Slower Traffic

We downplay the cost of car crashes in lost and interrupted lives, as well as the strain on our health care system. According to the American Automobile Association, car crashes cost nearly $300 billion per year in this country alone. Some 2.5 million Americans – nearly 7,000 per day – are treated in emergency rooms for car-related injuries.

I first wrote about Bangor’s food deserts in 2016. “How do you go grocery shopping without a car?” a friend had asked me. “I live in a food desert. The nearest grocery stores are all about three miles away. And there’s no convenient bus you can take to any of them.”

Anyone who’s ever written a book knows that it requires solitary, anonymous toil, and that every part of the process takes longer than you think it’s going to. You can write a blog post and upload it to social media the next day. It can be just as quickly forgotten. But a book is an artifact. It must remain relevant from conception to composition, through publication and shelf life, over a span of years and occasionally generations.

The Summer Solstice is upon us, the longest day of the year. There’s nothing like a June morning with the Sun blazing into the bathroom window at five o’clock. Who can stay in bed on a day like that? Rita the dog agrees. She knows the drill: coffee, breakfast (hers), then out to patrol the neighborhood before six. Sometimes we encounter homeless people in the park, and on occasion we run into friends, both canine and human. There aren’t many cars on the streets at that hour,

This is the book that made me think I could do it. Nineteen years ago, I resolved to live without owning a car for a year. As I’ve often said, it’s the only New Year’s resolution I’ve ever kept. I’ve renewed it every year since.

“Be the change” is often cited as an admonishment to do good work in the world. Though my motivations aren’t entirely unselfish, I like to think there’s a little bit of Gandhi in my life without a car. I want to see fewer cars on the road. Therefore, I don’t own one. It may seem like a small thing, subtracting one car from the vast American traffic picture, but small increments can add up to long-term change.