A Real Car

My little Honda Civic is falling apart, yet I hardly ever drive it. The radio stopped working last week, the driver window doesn't "roll up" into the weatherproof liner, the roof paint is badly fading and peeling, the rotors got overheated and are warped, and there's an unmistakable exhaust leak starting. It's only nine years old with sixty thousand miles, forty five of those put on by the previous owner.

This is why bicycling to work is a pointless economic exercise, because not only do I have to fix and maintain the bike I have additional work to do on a car that just sits there most of the time. And while I'm not using it, I'm still insuring it. Man, what a waste.

But because I live squarely in suburbia, right in the middle of one the most car dependent cities on earth, it would be problematic to jettison the car altogether. Because no one else gets around without their cars, public transportation is scarcely viable, and we hardly have gorgeous year-round weather here in Elk Grove. To eliminate a car while living in extreme car dependency would be draconian to say the least, especially when transportation is so heavily subsidized. No, it still makes sense to hold on to the damn thing.

The way around this, of course, is to live in a city where I don't need a fucking car to begin with, where it isn't required for every facet of human existence. Of course, I can't afford to live in such a place -- around here, the few we do have have become the most desirable places to live, places built to human scales, to human speeds, to human endeavors. They also cost twice as much.

Nope, I can't afford a real place to live, at least not yet. In the meantime, because we subsidize road building more than anything else we do, it's cheap to live fifteen miles from everything...cheap to live in Elk Grove. I suppose that living with a cheap broken down car is just something I'll resign to having to live with for as long as I choose to stick it out in this city, unless I decide to join the rest of you and just accept extreme energy dependence and go out and get that new Highlander on credit and stop bitching about all this nonsense of bad urban design, etc. Nope. I can afford a real car to drive, so why don't I?