The Culture Of The Automobile

My daughter who lives in Cambridge Massachusetts is visiting us, and on Wednesday night we drove south of Sarasota to, Englewood, the town north of Boca Grande where we met my grandson's family and his sister visiting from Canada and her brood.  It was about fifty miles,  an hour drive through heavy traffic, not exactly bumper to bumper with a multi lane highway crowded enough to demand close attention.  As anyone who has ever driven in sprawl United States as opposed to urban areas, the highways are lined with strip malls, little businesses, god knows what, its entire length which means that cars are endlessly pulling in and out of the side of the road onto the immediately adjacent lane with the concomitant slowing down and speeding up that accompanies such maneuvers, no wonder Florida hold a record for collisions.  Add to the mix the abnormally high number of drivers over seventy five, a category which tends to hug the inner far left lane going slow and sure causing the speeding driver to weave in and out around them.  It is not a pleasurable nor relaxing ride, believe me.  After a lovely evening with the great grandchildren, and the grandchildren and spouses we headed back to Sarasota and the pleasures of relaxed dining and chatting had completely dissipated by the time we got home.  Last night we drove my daughter and a friend, who in fact did the driving for us in his car, down to Venice Florida to see a musical.  Venice, like Sarasota, has a wonderful theater with a far more adventurous program of drama sometimes.  The ride again was on the same nightmare trail that we had taken the night before although not quite so many miles distant.  Nonetheless, the positive experience of dinner and theater was much diluted by the horror of the drive.  I doubt that we will continue our theater subscription there.  The Republican government of Florida prides itself on not "wasting" tax payers' money on infrastructure nor services, so that in such a burgeoning metropolitan area as the essentially city cluster from Tampa and above all the way to Fort Myer and below, there is not a single bus nor trolley, only the insidious car.  My daughter who lives in the civilization of the North East and particularly Cambridge marveled at the fact that she can walk to many of the shops she needs, take a subway or bus to other destinations, and remarked that her husband's mechanic advised him to turn over the engine of the car and move it slightly so as to give the tires a chance to redistribute their weight because they use it so infrequently.  Well, we gave that up to be warm, and so far it seems a delicious bargain, and we do indeed like the warmth and absence of snow and ice, but the shutting down of activity which is concomitant with advancing age in a car culture is disquieting.