Good Luck Comes In Threes

Riding my bicycle into work today was blissful, thanks to 1) a pleasant cool tailwind, 2) a Furlough Friday, and 3) thousands of unemployed Elk Grovians.

We've had some very nice weather this week, so much so that you'd think that bike riding would be much more acceptable to commuters. Alas, no...for a moment I forgot I live in the one of the most car dependent cities on earth. I'm still only one of a handful of Elk Grovians who bothers to exercise to work, whether gasoline is $2 or $4 a gallon.

Furlough Friday's are also more commonplace, now that California's Fiscal Armageddon has finally arrived. We've hummed along blind for two years with billions in budgetary debt with absolutely no progress on fixing it, so it's finally rearing. The DMV office is closed today, along with two other Friday's this month. As I rode by the empty Broadway office building this morning I couldn't help but think how much less likely I'll get plowed over by a car now that DMV employees aren't commuting to work and neither are hundreds of patrons. I'm going to guess that DMV employees are just as likely as every other Californian to speed, to fail to signal, to text their boyfriends, to improperly yield. The mechanic's car is always the worst running jalopy on the roadway; the gardener's own lawn is always the worst kept yard on the block; the DMV employee is likely the worst driver on the road.

My city of Elk Grove, a city with no jobs of its own, requires the perpetual motoring of its occupants to the Bay Area, Rancho Cordova, or Sacramento for work, but with all these regions laying off people our Elk Grovians are driving less. And God bless them, too, for that means fewer chances for them to plow me over while texting their mistresses soon after leaving home. The Elk Grove Citizen newspaper this morning had seven pages, seven! of notice of defaults on a deed of trust, compared to three pages five months ago, so Elk Grovian foreclosures are still running hot, straight and normal. Because these people are defaulting and because there are no jobs here they are moving away -- back to renting in the Bay Area, back to living with relatives in cities with jobs. The decline of traffic on Franklin Blvd. in the morning is stunning, absolutely stunning.

I originally estimated that our depression slowdown would reduce my odds of an accident by 5%, but now I'm thinking it's closer to 15%.