Call it a Metro, Underground, Tube, Light Rail, Rapid Transit or
Metrolink. Color it purple, gold, blue or red. It’s coming to Santa Monica. By
this time next year it will have changed not only the landscape but, as Gerald
Manley Hopkins called it, the inscape of
our lives.
Our car culture has been embedded in our psyche and
now we shall see if we can take the off-ramp to public transportation. Our
individuality may shift slowly towards that of a social creature. The psychic space of a car will need to adjust to a public one and our
individuation become more inclusive.
When I moved here 61 years ago I rode the red car for
about a week and then bought a ’48 De Soto for $100. Behind the wheel I was
aligned with the physicality of Southern California. Los Angeles County is still far larger than Delaware and Rhode Island put together. But this place has changed
from the open road of a sprawl to the Sig Alert inside a sardine can.
Freeway construction tacitly encourages more cars. No widening can accommodate the traffic. I suspect there is an untold story in which big oil money plus Detroit lobbyists, in the fifties, persuaded Sacramento to direct funding away from public transportation and into the car culture.
Freeway construction tacitly encourages more cars. No widening can accommodate the traffic. I suspect there is an untold story in which big oil money plus Detroit lobbyists, in the fifties, persuaded Sacramento to direct funding away from public transportation and into the car culture.
A metro-to-the-sea should alleviate some of the
crunch. However much will depend on the available parking and buses adjacent to
the stops. It will be a long-term process to change the habits of an aging
population.
For my first 21 years I accepted subway consciousness as a given. We lived one block from a stop and five stops to Manhattan. For a nickel I could travel, with several transfers, to Flatbush and watch the Dodgers. I always had a high regard for the man in the change booth who knew the feel of twenty nickels when presented with a dollar bill. Now the price of a ride is $2.75 and the magician in the booth has been replaced by a vending machine.
For my first 21 years I accepted subway consciousness as a given. We lived one block from a stop and five stops to Manhattan. For a nickel I could travel, with several transfers, to Flatbush and watch the Dodgers. I always had a high regard for the man in the change booth who knew the feel of twenty nickels when presented with a dollar bill. Now the price of a ride is $2.75 and the magician in the booth has been replaced by a vending machine.
For a rider as opposed to a driver I could catch up
on my reading or just stare into the great beyond and think great thoughts.
People put on a certain subway face which revealed nothing. The fiction of unlived
lives got polished in ruminations. Riders of public transportation cultivated a
way of not noticing in close proximity.
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