You can't get there from here anymore

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Now modern man has grudgingly figured out that auto transportation is one of the things that is killing us, though unlike an overcrowded farm or apartment, it doesn’t pain us from moment to moment. But gridlock does. From I-5 on one coast to I-95 on the other, plus growing congestion in between, we adopt personal strategies to best survive the crush. These even sometimes involve trains or buses.

Nonetheless, given half a chance, we will cheerfully revert to the car the moment we can, and scorch the planet some more. That’s the suicidal part. Unfortunately, the current flurry of excitement for new Metro-North railcars and transit buses isn’t about global warming; it’s about convenience.

Who knows, if the state can get enough other drivers onto mass transit, then there may again be room on the road for me. Failing that, I’ll ride the train myself and grouse about the inconvenience the whole way. But whenever I do get to drive, it will be in a car reflecting my elevated status and psyche. CO2 be damned.

Similarly destructive is driving to jobs in difficult-to-reach places. Not long ago, I met a woman who commutes from Staten Island to Stamford. I kid you not. No easy transit for that run. No affordable place to live in Stamford either, or enjoyable pedestrian-style neighborhood. So why not drive? It’s only an hour each way, on a very good day.

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Our housing rules and personal life preferences are also self-destructive. By dividing ourselves into rich towns and poor towns, business towns and residential towns, we guarantee that most of us will commute. (Meanwhile, Arnold Chase is building a 50,000 square foot house in West Hartford, much like Bill Gates.) There go the glaciers.

Stores, too, play their part in the planet’s overheated doom. At a recent meeting in St. Louis, a colleague asked where he could fill a prescription. The hotel clerk apologized that there were no more drug or grocery stores left in downtown St. Louis. Driving was it. For groceries, Connecticut is that way, too. All the stores are out on the strip.

It is tempting to emulate the Chinese. They solve problems in a very direct way.

But wait! While Beijing may have summoned the courage to tell families to limit children, even it has yet to summon the courage to tell them to limit driving. That could foment another revolution!

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Then there’s the profit angle. Transit is a loser. We have to pay taxes to get it, so if we don’t use it ourselves, why support it? Especially when there are oil companies and car companies spending fortunes to get us into the latest Himalaya 8 for that rugged drive to work over unpaved forest trails.

Global warming though, like overpopulation, is a great stimulus for London-style central city transit and for tolls. It supplies one more good argument for action on the floor of the Legislature. That’s because now, in addition to not being able to drive anywhere from here anymore, we know that we’re frying poor Burkina Faso by even trying. This may not persuade us to take the bus ourselves, but it may soften us on agreeing to pay for one for other people.

Thus, public transit seems likely to prosper a bit in ridership, but not enough in global climate control to save Old Saybrook from being abandoned to malaria, or Windsor from giving up tobacco for bananas. The lemmings must be laughing.