Category: Park Meetup News

By Andrea Menzies

Many thanks to my family and friends which helped me get my car fixed this week. That is the one good part about this area is I have my mom, daughter, and a few cousins that are great at fixing cars in the area. The super cold weather has been hard on cars, and my sick car has been a challenge. I wish I did not live in a car dependent area with no buses available. I lived in France and Germany as a child when my American citizen family worked there, and public transportation was so clean, maintained, and on time transportation was never a problem. I lived in New Orleans for University and street cars and buses were easy to take, and running day and night. Car manufacturing leaders lobbied the governments in many U.S. areas to make roads non-walkable in the 1940s saying it would promote car manufacturing jobs. Now most of the jobs are gone overseas, and we are stuck with roads with few sidewalks and bike lanes. Many bike lanes are painted in this area that only run near parks, and don’t run the full street. House rental and sale websites want to list property as “near walk and bike trails” as the trails go nowhere and lead to dead-end roads constantly. The problem is people trying to go to work, school, and weekend social activities have limited transportation. Uber, other rideshare, and taxi rides are super expensive, often slow, and destroy a work-day’s profit margin for their personal profits. Cars use fossil fuel which makes pollution, are dangerous for wrecks, and cause many social problems. Forcing people in the U.S. to be dependent on cars destroys the ability to be productive many days.

The car was sick.