Your American Dream Didn't Mean A Thing... Suburban King

This post has been swilling in my brain for a while, at times a positive one, at times a negative one... depending on how stuck I feel in my current living situation.

Still, with Ezra talking public transportation, it seemed as good a policy hook as any to try and lift my thoughts up to a different level.

It's been interesting, living in the suburbs, and driving more to do basic things than I have in 20 years or so. The 15 or so years I spent in the urban cores of New York and Boston were all about public transportation and walking. Now, it's into the car to go to work, to the store, to get gas... to get anywhere.

And without it... I feel trapped.

That, really is a nutshell of America's challenge when it comes to cars: polluting, gas-guzzling inefficient behemoths that they are, they have made us a mobile society, people with the ability to roam, to move, to travel far away in short periods of time, by ourselves. Live in a city - especially New York - and you can be very exempt from the realities of the rest of America, where cars rule, and the world is roads... and parking lots.

I call Westchester a suburb, but in many ways it's the antithesis of the ordinary suburb: there's been a deep resistance to development and commercialization in significant swaths of this county directly north of New York City, such that at a half hour out of town (that is, north of Yonkers and New Rochelle), things become fairly rural fairly fast. On the Western, Hudson facing side, of the county, there's little more than a string of smaller towns, a few small highways, and the Metro North line to ferry people in and out of the city. On the Eastern side, the county narrows to a point where it's little more than the connecting road to Connecticut (where, again, things get pretty rural, pretty fast, off the main roads).

It's lovely to be out here, in many ways: calming, peaceful, beautiful to see. My town (a village, actually, in the scheme of New York local governing) is very much built into existing terrain, and houses are built into hillsides, overlooking rivers and streams and the system of reservoirs that feed into New York City's water table.

But it's also isolating, distant, and a little lonely. Blogging, my main activity at home, doesn't help. As much as I need the money, what I really like about my little job is that it forces me to be social and maintain contact with real live people. ever before has a service job seemed so vital, so necessary.

If you'd asked me, a year ago, about the environmental changes we need in this country - pushing fuel efficiency, pushing people out of cars and into mass transit, I'd have been wholeheartedly behind it (not in an Al Gore way, but still). Now, I see more of the complexities; the reality of life out here needs cars, and there are no easy answers. I can't really imagine, an American life out here where you give up on the car.

What worries me most, I suppose, is the way that all of this seeps into my soul; the way I become more comfortable with the 45 minute drives, the "I'll just hop over to the store", the slower pace of life compared to the hectic urban life in Manhattan, which draws me back, too, each time I go into the city. My muscle memory of life in midtown never leaves, but it's pull fades. As I become a Suburban King.

Comments

[jinbaltimore]

You need to be in a city. There. I've said it.

[greg]

It's all about planning (spoken as an urban planning student). There's nothing wrong with using a car sometimes. The problem is that (most) Americans use them far too often and commute ridiculous distances. We need to stop the unrestrained sprawl that results in communities that are completely car-dependent. If communities are planned in ways that provide transportation choices, people will take them, at least some of the time. You would feel trapped without a car. That's very poor planning, to only allow for one viable form of transportation.

Also the real low hanging fruit that should be pursued is the multitude of cities with very poor transit service. Even modest investments could make a big difference.

[Redstar]

yes to greg. i'm also an urban planning student (have i mentioned that enough times?) but i'm also personally boycotting the T on a regular basis. Making improvements in cities that are not NY would be a tremendous 1st step.

And the sprawling suburbs of Raleigh are very diff. from the suburbs of Westchester. But your point is taken, weboy.