Car-Brain (its a curable disease)

Today I almost got hit by a car. However, that does not make this day unique, as every day presents me the opportunity to be crushed by a veritable tank, poorly disguised as a mode of transportation. 

Me, after almost getting hit by a truck

As I make my way through the world here in Virginia Beach, I am somewhat taken aback by the sheer size of the vehicles on the road. When I got back from the Netherlands a few months ago it was the first thing I noticed on the ride back from the airport. The vehicles in the U.S are simply massive-- and only getting bigger. SUVs have been marketed as "safe" family vehicles, capable of all that hauling and off-roading that Americans do on a daily basis (or so the car ads would have you believe). The safety feature that car companies tout is in fact simply the ability to crush any obstacle that comes into its path. The safety feature is the armor that the car supplies to its inhabitants in a crash. What these companies never talk about, however, is how safe that car is for those outside of it. Standard cars have regulations that make them less deadly if they hit a person on the road. Part of this is a regulation on the hood height. Not only does a lower hood allow for visibility for the driver, but in the event of a collision with a person, that person will be hit below the waist, and be thrown on top of the car. Now, this is not an ideal situation to be in of course, but its much better than what will happen if you get hit by an SUV. SUVs do not have to adhere to the same rules as standard cars do because they are classified as "light trucks". In essence this means they can be bigger, taller, and more deadly. With that high safety rating come an even higher hood, guaranteeing that if it hits a person, that person is first going to be struck in the chest, and then thrown under the vehicle. Chances of survival after being hit by an SUV are dramatically lower than if you are hit by a sedan. 

As cars have gotten bigger, naturally the amount of space that they take up has increased as well. Street parking space becomes more limited as one SUV takes up the space two cars could have fit. This prompts the building of more surface parking lots and parking structures, induces more traffic which allows city officials to call for highway and lane widening, and before you know it, your entire city has been reappropriated to cars and you find yourself in a hellscape that looks a lot like Virginia Beach. 

In this land of cars, cars take up not only the majority of the physical space, but also the majority of the brain space. Car-brainedness is a term that is used in the cycling community to describe people who are so immersed in the car world that it takes up space in every consideration, conversation, and conception of their imagined world. This culminates in the car culture that is so pervasive in our country. No surprise, but Virginia Beach is the most car-brained place I can conceive. I've been biking to work, and thus have become the office freak. Every single day people ask me questions along the lines of, "when are you going to give up this biking thing and just get a car?" I work in the transportation department. Not a good sign guys. 

This kind of thinking permeates everything, so much so that when I biked to the farmers market last weekend, I heard a 7 year-old girl ask her mom, "why does she have a bike?" as I pulled up. I would have rather she'd asked a question like, "is that a boy or a girl?" like normal kids do. Never mind that I had a near-miss with an F-150 on the way, this was the thing that ruined my day.

I couldn't help but think of all the tiny children I saw riding either on their own, or with three of their siblings on their parent's bike when I was in the Netherlands. It makes me sad for the kids of the U.S that they have to grow up in the backseat of a car, rather than out in the world. Virginia Beach has gone so hard into investing into car infrastructure, citing freedom of movement as a reason, that the roads are unmaintainable, traffic is the worst I've ever seen, and kids can't play outside or walk to school. If you don't have a car here, there is a very limited number of places that you can go. Although I'd like to say that I've been steadfastly working on projects to improve this place, unfortunately it seems that change is slow in coming (if, like my bus, it is coming at all). More on that later.