There on Pine Street, Larry dug into his pocket and pulled out an actual key to the city. His CarShare key fob. It was a gray, pear-shaped piece of plastic with an electronic ID inside. He held it up in front of the woman’s face. Then he made his pitch, a version of the pitch he had made many times to many groups: This key fob gets you into 400 cars. You don’t need to own your own car. You don’t need to pay for gas or insurance. Just join CarShare. You only use the car when you need it, paying a low daily or hourly rate (as little as $2.90 an hour). Larry said, “You don’t need your boyfriend’s cars anymore. You’re free.”
The woman stood up straight. Her eyes seemed to unfog. Larry couldn’t believe it. “You stay here,” he said. “I’m gonna get you some information on PhillyCarShare.” He ran back to his car to get a brochure. Then he realized: Oh shit, I’m going to have a crazy woman using the service. That’s not good. So instead of grabbing a CarShare brochure, he grabbed a postcard advertising a competing service, Flexcar. He had seen the Flexcar postcard downtown and had picked it up out of curiosity. He walked back to the woman and thrust the Flexcar postcard into her hand. She read the card. Then she walked away, smiling, five minutes after trying to kill herself.
WHEN LARRY TOLD ME THIS STORY, THE WHOLE time I was thinking, really? Did this actually happen? He swore it did. And then I thought, Why not? Is this woman — minus her apparent need for some Celexa or something — really so different from me, from us? Sick of dealing with cars? Sick of rising gas prices, sick of $1,500-a-year insurance payments and sudden $400 bills when the brake rotors crap out? Sick of the guilty knowledge, post-Gore, post-An Inconvenient Truth, that every time you drive to IKEA you’re abrading the thin blue eggshell that’s the only thing keeping the planet from frying? This woman isn’t some aberration. She’s pissed off. Disempowered — by cars. By these putatively empowering machines.
In the old telling of the American story, the car is an inherent good. Ours is an awesomely big country … and what lets you experience that bigness is the car … and so the car is freedom, and freedom is America. Problem: In cities of 50,000 or more, where two out of three Americans live, the car is not an inherent good. The car eats real estate, degrades the air, cuts us off from the joys of public space — simple facts that haven’t stopped urban planners from designing cities around cars instead of people, or the government from misdirecting tax dollars. It subsidizes cars, not trains. It builds roads, not tracks. We don’t need more cars, but we get them anyway. Such is the power of that emotional bond, reinforced by advertising, cemented by lobbying: car/America, America/car.
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