Let me point out a little known way of looking at the huge number of automobiles, trucks, busses and military vehicles that choke our highways and lesser-used streets.  There are simply too many of them and they can be looked at as a weapon of mass transportation that works against the health, safety and sanity of ordinary people. Even the extraordinary people suffer from the glut of individual transportation machinery (henceforth known by the initials of ITM). The vehicle may be gold-plated and with a designer name but it, too, can be stuck in the waves of little people hurrying to get to where they are going.

We have never really solved the problem of how to live near to where you work.  I once had an hour and a half drive from my home out in the suburbs of Newark (fifteen communities lining the way) to get to my teaching assignment in the Central Ward of that city. I found one solution to getting to work on time and missing the traffic jams by getting up two hours early and getting to work one hour early and got a lot of work done sitting at my desk marking papers and planning future lessons. Although my memory says that this was a sane way of handling living far from work, I remember the lothario who reeled in to his classroom in tatters many mornings.  He lived practically across the street from the school and had a rich and rewarding life style that caused him to be late very often.

I considered my commute at that time, going back fifty years ago, as murderous. It murdered nerves, jangling them to the point of choosing to forego sleep to get to work early before the daily marathon of thousands of single drivers in big cars consuming untold gallons of gas producing tons particulates and noxious fumes. Weekends replaced the work driven drivers with going out to recreation. Of course, all of this has changed with a recreation rather than work driven economy developing in one of the most “advanced” civilizations ever to appear on this planet.

Can I point out the obvious? There was a time when anyone who could afford a horse, had one. The horses, rivaling the human population at one time, produced tons of manure that walkers had to pick a path through. Horse drawn streetcars, a means of mass transportation, plied the streets of cities.  When steam driven trains appeared, they seemed to be the answer and tracks went just about anywhere.  However, the gasoline engine developed little four wheel (in preference for the quirky three wheeled devices) enclosed machines that ubiquitously have taken over the planet.  That there is no room for all of them and all of us is plain for this antique driver to see.

What we need to do is create real mass transportation and get rid of the dangerous weapon we have created.