Rushing around...

By now you may have noticed through these brief jottings that I despise cars, or to be more specific, what they have done, and continue to do, to human society and our communities. Among the more elevated of the detrimental effects I attribute to car culture is the rush mentality that has taken possession of the motor-bound masses. It is the automobile that has pushed the rushability envelope by making superhuman speeds accessible, increasing our impatience at the slightest inconvenience causing us to slooowwww dddoooowwwwnnn. True, my beloved bicycle predates the auto as a mode of travel designed to assist human mobility. But, the bicycle's speed is a purely human-scale speed; it's speed being relative to the strength and efficiency of the person pushing (and pulling) on the pedals. On a bicycle, the journey is the reason to go from point A to point B, and being able to experience everything that comes between. In a car, spending the least possible time getting from point A to point B is the modus operandi; nothing that happens in the journey between matters but that it makes the time pass that much quicker.

Thus it has long been standard procedure for traffic engineers and urban designers to design our transportation networks to maximize this type of mobility; the faster, the better, could be the motto. We continue to increase speeds on our streets, even where they traverse residential areas. The speed limit on one street near where I work was, just this past year, increased to 55 mph. This is a street on which large scale housing complexes front, where students walk and bike to the nearby elementary school. How pleasant it must be to live there and listen to the rushing of traffic on the street's four to eight lanes all day. We seem to live in a society where the people who complain about speeders in their own neighborhood are the very same people who don't give a second thought to speeding through someone else's. Thankfully, we may have finally reached a breaking point, the idea of livable streets and livable communities have taken root across the country and continue to spread.

Slowing cars down is good for everyone, residents, businesses, bicyclists, pedestrians. With any luck the latest three streets in Los Angeles to see their speeds increased will be the last (reaslistically though, I doubt it), and like London we can begin to see speeds decrease, and the attendant benefits of that decrease, multiply.