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Cars and freeways now an inevitability
By Carl Heintze
On these still early mornings when I walk out into my driveway to get my morning newspaper, to the north I hear a dull, steady, increasing roar.
It is like some caged beast trying to escape its imprisonment, as if it wants to break loose and rush about attacking everything in its path. It's the freeway, or one of the freeways, that cuts through Santa Clara County. Night and day it is loaded with cars, trucks and buses. It doesn't seem to matter the time of day. The roar continues night and morning.
In the winter it's more noticeable in the morning, but on warm summer evenings, when the windows are open it is there again--an ominous background to the life you and I lead in the Santa Clara Valley.
In some ways I am surprised that I hear it so constantly, for where the freeway comes close to my house, it is depressed into a cut. Cars actually travel at a level lower than the former walnut orchard where I live. And besides the cut, so-called "sound walls" have been erected, supposedly to keep the noise from freeway neighbors.
Although I can't be certain, it's my belief that all the sound walls do is funnel the noise upward, to come down farther from the freeway.
The monster seeking to get loose is, of course, not the freeway itself, although its cement has covered what once were orchards and fields. The monster is really the internal combustion engine--the gasoline-powered set of cylinders upon which we all depend, in one way or another, for life.
The automobile and the truck are how most of us get our food these days. Trucks haul it to the nearest grocery store where we drive to buy it. And anything else we need. Our valley has been adapted to the automobile and its internal combustion engine.
And the internal combustion engine now depends on fossil fuel from afar: Alaska, Venzuela, Saudi Arabia or Mexico.
Without the machines in which we spend much of our days and without the fuel from far away which drives them, civilization as we know it would grind to a halt. As it is, it is grinding to a halt, anyway. The freeways aren't really free. We pay for them with our taxes, with air pollution and with the increasing cost of their construction and upkeep.
We also pay for them in human life, in the weekly toll of injury and death that accompanies the movement of commuters to and from work each morning.
Sometimes I listen to morning radio with its traffic alert. Not a morning passes when there is not an accident somewhere in the Bay Area, usually with some injury.
But no one pays much attention any more, unless they are the injured or injuring party. Death and injury are an acceptable fact in the automobile age.
We have created, and are living with, a monster.
And it is this monster, which is barely caged in the cut north of my house about a mile, that I hear each winter morning.
It is this monster which I hear roaring, seeking to be even freer than it is and able to roam mindlessly across the landscape.
On mornings when I hear it, I sometimes pause to wonder how all this happened and, more importantly, whether or not we are going to be able to keep it caged and confined.
The internal combustion engine has been growing as a menace throughout all of our lifetimes. Almost none of us, no matter what our age, is able to remember a time when automobiles were rare and horses were not, when roads were mostly dirt and unpaved, and when the world was more silent than sound-filled.
The rise of the automobile has happened over about a century. Coming from a few rickety horseless carriages to the streamlined, expensive, comfortable and ubiquitous companions we pamper, park and worship in our garages, we have created a new world.
Indeed, we have changed the world. Almost no part of the globe is without some automobiles, even those parts far removed from industrial civilization. Trucks and cars have penetrated the remotest parts of Africa and South America. If one day there is an automobile in every Chinese garage, we will have been finally overcome by the automobile.
The ultimate nightmare is more than a billion Chinese, most of them with automobiles. It boggles the mind.
In the meantime, however, we are without a solution except gridlock and disaster. No one has invented an acceptable substitute for the auto or for its engine. Mass transit--which means mostly costly systems such as BART or the light rail--can't be built fast enough or far enough to help much within the near future.
And so, threatened and at its mercy, we listen to the monster roar each morning and wonder when it will finally break loose from its cage, and come after all of us.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to The Sun.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
