Do You See?

Overlooking Highway 99 at 41st Avenue on my bike, I stopped a few times last week and counted the number of southbound vehicles that passed below me per minute.

Interestingly, regardless of the apparent speed the number consistently ranges between 95 and 108 cars per minute. About 6,000 per hour, I'd wager. For some reason I had earlier assumed that as speed dropped, the total number would also drop, but indeed the spacing between them shortens and the overall volume is unchanged. Nonetheless, there comes an inflection point as the volume increases that traffic speed significantly falls off, something akin to voltage collapse on the electrical system, a point where the road can no longer support the number of cars wanting to use it. Gridlock.

The Sacramento Bee reported the other day how Sacramento drivers "suffer" through 24 hours a year in stalled or slowed traffic, compared to 28 hours at the height of the hallucinated economic boom. This represents a decrease in individual vehicular mobility, which, according to the right wing of America, is a goddamn right. Healthcare? No way. Unfettered personal access to the only real public domain we have left, the roadway? Absolutely.

The problem I see with this approach, something that we've been doing now for the past hundred years, is that there is no way a city the size of Sacramento can accommodate any more than a fraction of its citizens in this manner, yet we continue to widen bridges over the American River, create ever longer commutes by continuing expansive suburban sprawl out to the fringes of the county, or contemplate a 6-lane connectorized expressway around the east as if we could. As if we should.

We haven't learned that by adding lanes to relieve congestion we've only ever increased the number of lanes of congestion, to the degradation of public spaces and to our collective health, to the fragmentation of entire neighborhoods, and to the staggering cost to maintain this public infrastructure.

Remember when Howe Avenue was widened from two lanes in each direction to three? Do you see? Perhaps twenty years ago now and today there's more congestion than ever. There are diminishing returns to spending public funds to essentially give away to consumers. This is a subsidy, or an entitlement, or whatever you want to call it. It is not materially different from universal health care, or social security. Yet somehow we bitch and bitch and bitch and bitch and bitch about subsidizing public transit...a great way of allocating this valuable urban space that we essentially give away to car owners.

What I find interesting is how WalMart, Target, Cargil, and Tyson Foods all can enjoy equal access to these same free entitlements to promote private enterprise while they consume a far greater allocation of this free good than what they pay in corporate taxes. This is free enterprise? Bullshit.

Personally I advocate public policies that recognize that the allocation and apportioning of resources in the private sector be equally applied to our public sector. By public sector, I am referring to "free parking" and "free use of the roadway," two things Sacramento has spent ninety years misallocating via taxation. The public use of the Sacramento River's edge was fuckered away fifty years ago, allocated to I-5 for thru truckers from Seattle to Los Angeles, to Natomas commuters, to duck hunters. South Sacramento neighborhoods were filleted like a fresh salmon to accommodate the then new Elk Grovian suburban commuters and a second option for easy access to Oakland.

These policies would, very simply, charge the users the true cost of these free public goods. You get charged by bandwidth for Internet access, you get charged for the number of cellularized telephone calls you make -- market-based approaches somehow ought to apply to every facet of Republican/Conservative ideology for every area of our economy -- except for the free use of roads and the prosecution of wars to promote the unfettered use of imported energy.

Six thousand cars an hour pass underneath the 41st Avenue bridge on Highway 99 while each only directly pays for a fraction of the cost. If one of them, call him Frank, makes $75,000 a year and drives 22,000 miles commuting to and from Elk Grove while another woman, Claire, lives without a car in midtown and makes the same wage, both are taxed equally to confer unequal use of the public domain, both are taxed equally to shoulder the staggering cost of maintenance and expansion of these public facilities, yet both don't equally use it. In what other public arena does this sort of disparity exist?

• Does Claire not receive the same public benefit from taxation to support NASA, to question human existence in the universe?
• Does Claire not receive the same benefits from an educated populace?
• Does Frank not receive the same public safety benefits from dog catchers and firefighters?
• Would one not gain access to a national or state park while the other could?
  Are both not entitled to the same Social Security benefits they both equally paid into?
• Are both not equally less secure through the waging of multiple perpetual wars?
  Do each pay different street prices for purple kush due to our failing war on drugs?
• Are both not equally spied on, eavesdropped, or otherwise controlled and manipulated by agents of the Central State? (this is getting fun)
• Are both not equally held responsible for socialized private losses via trillion dollar bailouts engineered by the collusion between corporate cartels, financial power elites and the public political plutocracy?

Both Claire and Frank would pay the same to register the same car, pay the same entrance fee to walk on the same state beach, yet they both have the ability to opt-out -- to not use the beach, to not purchase a car. When it comes to wetlands preservation, one may disagree, indeed vehemently, that the allocation of such resources is misguided yet both are still conferred the same environmental benefit. When it comes to imported apples from Chile, one may disagree, indeed vehemently, that the allocation of roadway resources is misguided yet both are still conferred the same economic benefit of out-of-season fruit...if they both choose to consume it. However, one or both may choose to opt-out, to not buy the apple.

But as Claire opts not to use Highway 99 she is still asked to pay for Frank's extended use of it. The difference between wetlands preservation for a swamp she may never visit and a freeway she may never drive on is that there is no public benefit for a non-utilized freeway, unlike real, tangible public benefits for wetlands restoration. If you want to argue that road building creates jobs that can be treated as a social good, well, so would wetlands restoration. So would engineering spacecraft to fly astronauts to Mars.

The argument that national security is enhanced by a network of roads capable of delivering tanks and howitzers to areas where they'll be needed is woefully outdated.

If you want to counter my argument with "well then let's just go back to the horse and donkey, let's see how you like it then," (which is just the sort of mindless, exhausting, pedestrian commentary provided by the anonymous on non-moderated comment boards) where, exactly, have I advocated the elimination of roads? I'm only asking that users ought to directly pay for their use of the fucking things. Cars will exist -- in my view, they should be held equally to other users of the public realm, not in dominance.