The Thundering Herd

I've long followed SACOGs forecasts for jobs to housing ratios for each of our region's cities. Their preferred metric is the jobs to housing ratio. Elk Grove has among the worst jobs to housing ratios today at 0.6, and 0.8 forecasted out to the year 2035.

This only measures employment vs. the number of housal units. This would be an OK metric if the median income in the city was equal to the median housal unit value, but in a city like Elk Grove, overrun with low wage retail jobs, this metric fails to provide a true picture of just how many Elk Grovians have to commute to higher wage areas of employment to buy that median house.

Not only is our jobs to housing ratio bad, the jobs we do have don't allow most of us to live here and afford the median house. Our city fares much worse than the statistics suggest, so into our cars we climb and commute elsewheres to work.

This morning was one of the very few times I was forced to commute by car, due to a combination of family and job constraints. It happened, unfortunately, to coincide with the second worst October storm in recorded history and it happened, unfortunately, to coincide with the Elk Grovian crush of traffic between 7:45 and 8:45 AM. If I had had any opportunity to avoid grinding out a commute, today would have been the day to do it, but...I followed the Thundering Herd -- no, not the EGHS footballers, but the daily Elk Grovian northward migration to jobs elsewhere. We are a nomadic, cattle-like people, forced to migrate with the herd when the herd says it's time to move.

There is absolutely no doubt, whatsoever, that excessive speed directly contributed to virtually every freeway accident today. Some observations: I passed a wreck at Hwy 99 and 47th going home this afternoon, and as soon as I passed it the freeway opened up. No more traffic -- I could drive as fast as I wanted. While I kept it at 42mph, a seemingly reasonable speed for the shitty conditions, I was passed left and right by everyone else on the road. I was passed by tractor-trailers doing 60, by drivers who merged right up on my ass and jerked into the next lane to pass me, by SUVs and compacts. The herd mentality kept them clustered into groups, tailgating, leaving no exits if an exit is needed. These are my neighbors, a plethora of dangerous drivers. No need to wonder why we have 41,000 traffic deaths each year. Today, it was a tractor-trailer that wrecked on I-5; we're not just talking about commuters -- when your job is to drive you have other incentives than safety to consider.

I believe it prudent to identify the relationships between the way we drive and the way we live. I'm suggesting that if we didn't build suburban slums twenty miles from our employment parks we wouldn't find it as necessary to speed, to hurry up and get there, to fail to yield and signal, to distract ourselves by trying to incorporate other daily living tasks (like Blackberrying, eating, or texting) with the task of driving. We collectively worshipped Jimmie Johnson's NASCAR win last Sunday and emulated our hero by turning our own residential streets into oval tracks...and, of course, by patronizing Lowe's...

I was part of the Elk Grove Thundering Herd today, and yes, it sucked wending for two hours in traffic, but it was a fascinating study to observe the poor driving habits of my neighbors.