I've invited my friend Elle Jhe to be a contributor to this blog which I am very excited about, here is ze's first contribution:
Driving and the Downfall of Society
This weekend my boyfriend and I ventured from Albany, NY down to Ocean City, NJ. I make the pilgrimage down there yearly to spend some time with my extended family and swim in the ocean. But I dread the drive down every time. It’s a long and arduous trek through one of the most densely populated areas in the country, and I added a lot of extra miles on by taking a detour east of the Hudson to hang with some old buddies in CT.
We left around noon and headed down 95 South to 287. Regardless of time of day, there is always a good amount of traffic. I get irrationally angry when stuck in traffic, as if god had conjured up the bottleneck just to piss me off specifically. We cross the bridge, which I am terribly frightened of crossing (NY has no money…this bridge is really long…I wonder if they still do repairs…have they rated this bridge for safety? I wonder what it ranks…. *images of Tacoma narrows flash*…our infrastructure is crumbling everywhere else, why not when suspended over three miles of deep river?...It’s not like the government gives a fuck if we all die anyway….) We survive the bridge and make it to the next peril, the Garden State Parkway.
Here in the Northeast of America each state has its stereotypes about other states drivers. NY drivers are fast and aggressive jerks. CT people never use their turning signals and step on their breaks all the time for no reason. People from MA drive like assholes, hence, mass-holes. Jersey drivers are just completely insane. Like all stereotypes these obviously are not entirely true. But in my experience driving all over the NE it seems that there is a certain culture of driving that distinctly differs from place to place. If you think about it, driving on America’s interstate system is a sociological experiment: put all kinds of people into extremely fast metal machines, give them a set of rules to follow, and set them loose to interact with one another as they may. Over time people develop certain expectations of what constitutes “acceptable” behavior and that varies from place to place. And just like the rest of society, while the planners have a vision of how a system functions, the reality is much different.
I noticed that in the areas around NYC people drive incredibly fast. I usually go 65, sometimes 70mph, and on both sides of me cars were whipping past. Not only that, I found that many people tended to also weave unpredictably in and out of traffic. At one moment I was surrounded by cars on all sides, going extremely fast; I had a horrible feeling that I was just moments from a wreck. I could see people ahead of me accidentally drifting across the dotted lines that mark the lanes, and when I passed them I would see that they were on their cell phone, or reading, or looking at a GPS—pretty much anything except looking at the road. When we got off at a rest stop to the left of the highway and tried to merge again, a SUV going about 90mph cut into our lane and I pulled off to the shoulder just in time not to die. Jesse took the wheel for the rest of the ride down because I was too shaken up to keep driving after that.
And I was wondering as I finally got safely to the beach; how could all of these people I encountered be so nonchalant about the act of driving? When you really think about it, it is a very dangerous undertaking. People’s bodies can’t withstand the impact of a crash at the speeds many people travel. I felt like there was a fundamental lack of respect for the act of driving and of other drivers as well. People screaming and flipping each other off, not letting people get in lane when they have to exit, depending on technology instead of their own instincts. I feel as though the culture of driving has become, “My car will protect me if I get in a crash, so I can drive however I want. I don’t have to look at the road because my GPS system is guiding me, and if I want to watch TV--hell, I’m gonna do it.” Car companies are inventing cars that parallel park for you, that sense if you’re drifting into another lane and correct your steering, that stop if they sense that you are about to crash into something in front of you; essentially, rationalizing peoples’ obliviousness to surroundings when behind the wheel. It seems to say, “Don’t worry about thinking-- the machine will do it for you.”
But let’s just think people; how many times does your home computer glitch out and do something totally unpredictable? You want that happening when you’re flying down the road at 90?? The more and more I think about it, the whole system of driving is inherently flawed. It’s a system that’s designed in such a way that it is only safe if everyone obeys all the rules all the time. And that never happens, regardless of how many fucking state troopers you pay to sit on the highway and pull people over, or how many computer programs you write to compensate for human error.
And the most ironic part of this whole experience is that I was using an oil-burning vehicle to take a vacation by the ocean, which is being destroyed by an oil spill. Next year maybe I’ll travel on horseback.
