We Must Keep Going

A few weeks ago, as most of you will have heard, an elderly driver in Santa Monica bumped his car into another, and then, in some sort of panic, drove through the barricades of a farmer's market that has taken place on a blockaded street near here for the last twenty-two years. He just kept going, and continued to drive down the street for two and a half blocks, killing ten people and sending fifty more to the hospital.

The incident inspired a brief flurry of journalistic consternation in the papers and on the television "news" shows, whose glossy-faced puppets pulled their concerned expressions out of the prop bag for the six or seven minutes the tragedy merited every evening for almost a week. Most stories settled on the question of more stringent licensing requirements for elderly drivers as the "solution." Only one that I recall mentioned the problem behind the problem, which is that we have built our cities, and especially our suburbs, to be so structurally dependent on automotive transport that those who cannot drive, and are not vigorous enough to bicycle long distances in all weathers, are in many places simply trapped at home.

My father, for example, lives in the San Fernando Valley, the original Suburban Paradise of cul-de-sacs, wide streets, few sidewalks, and retail services clustered within huge parking lots at great distances from each other. He is seventy-two, not really very old these days, but it happens that his eyes are failing, slowly but certainly. Now he is wondering what he will do when he can no longer drive. He will probably never be blind; he will certainly be able to walk and read large print and do most of his daily chores. But the time will come when he can't drive.

His house, which he owns free and clear, is in fact only about three or four hundred feet from the market where he shops. But that is as the crow flies; because he lives on a cul-de-sac, he presently drives over a mile to get to that market--down to the end of his long suburban block, left two more blocks to the main street, then left again, past the latitude of his house, and then another half block to Sherman Way--six lanes wide at this point and difficult for even a young and agile person with good eyes to cross safely. Then, once in the parking lot, another several hundred feet to park by the door. And that is the nearest store to his house. For something other than supermarket goods, he must go much farther.

The summer temperatures in the Valley stay near 100 degrees Fahrenheit much of the time. Because of the low population density, the buses do not run very often even at rush hour. Only near Ventura Boulevard, several miles south, is there the sort of residential and retail density that makes for lively neighborhoods, a rich variety of amenities within a reasonable walk of anywhere, and decent public transit--the Rapid buses work very well, and feed riders to the Red Line Metro and thereby into Hollywood, Downtown, and (through light rail connections) on to Long Beach, Norwalk, the Beach Cities, and Pasadena.

More than a mile from Ventura Boulevard, though, and--as in those parts of Egypt that are distant from the Nile--one enters a desert of sorts. A transit desert, in this case, where, in the land of the allegedly free, there is no freedom of choice: it's drive or rot at home.

And that is the tragedy behind these tragedies, behind the tragedy of the market goers lying dead or mangled among organic grapes and heirloom tomatoes, behind the tragedy of a honest men facing the conceptual imprisonment our lack of imagination has decreed as their punishment for growing old.

In Paris, in Amsterdam, in Manhattan, in any transit-based city in the world, these two old men would not have to drive to carry out their daily chores and pleasures; each could live a rich and easy life without a car. As could we all. We have condemned ourselves to traffic jams and circling for a better parking spot as the major activities of our years of youth and strength, and to solitude and inconvenience as the defining values of our old age.

We can do better. We've started, here in Los Angeles, taking baby steps with our paltry miles of Metro and our transit villages--still, better late than never. For those young dead in Santa Monica, and for the man who killed them, and for my father who fears his ever-grayer future, it is perhaps too late. But at least we are heading in the right direction after all, finally.

Sad to say, there is opposition from those who fear true freedom and true choices, and who want to keep us condemned to driving till we drop. They must not prevail. If we are to honor the dead and the living who have suffered from this narrowness of mind, if we are to honor our children and the generations that will follow us, we must keep going.

We must build a world where people can live on their own two feet, a world of corner stores and real town squares, of subways and trams and sidewalk cafés where you can talk without shouting over street noise; a world of neighbors and porches and a five-minute walk to nearly everything. Real neighborhoods, where life offers more choices than the one between the windshield and the TV screen. We can do it. We are doing it. We must keep going.

Text and article photos by Richard Risemberg

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