Posted on 02/07/2019 12:51:55 PM PST by ppaul
A fundamentally American freedom is under attack. The automobile defined the 20th century in the United States. Mass production made cars available to the nation's middle class and helped create the modern suburb, where most Americans now live. Driving became part of coming of age in America...Meanwhile, some cities have put their drivers on forced road diets. They are reducing lanes available to drivers on key arterial streets...The goal is to discourage driving by intentionally reducing capacity and creating traffic congestion by design...The bottom line is they want to force more residents to use alternative transportation by making driving as unpleasant as possible. Since when did the automobile, which helped drive this nation's development and success, become a public enemy?
(Excerpt) Read more at greeleytribune.com ...
My wife used to sell high-end autos and I got to hang around with some car buffs who work on or can afford new stuff.
It’s happening here in downtown OKC.
Places like S. CA have too many people, too many cars and bet the rent it's just going to get worse and worse until they eventually force people in these regions out of the cars and or make it so expen$ive to drive that people will opt to not drive or own a car. Or people will start jumping out of windows because their commutes are taking up 35% of their day and the traffic finally turned them all into unrestrained lunatics.
However driving in most smaller towns and cities and rural areas are still fun and can be done without many issues.☺
Oooohhhhhhh.....probably some of those fancy foreign jobs like a Buick.
I still have a Jaguar.
What do you feed it?
Impalas?
TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION
Now cities are proposing intentionally making driving harder to force people to use transit.
LINK: https://la.curbed.com/2019/2/5/18211168/transit-los-angeles-parking-density-report
I had one of those fancy foreign jobs once.
It was a Honda Civic Hatchback.
It was loaded with options.
Windshield. Tires. A floor.
This wasn’t some cheapo.
We did all kinds of things when I was a kid that the “helicopter parents” of today would find horrifying. We built ramps to jump our bikes (inspired by Evel Knievel), had bottle rocket fights around 4th of July (everyone survived), and horror of horrors, stayed out all day without our parents knowing exactly where we were (no cell phones).
I live in Denver now, but grew up in Illinois. When I lived in Illinois our parents used to take us every now and then to Six Flags over Mid-America near St. Louis. This was back when it was clean and new and more like a “Disneyland for the rest of us” than the run-down adrenaline junkie parks that those places have since become. Back then, there was a ride called “Adventures on the Mississippi.” It was obviously inspired by Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise, and it similarly involved guided boats that carried a couple dozen people or so and wound their way around the river, encountering various “challenges” and “dangers.” The climax of the ride involved a fort with cannons firing at your boat, complete with big splashes when the “cannonballs” hit the water (driven by underwater air compressors, I believe).
Well, once back home after one of our visits, a couple of my friends and I suddenly realized we had a large stand of woods behind our subdivision, and lo and behold, it had a stream (actually, a small creek) running through it. We also realized that one friend had a small plastic boat, I had a cap gun (one of the revolvers that used the round plastic caps, not the paper ones), and another had a bow and some arrows. You can probably see where this is going....
Well, to make a long story short, we used what we had to set up our own version of “Adventures on the Mississippi”, and charged the little kids in the neighborhood one dollar each to experience it. We rigged the plastic boat up by tying fishing line to it and attaching pulleys to several trees so that it could be pulled along the “river” (creek) invisibly while the little kids rode it one at a time. Unfortunately, we were a little short on cannons, so another of my friends would hide near the creek and throw big rocks in ahead of the boat to simulate cannon fire.
There was also a walking tour portion to the “experience”, which involved coming across a Bigfoot track on the trail, and encountering a real live Indian in a tree with a bow and arrows. The plan for that scene was that whoever was playing tour guide would see the Indian and, using the cap gun, dispatch the Indian before he could do the tour group any harm. Whoever played the Indian would then pretend to die and slump down on the tree branch they were perched on. It worked great except for that one time that I fired at the Indian, and my friend, instead of playing dead in the tree ended up doing a little too good a job of acting and fell out of the tree about 10 or 12 feet to the ground. He fell in tall grass, so I couldn’t see him, but....the show must go on!, so we continued on while I hoped that he was still alive. Turned out he was fine, relatively speaking.
Kids today just don’t have the imagination that we did, and if they tried to do anything remotely like what I’ve described above the authorities would probably show up and take the kids away. No kid I knew ever wore a helmet for anything other than playing football, and we all survived. We rode our bikes for miles (again, without helmets) and we all survived. Sure, we got banged up sometimes, but it was all part of growing up, and our freedom to imagine and dream, and then to sometimes face the painful consequences of our choices, built character.
By treating kids today like fragile little snowflakes, they are becoming precisely that.
I would have loved your version of Adventures on the Mississippi!
It wasn’t just fun you were having, because you and your friends were using your imagination and ingenuity to create your own adventure (and earn a buck or two). Now imagination is confined to tiny screens.
Do you really believe that uber leader bimbos Nanzi Pelosi and Occasional Kotex would EVER take public transportation????
HA! Public transportation is for the “Little People!”
When did driving become a problem that needs to be solved?When they gave illegals licenses.
Tell me about it, I’m constantly fighting traffic here in South Carolina where the roads used to be nearly empty. I liked it better the old way, I wish most of those who are moving here from up North would go back to looking down their nose at Carolina and vowing never to spend a night in this state. I used to run I-95 as if I owned it, often there was not a car in sight, now it is almost like driving in the city. Myrtle Beach is ruined, you might just as well move to New York as live at Myrtle Beach, the sight of it is enough to make an old hillbilly want to throw up.
It’s bad all over, agreed. Really bad is CT. It’s gotten almost impossible to get across the state. And now they’re talking about massive tolls for the privilege of getting overwhelmed by traffic nightmares!
Ping.
I rode to school on buses driven by sixteen and seventeen year old student drivers, I would have been one had I not made a careless error on my driving test for the school bus license. Those drivers were super dependable, never missing a day for the most part, always on time. I can’t imagine what would happen if the same thing were tried today.
Fortunately freedom loving Americans are moving away from the centrally planned hives. If it wasn't for massive immigration the cities would be emptying out.
If capitalists sell the city socialists enough rope they will hang themselves.
Oh it did not!
It just clustered too greatly in the OLD cities!
...and every SMALL city wants to GROW!!
I ask WHY??
A narrow mouthed box canyon needs a LOT less fence to hold the critters back than a wide mouthed one.
(Dead Horse Point)
(Negro Bill Canyon)
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