sprawling new homes and garages, commercial developers followed suit, delivering a suburban Car-topia landscape of strip malls and indoor shopping malls, dotted with big-box retailers, mammoth surface parking lots and a maze of divided highways and traffic lights. As we’ve distanced our homes from where we work, go to school, shop, and worship, the car has been there to bridge the gap. And what has made that work? Cheap oil.

The other half of our imported crude goes into “stuff” we consume. Steiner effectively describes how cheap oil has also enabled our consumption of foreign-made goods, things like couches, DVD players, mops, bed sheets—-products made of synthetic materials derived from, again, oil. These things can be made cheaply in China, for example, where labor and material inputs are vastly less expensive than in the U.S. , and then shipped here via massive container ships. Wal-Mart, for example, has 6,000 suppliers, 80 percent of which are located in China. There’s no way its business model--one based on a global supply chain and distribution of its goods--works without cheap oil. There’s no way it offers such low prices without a supply of cheap oil.

The eternal Trabant.

Trabants are back in the news, at least in these three articles in the New York Times.

Where Have the Trabis Gone?

A People’s Car as Flawed as the People’s Paradise

A Red Menace That You Can Drive Yourself

HOW many workers did it take to build a Trabant? Two — one to fold and one to paste.

How do you double the value of a Trabant? Fill its gas tank.

How do you measure a Trabant’s acceleration? With a diary.

East Germany's infamous Trabant was a cuddly bundle of rough-hewn metal and socialist asbestos powered by the equivalent of a two-stroke lawn mower engine, for which creative types could fashion replacement parts from discarded tin foil and baling twine in the absence of auto care superstores.

Lest we forget, Reagan asked Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, but it was opportunistic Ossies piloting their Trabants across the porous Hungarian border in the summer of 1989 that finally did the trick.

Check out this clip: 1960’s-era Trabant advertisement at YouTube.

Also: Everyday Life with the Trabant.

The car itself is smart. As for the other drivers ...

(A reworked MySpace blog post)

Automobiles? They're the American birthright, or so I'm told, but when it comes to cars I'm an aesthetic dyslexic, and damned proud of it.

Gaze upon the machine in as loving a fashion as you wish: Stylish, sleek, sexy, and reminiscent of a throbbing penis … whatever ... and pardon me while I suppress a yawn.


Cars are nothing more than a necessary evil, a conveyance I'm forced to utilize when the weather or my schedule precludes riding the bicycle to work, or during those sadly numerous times when I must reconcile myself to the sad fact that my fellow Americans have chosen to forego public transportation so they can live "free" (and die broke) fifty miles from the places they need to go each day.


And while I'm at it, stop making the remark, "Gee, Rog, you're lucky that you live so close to work and can ride your bike." Luck has nothing to do with it. Planning does, but listen, I know how much you need that exurban acreage to feel whole and be near your megachurch.

----

Having said all that, my wife needs transportation both to and for her job, and so just for the fun of it we test-drove a Smart Car on Wednesday evening. Speaking from the vantage point of 6' 4" and 250 lbs, it's a small car, indeed, but sufficiently roomy to accommodate me with space left over. Verily, the doors are the single largest part, and it really is a front without a back.

The drive went swimmingly until we were merging onto I-64 and came abreast of a predictably swinish semi rig that had ample space in the center lane to yield, and of course would not, and as we traversed the shoulder I was reminded of my friend Tim's observation: If you're in a Smart Car and involved in a high speed wreck, don't worry; modern forensics can be relied upon to make a positive identification of your remains.

I was also reminded of my hands-down favorite automobile of all time: East Germany's infamous and long deceased Trabant, that cuddly cute bundle of rough-hewn metal and socialist asbestos powered by the equivalent of a lawn mower engine, for which creative types could fashion replacement parts from discarded tin foil and baling twine.

The Trabant did far more to undermine the Iron Curtain than Ronald Reagan ever mustered. Lest we forget, Reagan asked Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, but it was opportunistic Ossies piloting their Trabants across the porous Hungarian border in the summer of 1989 that finally did the trick.

----

It was decided that there'll be no Smart Cars in the household, at least not yet; other expenditures are more vital. Still, for an aesthetic dyslexic, the Euro-styling strikes a definitive chord. If only our rapidly disappearing American currency could make the same claim.