| PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES |
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I’m not a tree-hugger because I’ve never felt that way about a tree. Something lacking in me maybe, but there it is. It’s just never been my thing. Not that they aren’t attractive of course, but I really think you have to be another tree to fully appreciate it. You can’t make up for it with imagination, at least not with mine. So although I have the deepest respect and admiration for trees and also bushes, I have never been able to see myself as part of their family.
All the same I’m an environmentalist in my way. One of the ways is my distaste for automobiles. I have owned plenty of them and driven thousands of miles in them and expect to keep on doing so, but I’ve still always looked at them as an expensive luxury that we should treat as such, not as an indispensable means of getting to and from work every day. There are plenty of other ways to use them, most of which I’ve been involved with myself, but commutation has always seemed to me a wasteful use. All those people, one to a car, grinding it out every day on a jammed highway, can they be happy? Well of course not, but then why don’t they complain?
They do, certainly, but hardly ever against their real grievance, the need to travel this way at all, but only against the incidentals, like congestion and obstruction and dangerous drivers. Car travel every day is something they’ve accepted, which has to be endured like bad weather, another thing everyone talks about, but nobody does anything about.
What about public transportation? Why don’t we have more of it? Why don’t people demand it more? Wouldn’t it save everyone a lot of money and save the environment from a huge amount of pollution? Are people so attached to their cars that they’re not interested in traveling any other way, no matter how high the price of gas goes?
The key question above is the last one. People like their cars all right -- they were the last things they gave up in the Depression -- but I don’t think they’re obsessed with them. They certainly aren’t that much superior to trains as a way of travel, they break down as often as any railroad and they encounter long-lasting delays more often than trains do. So what’s the problem?
I think it’s security. Cars have it, trains don’t. Not to the same extent anyway. Today’s headline in my paper is about a young woman in Union Square in New York who was pushed onto to the subway tracks by another young woman standing behind her. Two strangers jumped down to the tracks and pulled her up before an arriving train got to her. Her assailant got caught leaving the scene. She was black like the victim, but they were strangers to each other.
So this isn’t a hate crime or an interracial one, but it still has a racial element in it. The subways are where the races meet and mingle like they do nowhere else. They have no choice about it either. There is no escape. Pass through a turnstile and you enter the Valley of Fear. The source of the fear is what the police call “roving bands”, which is actually a euphemism for “packs of blacks.”
Black high school kids finding themselves in a tightly knit group well able to take over a subway car are liable to try doing just that. In fact, two groups in the same car may compete with each other to do it. Today this will usually result in shooting.
Whether whites or blacks are the victims of this kind of action, its roots will usually be the same. Start with group dynamism, add in learned hostility and you have all the ingredients you need for chaos underground. It’s proven out everyday.
This means one thing. Talking about the elimination of automobile pollution, expense, delay, stress, etc., gets us nowhere if we don’t come up with a reasonable alternative to car use. Public transportation as I’ve described it above isn’t a reasonable alternative. Before it can be we have to solve the problem of security. The automobile stranglehold didn’t come about by accident. Millions of people had enough bad experiences on trains and buses that they gave them up in favor of their cars.
Before we add another train to our schedule, instead of recruiting the necessary engineers, conductors, trainmen, ticket agents and others, let’s sign up the cops we’ll need to protect it. Let’s add the cameras, sensors, and alarms we need to guarantee safety. When we’ve done this we can begin to talk about building ridership.
We cannot build it, though, under today’s criminal justice system. We need a new system, a Transportation Code that won’t just put teeth into the laws, but fangs. The first provision should be to ban all bail for transit criminals. The idea that bail is only to guarantee their re-appearance in court isn’t in the Constitution. It’s only a lawyer’s invention to facilitate crime. A criminal working mass transit is a specialist who can be trusted to repeat himself. The passengers aren’t there only for their convenience. They have subjected themselves to an imprisonment that is also for the public good and the preservation of the environment. To allow criminals to prey on them is to penalize them for their public spirit.
Another improvement over present law would be a requirement that accused persons must take the stand and testify in their defense. Or they can take the Fifth Amendment and refuse to testify. They can attempt to exonerate themselves or they can admit that their testimony will implicate them. In either case the jury can form a judgment about them. They do it now even though forbidden to do so when there’s no testimony. Again we’re not looking at the Constitution but a lawyers’ trick to encourage criminals and expand their pool of customers.
Looking at the headlines in the papers everyday has proved to me that I can’t discuss questions of transportation without touching on legal ones as well. Next time I go in that direction I will bring up the question of the relationship of juries to the proper operation of a modern transportation system. Don’t worry, I mean all juries, not just hanging juries. | |
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