Crazy Me, Driving
A while back I lamented about how much extra driving my family does, now that our older daughter has started kindergarten. (To recap: the school that my wife and I chose isn't in our neighborhood, and we're driving an extra 75 miles every week as a result. Ugh.)
Just before school started, my main beef was that all that extra driving would increase our family's contribution to climate change. I still think that's right.
But there's perhaps a more immediate impact that's worth mentioning. I'm spending a lot more time in my car on the typical weekday--a little over double the time, as a matter of fact.
And at risk of sounding like a whiner: it's really getting to be a drag.
Special Series
The Year of Living Car-lessly Experiment
In a Series
Mapping Toilets
Can the wireless web find you a loo? Not yet, as far as I can tell.
In a complete, compact community, you ought to be able to find a restroom promptly, as I’ve said. That’s a requisite of strong communities as basic as--if less morally stirring than--say, the rule of law or the protection of dissent. So it’s discouraging to read yesterday’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer report that Seattle’s experimental high-end automatic public toilets have become pit stops for vice rather than, well, just pit stops.
Surely, however, in the era of wireless web, in which overwhelming majorities of northwesterners carry cell phones and majorities of cell phones are equipped for internet access, it should be easier than it’s ever been for ordinary people to find an emptying station within a short walk of wherever they happen to be. Expensive city-built commodes shouldn’t be as necessary, thanks to what we used to call the information superhighway. Right?
