I Have Spent A Year Of My Life Driving To And From Work

 

1914 Street Car Routes in the Twin Cities that were later ripped up. Some of the corridors now feature light rail. Public Domain Wikimedia

I'm not too fond of any kind of driving unless it is a cross-country trip for recreation. I used to enjoy driving, but after years of mindless, expensive miles commuting to and from work, I like any opportunity not to drive. Part of what I like about living and working in Williston is that everything is ten minutes from everything else, and there is no traffic. As a town of around thirty thousand, Williston sits right on the line between being a manageable town and becoming an urban snarl. It has the amenities of a bigger town, without the traffic and sprawled distances. A town its size could be even better if American urban planning weren't all about putting things far apart, forcing everything to be accessible only by car. The planning of the new parts of the town are a bit like somebody wearing a blindfold deciding to place housing and businesses in random spots far from everything else.
 

A few years ago, I estimated how much time I had spent commuting to and from work in a car. The rough estimate, which mainly consisted of my six years in the Minneapolis metro area and 13 years traveling from Bismarck to Standing Rock, came up to a year of my life, 24/7 sitting in a car going to and from work. This time included carpooling, which constituted most of my trips from Bismarck to Standing Rock, and the commuter bus from Mandan to Fort Yates, which I also commonly rode.

The first thing I noticed once I stopped spending so much time in the car was that my back problems went away. Having spent most of my adult life, from my 20s to 40s, in a car, I didn't know it could be any other way.  Before that, from my teens to mid twenties, I spend about half of each year working in agricultural jobs that involved long hours sitting on and bouncing across fields in farm machines. I knew no other world but one of back problems. 

What had been regular visits to the chiropractor are now rare. I first realized this in the years my wife lived in the Standing Rock schools and Sitting Bull College housing, where we were able to walk to work. A big part of our decision to move elsewhere was when we moved back to Bismarck and had to commute again. I was done with the time, and wear and tear on the car and body, so we decided to move to Williston.

When I moved to the Twin Cities in the 1990s, it was at first exciting to whiz around freeways, and it felt like a grownup thing to do. It was what adults do, right? Spend hours in the car driving around doing grownup stuff. I felt important to whiz to and from work, to the park and ride bus or weaving through traffic as a delivery driver. It was a buzz that wore off.

 The Twin Cities is a nightmare of spread out sprawl where traveling from one side of the city to the other can stretch out into hours. While today there is a rudimentary rail system, at that time, car was the only way to get around. Getting a few items at a grocery store could be a forty-five-minute jaunt. At the time, I thought this was the only way it could be. Little did I know that I was living in a bizarre American creation where sprawl and lack of transit created a car-centric dystopia that was supposed to set us free. One only needs to compare the 5,200 square miles of the Tokyo metro's roughly 38 million people to the Twin Cities metro's 6,364 square miles and 3.69 million people to realize how spread out, poorly planned and unsustainable things are.

It didn't have to be this way. America once had a train system that was the envy of the world. In the 1930s, my grandfather rode the train from the tiny Clifford, North Dakota, to the World's Fair in Chicago. Before the age of good roads, it was still relatively easy to get from one side of the country to another. Even in the late 1800s, in the time of Sitting Bull, remote Standing Rock was visited by diverse groups from around the world who were able to make the trip in some ways easier than we do today. Before cars and suburbia took over, even small towns had streetcar lines that were mostly ripped up when we went all in for cars. The irony is that today versions of those lines are being put back in. We went all in for vehicles, and now we pay the price. In America, as in all other things, we choose the individual over the group. I think it is in part individuals closed up inside cars that has created some of the distance and animosity people feel for each other in the zeitgeist of today. How can you have empathy for someone who you don't pass walking on the street or sit next to on the train?

After leaving the Twin Cities, I moved from one commuting regime to another. In rural areas, people are forced to commute. It was an hour-long commute from Bismarck to Fort Yates through beautiful rural scenery that was relaxing some of the year, but white-knuckled for much of the winter. As a child of rural America, where driving everywhere for everything is the norm, I didn't think too deeply about it until years wore on my body.

My years there highlighted the disparities of a car-centric culture. Henry Ford famously paid his workers a wage that was high enough that they could afford to buy the cars they were making. The car is really a middle-class object, and to afford a good car, insure and maintain it requires a middle-class income. Anyone outside that ,which is an increasing segment of America, is forced to either get by in a car-centric world without one or purchase a used car and devote precious income to it; quite literally taking food from the mouths of babes. 

 I have seen this play out in my life as a worker and college student living the bizarre irony of working so that I can afford to drive to work. I have also seen it again and again where people with little or no income put what they have into marginal vehicles that fail them, becoming expensive paperweights in their driveway or along the road. In the world we left behind, with diverse rail and street car connections within closely spaced urban grids, many wouldn't have to devote income they don't have to something that barely works. I have seen people driving marginal and unsafe cars because they have no other options to get around. In fact, in areas of poverty it is the norm to see people getting by with marginal and often unsafe vehicles. A big reason for this is the ways we have designed our transport systems, zoning, and urban design to the detriment of anything but cars. 

A big part of these systems of spread out sprawled cites, with acres of paved over roads and parking lots are the unseen costs of all that infrastructure. More infrastructure, costs more money and it all has to be paid for somehow. Every extra foot of road, pipe or cable eventually has to be repaired or replaced. We are so used to these costs that we don't realize how much they weigh us down. Not to mention the added costs of the urban heat island effect created by all that pavement and all the tailpipe emissions doing so much to our health and the climate. Then, there are the costs of disposal of cars and all their toxins. Even when replaced by electrics, the only costs that won't still be with us is most of the air and noise pollution. How much would we save and devote to a more equitable society without so much infrastructure devoted to cars?

For the rest of my life, finding places to live where I don't have to depend on driving will be at the top of my list. Especially as I roll on the sloping hill toward some kind retirement. I don't want to rely on a car when walking is part of what will keep me mobile and fit into old age.