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> While you may like a break from your car, you > must admit that, because of it's unfixed route, > it is more flexible, and therefore will remain > the primary choice for most corridors, and for > most vacationers on a budget. I admit no such d***ed thing. Just because we have a more-or-less constant barrage of automobile ads promoting sports cars and SUVs as adult toys (like the one where a husband and wife are driving up a long, winding road to look at a house, and the husband, after looking down at the long, winding road, declares "we'll take it," without even looking at the house itself) doesn't make it so, and just because the open road is promoted as "freedom" doesn't mean one is particularly free while stuck in an automobile for hours at a time. Simply put, driving is work. It demands constant attention, and precludes more than a fleeting glance at the scenery. A microcosm: For many, many years, I made the drive from my Orange County, CA home to Hollywood Bowl, two or three times a week. Under ideal conditions, it's slightly less than an hour each way. I spent a small fortune on gas and parking, but since I lived in the middle of a huge, gaping hole in the Bowl's park-and-ride system, I had little choice. When on-site parking became prohibitively expensive, I started parking in a shuttle lot, even though it meant driving another few miles. True, I had the freedom especially when I was still parking on-site, to make a side trip to Tower Classics in West Hollywood on my way home, but with a large selection of classical CDs available in the larger bookstores, and through Internet merchants (and with my tastes growing steadily more esoteric), even exclusively-classical record shops have lost much of their appeal, and besides, even without the side-trip, I was arriving home more than a little bit frazzled from the drive. Then, last summer, the price of gas went through the proverbial roof. The curtain time for most of the concerts I attended had been changed to half an hour earlier, making it feasible, at least for those concerts, for me to try taking MetroRail. I investigated, and found there was a free shuttle service from the Red Line station to the Bowl, and that if I paid my fares in tokens, my transportation would cost a fraction of what it was costing me to drive there and park in the shuttle lots. After nearly a full season of taking MetroRail to the Bowl, I can safely say that I love it, and look forward to using it exclusively this season. It's cut my summer gas bill in half, and allowed me to completely bypass the worst of the traffic. I can spend my travel time reading the week's program, and (at least on the way up) looking at the scenery. I still have clear, unpleasant memories of the days when "family vacation" meant "car trip to North Dakota." I remember hour after hour with little change of scenery. It wasn't as long as a train ride would have been, but on a train, I would have been stuck in the same seat for hours on end, unable to even get up and walk around. I remember hunting around for a motel, because we were hours behind schedule, and wouldn't make it to the one where we had a reservation. I remember passing through the Mojave Desert, by day, without air conditioning. As to air travel, we mustn't forget that a typical rail coach seat is about the size of a first class seat on an airplane. While I've had occasional pleasant flights, I've far more often found that air travel meant spending time strapped into incredibly cramped seats, with tiny windows and food a starving Rottweiler would turn his nose up at. And that was before the atrocities of last September. Now, with the additional hassle of heightened security, air travel is an even more time-consuming pain in the backside than ever. This leaves vacationers with three choices: Put up with the monumental hassle of air travel, or drive, or take the train. Somebody else (possibly on the "Libertarian Doofus" thread, possibly on this one) came out against the idea of increasing fuel taxes in order to make the highways more self-supporting, and to make trains more attractive to travelers and shippers alike. Why? Whatever portion of the cost of highway maintenance isn't covered by fuel taxes and vehicle license fees ends up being covered by income and sales taxes. Why shouldn't we shift the burden of paying for highways onto those who derive the most benefit from them, and who cause the most wear and tear on them? Our air would be cleaner, and our shrinking petroleum reserves would last longer. -- James H. H. Lampert
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