Brick

Copy­right 2005 Ben S. Pollock

Fri­day, July 15, 2005. It would take some nerve to call myself an avid bicy­clist. I pedal more than most, and a lot less than oth­ers. I biked for fun and for com­mut­ing as a teenager, even though I could bor­row Mom’s Bee­tle almost when­ever I wanted. I liked the exhil­a­ra­tion, and being different.

Get­ting around in and near the broad Stan­ford cam­pus was prac­ti­cal only on a bike; cars were banned on most of it. Junior year I bought an ancient child’s push scooter at a junk shop and used that most of the term, 20 years ahead of the Razor fad.

Since becom­ing a grown-up, I’ve biked off and on: Rarely for recre­ation, rather to com­mute: The six years I both lived and worked in down­town Lit­tle Rock, and 18 months study­ing and teach­ing at the Uni­ver­sity in Fayetteville.

When I didn’t bike in Palo Alto, I took buses and as I approached San Fran­cisco, the BART sub­way. In Lit­tle Rock, I kept a hand­ful of bus tokens for when it was too icy to drive or bike.

On vaca­tion, my wife and I often pre­fer pub­lic trans­porta­tion, for effi­ciency (we don’t get lost), sav­ing money (you rent a car to use it one hour out of 24 on cer­tain kinds of trips) but mainly to see the sights — and the people.

She worked off and on for few months in Lon­don in 1999–2000. Where her co-workers took taxis, she took the Under­ground. Most of her com­mutes began or ended at the very two sta­tions of the main 7/7 attacks, Aldgate and King’s Cross.

All this is a long way around to say defin­i­tively I am a fan of mass tran­sit in every form as well as any alter­na­tive to cars, espe­cially bicy­cles and feet.

So it sounds odd to call silly the seri­ous pro­pos­als for light rail in North­west Arkansas. But they are. Pub­lic trans­porta­tion is inevitable. But we non-big-city Amer­i­cans — most of us — don’t want any limit to free­dom to come and go as we please.

Plan­ners have to admit another fact, that no com­mu­nity or series of com­mu­ni­ties out­side old metrop­o­lises are set up for rail or seri­ous bus use. These work in old S.F. for the rea­son they don’t in new L.A.: density.

I usu­ally ped­aled to and from my first news­pa­per job, sum­mer 1978 as a reporter at the Times Record in Fort Smith, which its then-editor Jack Mose­ley recalls any­time I run into him. (I also biked the sum­mer before to KHBS-TV/KFPW-AM, where I reported.)

In my first week, I did a story on bicy­cle com­mut­ing, inter­view­ing the head of the local bike club (who unin­ten­tion­ally taught me a les­son when he praised me, say­ing he’d seen my name on well-written arti­cles, when I hadn’t pub­lished any­thing yet).

Then I talked to a city offi­cial, who said some­thing to the effect of, “No one’s going to take bicy­cles or buses seri­ously until gas hits a dol­lar a gallon.”

We’re likely going to stay at more than dou­ble that price, yet there has been no seri­ous drop in sales of gas-guzzling four-wheel-drive tulip-crushers. What will cause us to clamor for local gov­ern­ment to do some­thing? Five dol­lars a gal­lon? Ten?

Given where we live, where we work, and where we shop and play, our solu­tion is going to be more buses on longer routes, lots of park-and-ride lots for them, for 24 hours a day seven days a week.

A track-bound people-mover goes far, but it can’t go wide. –30–