Drives Me Nuts

Take a look at this picture.

Anything unusual?

This is a woman and her three daughters (mom is second from the right).

This picture is from a story in our local newspaper about Sonoma County having the most cars per capita of any County in the greater San Francisco Bay Area:

Sonoma County has more vehicles per capita than any of the nine Bay Area counties - nearly one for every man, woman and child living here.The county's rural landscape with almost 1,400 miles of roads, lots of parking in its far-flung nine cities and a patchwork of public transportation are all factors in the reliance on cars.

End of story...right?

Wrong.

Everyone. And I mean everyone complains about traffic in Sonoma County.

The five members of this family each have a car....that's five cars including dad. They proclaim it as essential to each have a vehicle, which I think is true. It also says a whole lot about the way in which we organize our towns and cities. Living independently without a vehicle in many parts of the United States is a huge challenge. Of course, this very fact is a symptom of our oil dependency which is coming back to bite us.

I saw a couple other things in the picture. Note that the vehicles are all larger vehicles......one individual per car. Is this family worried about fuel efficiency? Because the United States has been blessed with it's own oil reserves, the price of oil has stayed low by international standards fueling (sorry) our dependency on oil.

But I saw one last thing. I saw five relatively pampered women, three of whom are quite young, all driving luxury large vehicles. Since when is it standard for college kids to drive a Mercedes or BMW?

I'm old fashioned. I drove a well-used 1959 Volkswagen Bug in 1970. Though given a good deal by my parents, I bought the car and paid for the insurance. It was pay the freight or hoof it. And I drove that car into the ground until I was able to upgrade to a 1969 VW that I purchased used in 1975. I've still never owned a Mercedes. Do you really think the young women in this picture paid the freight for their vehicles?

Here's my point. You ever wonder where the pampered, afraid-of-the-boogie man, apathetic, selfish and out-of-touch voting public comes from? You just might have a picture of four of them above.