This weekend my boyfriend and I ventured from Albany, NY down to Ocean City, NJ. I make the pilgrimage down there yearly to spend some time with my extended family and swim in the ocean. But I dread the drive down every time. It’s a long and arduous trek through one of the most densely populated areas in the country, and I added a lot of extra miles on by taking a detour east of the Hudson to hang with some old buddies in CT.
We left around noon and headed down 95 South to 287. Regardless of time of day, there is always a good amount of traffic. I get irrationally angry when stuck in traffic, as if god had conjured up the bottleneck just to piss me off specifically. We cross the bridge, which I am terribly frightened of crossing (NY has no money…this bridge is really long…I wonder if they still do repairs…have they rated this bridge for safety? I wonder what it ranks…. *images of Tacoma narrows flash*…our infrastructure is crumbling everywhere else, why not when suspended over three miles of deep river?...It’s not like the government gives a fuck if we all die anyway….) We survive the bridge and make it to the next peril, the Garden State Parkway.
Here in the Northeast of America each state has its stereotypes about other states drivers. NY drivers are fast and aggressive jerks. CT people never use their turning signals and step on their breaks all the time for no reason. People from MA drive like assholes, hence, mass-holes. Jersey drivers are just completely insane. Like all stereotypes these obviously are not entirely true. But in my experience driving all over the NE it seems that there is a certain culture of driving that distinctly differs from place to place. If you think about it, driving on America’s interstate system is a sociological experiment: put all kinds of people into extremely fast metal machines, give them a set of rules to follow, and set them loose to interact with one another as they may. Over time people develop certain expectations of what constitutes “acceptable” behavior and that varies from place to place. And just like the rest of society, while the planners have a vision of how a system functions, the reality is much different.
I noticed that in the areas around NYC people drive incredibly fast. I usually go 65, sometimes 70mph, and on both sides of me cars were whipping past. Not only that, I found that many people tended to also weave unpredictably in and out of traffic. At one moment I was surrounded by cars on all sides, going extremely fast; I had a horrible feeling that I was just moments from a wreck. I could see people ahead of me accidentally drifting across the dotted lines that mark the lanes, and when I passed them I would see that they were on their cell phone, or reading, or looking at a GPS—pretty much anything except looking at the road. When we got off at a rest stop to the left of the highway and tried to merge again, a SUV going about 90mph cut into our lane and I pulled off to the shoulder just in time not to die. Jesse took the wheel for the rest of the ride down because I was too shaken up to keep driving after that.
And I was wondering as I finally got safely to the beach; how could all of these people I encountered be so nonchalant about the act of driving? When you really think about it, it is a very dangerous undertaking. People’s bodies can’t withstand the impact of a crash at the speeds many people travel. I felt like there was a fundamental lack of respect for the act of driving and of other drivers as well. People screaming and flipping each other off, not letting people get in lane when they have to exit, depending on technology instead of their own instincts. I feel as though the culture of driving has become, “My car will protect me if I get in a crash, so I can drive however I want. I don’t have to look at the road because my GPS system is guiding me, and if I want to watch TV--hell, I’m gonna do it.” Car companies are inventing cars that parallel park for you, that sense if you’re drifting into another lane and correct your steering, that stop if they sense that you are about to crash into something in front of you; essentially, rationalizing peoples’ obliviousness to surroundings when behind the wheel. It seems to say, “Don’t worry about thinking-- the machine will do it for you.”
But let’s just think people; how many times does your home computer glitch out and do something totally unpredictable? You want that happening when you’re flying down the road at 90?? The more and more I think about it, the whole system of driving is inherently flawed. It’s a system that’s designed in such a way that it is only safe if everyone obeys all the rules all the time. And that never happens, regardless of how many fucking state troopers you pay to sit on the highway and pull people over, or how many computer programs you write to compensate for human error.
And the most ironic part of this whole experience is that I was using an oil-burning vehicle to take a vacation by the ocean, which is being destroyed by an oil spill. Next year maybe I’ll travel on horseback.
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