Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 18, 1993 TAG: 9307190254
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ED SHAMY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Max is a 33-year-old single man who lives in Roanoke and works in the valley. He drives a 10-year-old Subaru wagon and he doesn't want his full name in the newspaper. Nor would you.
Earlier this year, Max celebrated an anniversary with his co-workers and, on his way home, was stopped by police.
He pleaded guilty in June to driving under the influence. His driver's license was restricted: For the next 6 months he can drive only to and from work.
"I asked the lady in the clerk's office who took my license if I was allowed to stop at Kroger on my way home from work and she said I wasn't supposed to," Max said.
He began his suspension determined to suffer the consequences as they were intended.
Legally and theoretically, we can expect of Max no less.
But realistically?
"On Tuesday and Thursday nights, if there's no good games on television, I would probably drive to the Elephant Walk [the nightclub at Holiday Inn on Starkey Road] and mess around for awhile, or go to happy hour at one of the other clubs," he said.
Now he's not supposed to. But in Max's pocket is a set of keys. One of them fits in the ignition of the car parked outside his window.
"It's tempting," he says. "It's really tempting."
He fears the consequences of driving when he shouldn't, but feels himself pulled by one of the primary cultural and technological forces in all of human history: The automobile.
Nowhere is it written in the U.S. Constitution or in the Bill of Rights that Americans have the right to drive. But that may be only because those cornerstones of our system were written before the combustion engine was developed.
Authorities involved in the struggle to control suspended drivers are fond of citing the philosophy: Driving is a privilege, not a right.
Try convincing 169 million licensed drivers in the U.S.; each driving an average of 12,900 miles yearly.
They drive billions of miles yearly, for good reasons and bad, to the detriment of the environment and the benefit of commerce, to flee and to rescue, to work and to relax.
There are more cars in America than any other nation now or in the history of the planet. More miles of paved roads, more parking spaces and more drive-in restaurants.
Arguably no technological advance - not the gun, not the light bulb or the television or the telephone - has as profoundly altered the culture of this country as has the automobile.
It became the steely beast of burden, replacing the horse and the oxen that had muscled America toward its manifest destiny out front of prairie schooners.
Maybe it's not surprising.
An American president had long pitched the idea of a national highway system. His name was Thomas Jefferson, and if cars had been around in his day, we might today be quoting a passage from the Constitution ensuring an American's right to drive.
The nation's first engineered road - a 62-mile stretch between Philadelphia and Lancaster, Pa., and paved with gravel - cost private investors $465,000 to build and the wagon traffic started to roll in 1794.
Just four years later, Louis Philippe, a Frenchman visiting this country, wrote the words that appear at the top of this story.
By 1921, Warren G. Harding became the first president to ride to his inauguration in an automobile. The car was already starring in motion pictures and causing startling new arguments at village council meetings, where smoother roads were becoming a taxpayer demand.
Trolleys faded.
Factory mass production techniques improved to fuel the war effort in the 1940s. Cars got cheaper and stronger, and millions of veterans returned stateside to energetically pursue the American dream: A home of their own, a little land, a job and a family.
Those homes were being built outside of town a bit, because there were cars to carry shoppers into downtown where the trade and the jobs were.
Dwight Eisenhower became president, determined to create an interstate highway system for military and commercial use.
Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg, the Beatniks, roared from coast to coast in convertibles, romanticizing the open road and becoming the new American pioneers.
The car changed all the fundamental principles of land-use. No longer did retailers have to cluster together.
Cities suffered as the car fueled decentralization. Shopping and strip malls developed and devoted more space to parking than they did for shopping. Drive-in movie theaters and drive-up banks were popular.
What was good for General Motors became good for the country, and vice versa. Detroit became more than just a name for a city - it became a synonym for the auto industry, the very guts of the American economy.
Cities tore down empty old shops and replaced them with parking lots and garages. Population declined in the cities and boomed in the suburbs; local governments and taxpayers struggled to meet the new infrastructure demands.
Oil producing countries crippled us by controlling their oil, exploiting our addiction; gas prices skyrocketed, we drove, anyway.
Jimmy Carter walked to his inauguration, and seemed out of step with the people he served as president for four years.
Distance became something we calculated by a mile per minute, the car defined the very pace at which we lived.
That pace quickened and the car developed as a sanctuary, wholly controlled by its operator, from climate control to speed, to the selection of the radio station. It is buffer between home and workplace, a cherished bit of privacy for the frazzled American in pursuit of the elusive dream.
And so now we're more likely to live within walking distance of a place to buy gasoline than we do to a place that sells food; few of us live within walking distance of the places we work.
Our very culture drives us to drive. How realistic is it to expect some to resist?
by CNB