If the New York
transit strike showed us anything, it’s that America
needs to treasure the fruits of the big birthday.
No teenager in
America fails to understand the big birthday.
It’s not 18. Who cares about voting? It’s not 21, as
a growing generation (or so I’d like to think)
figures out that alcohol does nothing good for you.
It’s not even
close. The big one is 16. Wheels, man. Mobility.
With the keys in my hand and my license in my
wallet, I’m large and in charge.
And every parent
understands that when their teen hits 16, the
balance of power starts to shift, because they no
longer depend on you entirely to get from place to
place. Oh sure, they used to get places within
bike-riding distance. And sure, even now you can try
to restrict their use of the car. But the fact
remains that the holder of a driver’s license is a
changed human being, and he or she knows it. And the
previous provider of transport services has less
influence over the life of the former passenger –
and he or she knows that as well.
When the New York
Transit Workers Union decided a few days before
Christmas to stop driving the kids to soccer, the
entire city went into meltdown mode. No rides?
But Mom! The problem for New Yorkers is that
they are perpetually suspended at the age of 15. It
is almost impossible to get anywhere in New York
City by driving your own car, and anyone who has
lived there for any length of time learned this long
ago. You get around on the bus or the subway. That’s
mom and dad. Occasionally you may spring for a cab.
That’s your older brother, and it’s a cooler ride,
but watch out because he’ll tell on you to mom and
dad if you annoy him too much.
New York’s Metro
Transit Authority strike reminded the rest of
America how much we appreciate being a nation of
16-year-olds. Nothing is more bogus than having to
call your boss and tell him you can’t come over
because Mr. Bus and Mrs. Subway won’t drive you.
A transit strike in
New York was a crisis because there is no other way
to get around there. But Americans elsewhere, who
watched with amusement then hopped in the car to go
pick up dinner from the drive-thru, should guard
their keys, especially the next time they hear
someone blathering on about the dangers of “urban
sprawl.”
In the greatest
threat to humanity since Fox News went on the air,
regional planning types are horrified by the growing
tendency of urban dwellers to head for the outskirts
of their metropolitan areas. And to make matters
worse, owners of rural land are only too happy to
sell their green fields to developers to make all
this possible.
To fight the
scourge of urban sprawl, its avowed enemies usually
suggest a combination of restrictions on automobile
traffic and huge increases in mass transit spending.
Cars are the problem everywhere. If only people
couldn’t drive themselves, they wouldn’t move so far
from the city.
Just think of the
stuff we could do about this. We could follow
Europe’s lead and jack up gas taxes, so everyone
except mass transit would pay $5 a gallon or more.
We could make it illegal to drive with fewer than
five passengers except in the right lane on
alternate Thursdays. We could mandate that every car
in America get 80 miles per gallon! This would
either be prohibitively expensive or impossible,
either of which would put GM and Ford out of
business – well, I mean, even faster – but need not
result in a reduction of union labor, because all
the displaced auto workers could become unionized
transit workers in every city in America.
Mass transit
utopia! Transit unions all over the nation become
mom and dad, and the rest of us all revert to aging
15-year-olds – needing rides. No more urban sprawl.
No more pollution. No more “global warming.” No more
road rage.
And when everyone
in America needs to depend on their own local
chapter of the TWU to get around, this won’t be a
problem, right? Because a strike like we saw in New
York was a rarity and an aberration, right?
Maybe we should ask
Jontelle Steffens, a 26-year-old single mother from
St. Paul, Minnesota. It seems they recently had a
transit strike there, too, and since she had decided
to rely on mass transit to get her to her job, she
no longer has a job. Steffens was in the news
recently because a high-profile local attorney
helped her out by buying her a car. She may be 26,
but she’s now 16 again. And it’s doubtful she’ll
want to go back to relying on her mom and dad at the
local transit union to get her anywhere.
I doubt many other
people will either, but if you want to be 15 again,
you can always move to New York. Urban sprawl is
fine with me if it lets people live where they want,
and cars are awesome if they let people go where
they want, when they want. If they also result in
some pollution, and clogged up roads, and
disappearing farmland, I think I’d rather deal with
those problems than turn over our national keys to
TWU chapters in every city in America.
As we just saw in
New York, parents like that have a tendency to abuse
their children.
