"From Tucson to Tucumcari...

 “Traffi-can't”

This is for the long-haul truckers and urban commuters. If you earn your living piloting an 18-wheel monster semi-trailer down freeways, stroads and urban streets, I feel your pain. If you spend 45 minutes to an hour a work day in clogged urban freeways and 5-lane stroads, I feel your pain. I recently imitated these routes by driving through 'rush hour' in Nashville and Chicago, while avoiding it in Atlanta by passing by at 5:30 a.m. What is the result of increasing populations, insufficient or no public transit, low wages and sprawl? Traffic. Traffic jams. Constant construction. Accidents. Time wasted. Frustration. Injuries and … death.

The tip-off to a city with 'traffic problems' are the number of personal injury attorney billboards along the roads. Another is the fear of bicyclists to even ride on the roads. It's the number of giant $60K racing pickups whose owners really wished they had a muscle car. It's the millions of dollars poured into endless construction projects. It's people on their cell-phones. It's dummies that drive too fast or slow, or weave at high speed.

This can even happen in a smaller city with constricted roads, where all the traffic is funneled into a few intersections. This is usually a place where no 'respectable' person will ride a bus, and the buses only come every hour anyway and their routes are extremely limited. Or in exurban areas that wind through bucolic surroundings where the 'crossroads' become a parking lot at rush hour. There is no 'rushing' to be done.

In Nashville on Interstate 24 a 4 car accident at 8:30 in the morning 20 miles south of downtown backed up traffic for several miles. Another near a key downtown interchange on the same road happened when a car smashed into the side of an 18-wheeler and 3 lanes were littered with debris, a smashed car and a pulled-over truck. Almost the whole parade behind this scene came to a complete stop. After the emergency vehicles, police cars, ambulances and tow trucks arrive, it will be an even bigger bloc. I barely escaped.

In Chicago, one of the 'bypasses' – that bypasses almost nothing – Interstate 294 – was packed with cars going north that got worse when another 4 car accident plugged 2 of the 5 lanes. The traffic going south – full of long-haul trucks coming out of the O'Hare airport and warehouse area – was stop and go for miles and miles, and the only reason seemed to be too many vehicles. Along this whole stretch were miles and miles of construction too – huge piles of broken concrete and sand; graders, backhoes, excavators, dump trucks and cranes; empty bull-dozed gravel fields that looked like it would take another 5 years to complete. I spent years commuting in Chicago and it gave me a fear of being trapped. But now?! The same construction situation is evident in Milwaukee on their 'bypass.' Miles of a backup also occurred on I94 at the St. Croix in Minnesota when the 'freeway' went from 4 lanes to 1 for 'construction.'

Huge and growing Atlanta has a crap public transit system that involves two MARTA train lines and some buses, but at least it has a full bypass. Nashville, a city growing by leaps and bounds, has nothing but buses and no real bypass. Larger Chicago has a much better network of the El, commuter trains and buses, but nothing goes to many of the suburbs. The first two Southern cities probably see public transit and limiting sprawl as communist plots. A built-in disadvantage of the freeway system is that, unlike an urban grid, you are trapped on the road if something happens. I saw a miles-long southbound backup north of Nashville on I24 again caused either by an accident or construction. Unless you are by an exit, you are trapped. I was happy to be on the other side of the road.

Truck-driving is now the top blue-collar occupation. Over the road semi drivers are the chief victims in this specific situation. They are required to get on these roads, meet a time-table, are unpaid in delays or waiting to unload at a warehouse, eat bad food, sleep in their cabs and pay their bills or truck loans in an increasingly unstable driving environment. No wonder there is such turnover, because drivers are no longer 'Willin'. All this is the revenge of the car culture, the carbon economy, the dream that cars and trucks will allow us to live anywhere, go anywhere, be anything our sweet hearts desire – and even get some useless doo-dad in 24 hours.

In 2021 Mississippi, South Carolina, Arkansas, New Mexico, Montana, Louisiana, Alabama, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Wyoming, Kentucky, Florida, Georgia and Missouri were the top 15 states – in that order from top to bottom - that led the nation in fatal vehicle accidents per capita . Sense a pattern? Southern, 'border' and rural states – just the places where sprawl, farming, poverty and the car culture dominate.

CityNerd reports that in 2023 the yearly cost of driving was $12,182 a year or about 3 hours of median-earning work a day, or 19% on average of U.S. waking life. The best to worst cities are: Cape Coral, FL; Suffolk, VA; Joliet, IL; Garland, TX; Deerfield Beach, FL; Stockton, CA; Sunrise Manor, NV; Antioch, CA; Waldorf, MD; the Inland Empire, CA – now sucking nearly 25-30% of workers' time. These are nearly all working-class edge cities or suburbs. The best cities as far as the time-suck goes, in ascending order, are Mountain View, CA; Seattle, WA; Bellevue, WA; Washington, D.C.; Palo Alto, CA; San Francisco, CA; Boulder, CO; Redmond, WA; Berkeley, CA; Cambridge, MA. You'll notice most of these are high-end cities. So working-class people get the worst out of the car economy, lack of affordable housing and public transit and increase in sprawl. Nor can they 'commute' on-line, as most blue-collar jobs are in person.

Driving, like nearly everything else, is becoming more and more a class question. It's a daily problem for many people, especially workers and especially truckers. A changeover to an economy that does not demand these long trips, expensive personal vehicles, sprawling real estate or clogged arterials would involve a wholesale change in the way the U.S. is structured, a revolutionary change. And I haven't even mentioned the carbon cost of this transport, density and private enterprise model to global warming. It's a cliché to say its unsustainable, but there it is, even on a personal level.

Live by the car, die by the car.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Motorcyclist Rant,” “Florida Will Sink,” “The End of Tourism?” “The Trials of Traffic,” “Spring is Here and the Time is Right for Riding in the Streets, Oh.”

The Cultural Marxist

May 2, 2024