Main Street

Have you heard? The bailout on Wall St. will affect those on Main St.

Supposedly, I live on Main Street, and you do, too. However, both NBC and CBS (both!) newscasts today displayed images of a tree-lined business district in a small town, with either parallel or slant parking, benches on the sidewalk for people to relax, enjoying ice cream. Main Street USA!

Truthfully, most of us live in suburban slums nowhere close to resembling a main street. You won't be able to find the actual main 'street' because suburban cities don't have a central core and don't have a street labeled 'main.' But look to Southern California (the automobile slum-de-jour) to find the only one around:


This is Main Street! Wa-hey! A pretend version of a living arrangement that might actually work if it weren't the entrance to Fantasyland or Tomorrowland.

People flock to this pretend place even during recessions. They spend seventy bucks just for the privilege of being able to walk through this Main Street. They like it, because it reminds them nothing of the autocentric suburban shitholes they actually live in. They like the idea of engaging other people, even if it's so obviously contrived here, the purpose being to sell large quantities of Chinese made Disney merchandise.

What makes this such a nice place? I could ask a hundred of these patrons (and I will, the next time I'm there), and not one of them will tell me that it's a nice place because there are no fucking cars.

Nope. Not one person. They'll say a hundred other things before they key into the fact that they don't have to dodge traffic. Put a few diesel F250 trucks doing 47mph on this street and it would immediately turn to shit. Put two Honda Civics on this street racing each other.

The truth is, you could actually put a few cars on this street and it would still be an acceptable place for pedestrians on the sides...because it's enclosed, has a vista at the end, the sides engage pedestrians, in and out, in and out, and...almost has a full complement of formally planted trees! A physical buffer between the bipedal apes and their motorized vehicles.

Trees! Something illegal in Elk Grove and nearly everywhere else! City planning departments prostituted themselves decades ago for a standard set of zoning codes that makes Bellingham look just like Omaha, just like Louisville, and in all cases, tree lined roads are outlawed outlawed! because trees are nothing but fixed impediments for vehicular traffic. City planners don't give a damn about what civic benefit trees might provide. Not a damn. They aren't planners, they are only actuaries; measuring this, disallowing that, this ain't wide enough, this is too close, that is too far, that is too tall, not enough outlets here, not enough parking spaces per retail space, too many wires there...they don't plan...they execute, as any rat pressing a lever for a pellet might.

What I will show in a follow-on post, disturbingly, is how inept Elk Grove and Sacramento planners are in approving fake second story windows/shutters and the illusion of 'apartments over retail' on the facades of strip retail and personal storage units. These are so god-damn stupid and completely degrade the public realm, but that's all these fucking morons can approve...because it's all their precious codes allow for!