Gone Yellow

I drove a company car to Folsom this morning, to assist with looping in a new 230kV transmission line into the Folsom substation. If things go well this project will be energized this Sunday and I will be able to breathe easier.

Noting, however, the tremendous crush of foothillian traffic coming down highway 50, I can't imagine I'll really be breathing easier, what with all that pollution created by the throngs of people who've "escaped suburbia" by re-locating to the foothills.

The City of Folsom is just another car dependent suburban slum, but compared to Elk Grove, it's most certainly a higher class suburban slum. It costs more to perpetually motor in Folsom because home values are more expensive and their power centers are more spread out. It also costs more because their residents are required to own more expensive vehicles due to their need to project status to their neighbors. This is how it is in above-median suburbia.

I spent some time in a power center at about 10:30AM today, after the commuters had all scattered but before the lunch crowd, and I was particularly observant of how many suburban housewives, either alone or with children, would navigate their SUVs through the immense parking lots to conduct their daily rituals of latte purchasing, drive through pharmacing, dry cleaning drop offing, or fast food consuming. Not a single one walks. Elk Grove doesn't have nearly the same quantity of these women roaming around its strip malls during these shoulder hours...and I wonder why. I had assumed that in order to drive two $31,000 rigs and own that $477,000 Folsomite house that both housal unit occupants would have to work but apparently not. It seems as if Folsom has more single wage earners than Elk Grove, and I wonder if this is true.

Nonetheless, the California DOT has plans to create an uninterrupted carpool lane all the way from Placerville to Sacramento over the next fifteen years, to better get all those single foothillian wage earners to their jobs in the valley. On one hand, the purpose is to promote higher vehicular occupancy to reduce the number of cars on the road (and presumably less pollution), while on the other hand they are forced by law to create a new lane instead of converting any existing lanes while building a forty mile long carpool path to encourage even more suburban growth as far as possible from employment.

Then, we have GM heavily lobbying CAL DOT to add more carpool stickers to the 85,000 already doled out to Prioria owners, only to encourage sales of their own future Volts.

Does this make any sense? Spending federal tax dollars to subsidize the building of another 30 highway lane miles to enable the happy motoring of rich white solo commuters who elect to commute 75 miles a day while offering economic incentives to purchase "green" cars capable of using these lanes by themselves? This is total horseshit if you ask me. A Prius with a yellow carpool sticker is worth a few thousand more than one without, because it's obvious that carpooling isn't about "saving the world" and it never has been. It's only about keeping highway workers employed building more highway lanes, about keeping solo commuters commuting in their own private vehicles, about assuaging the guilt of white environment trashers, and about enabling our economy of sprawl to continue to edge ever farther out into the hinterlands.