Where Oh Where Did My Grocery Cart Go?
If anyone saw you pushing a grocery cart home or managing to pack one into your car after shopping to take with you, people would wonder what you’re doing. Some would be impertinent enough to ask. If you told them, “It’s my grocery cart. I’m not going to leave it here for just anyone to use,” an eyebrow would go up. If you then justified your maneuver by pointing out that you need it for the next time you go shopping, you would probably not succeed in convincing. Your listeners might think you’re a loon. If they learned subsequently that you pay a rather hefty fee for storing the cart in a safe place between shopping trips, either in your house or near your condominium, they might start considering other aspects of your long-familiar behavior in a different light. If they came to know that you spent one third of your leisure time taking care of the grocery cart, sometimes pushing it around for fun, you would be reported. Rest assured, the whole matter would be kept under wraps for your own protection until you were committed, but you would be committed, and you wouldn’t get to take your grocery cart with you.
If we transform the grocery cart into a car, yea, a Mercedes, a Jaguar, a Ferrari!, the matter clears up instantly. You are released with apologies and requested to please not sue. Now it’s clear to everyone that, of course, you’re going to take it home with you. It is, in fact, taking you home; you don’t go anywhere without it. And of course you’re going to keep it in a garage, a locked garage. That thing cost a lot of money, not to mention the insurance you pay for it. Of course, you’re going to spend just about one third of your free time tending it. You regularly pack self and family into it prior to easing out onto the highway to have your lives slapped around at 50, 60, 70 miles an hour. Eggs splatter as well, so we transport them in custom-shaped carton containers. All you’ve got is insurance.
Let’s put this in perspective. You need a car to get around. Everyone needs to get around. The more modern the times, the more around we’ve all got to get—like electrons mega-nudged out of orbit. The best way to get around, society’s consensus dictates, is the privately owned vehicle. Comfort is definitely important, not absolutely essential. Convenience counts, but with all those other out-of-orbit electrons having found wheels a satisfactory surrogate to spinning themselves, all you can count on by way of convenience is being able to jump into your car whenever you want and intending to get somewhere with no stopovers, no waiting in the rain, and no annoying fellow passengers—which gets us to the biggest plus of all: it’s private. There are no unanticipated annoying fellow passengers. Dissenting family members and marital tiffs in germination don’t count.
About the convenience of getting from point A to point B: Let’s bypass any accusatory side remarks about sloth and admit that, yes, you do want your journey to start from inside the exhaust-saturated air of your own garage and end in the exhaust-saturated air of the garage of the office building, hotel, or conference hall that is your destination. That, in our minds, is efficiency. And, no, you don’t mind hearing the news headlines 20 to 40 times running. You have gotten to sort of like that disgusting number one tune. And you will be fussing heatedly with your cell phone when you shouldn’t be (this is where the custom-molded cardboard packaging would provide some reassurance).
And while we’re on convenience, the man who inhabits the condominium one floor above me has never seen the neighborhood at ground level. His trips start at the elevator, in which he rides down to the underground garage, through which he carefully picks his way amidst the grit and oil dribbles to arrive at his trusty vehicle, into which he climbs and, finally, encased as Urban Dweller on the Move (or, Udom) ought to be encased, begins his armored urban creep through said garage, but on emerging to street level, charges his rockets and is on his real way. His weekly walks start this way as well. I know, because he offered a lift to poor me when he found out I was going to walk to my walk. I declined without mentioning that his generosity—driving me to where I planned to walk—would have scuttled my walk altogether.
On making such and many other observations, I have come to the firm conclusion that cars stifle us all, and I have a proposal to rid us of the problem. I am subtly aware of how effective my proposal sounds, due simply to the violent objections with which it is received whenever I mention it, which is not often, because I end up making myself very unpopular. You see, my scenario would be a scene of horrors for my poor neighbor. The auto industry would howl and scream, defame my character, subpoena me, put me through countless depositions, make me get a lawyer to negotiate my way through all those depositions in order to bankrupt me before any nasty little finger could be moved to relieve this old world of a single tire tread. Hence the unveiling of my theory here. This method allows you to laugh all you like. Yes, you can give full vent to the sneers and jeers and insults my real-time listeners are forced to merely insinuate. My proposal is simple enough, which is part of the problem. I wouldn’t change anything about how anyone chooses to travel—subways, trains, and buses would still be available alongside the cars. I merely propose we change the ownership. That’s right. You can still climb into a car and drive in full privacy exactly whenever you like from point A to point B. It just wouldn’t be your car.
The gritty details would look like this: I would shorten the first leg of my neighbor’s trip by having him ride the lift down to the ground floor (rather than the underground garage), exiting the building through the front door, and braving direct contact with the light of day to pace across the courtyard onto the sidewalk which borders the street. There he would find a device such as none of us can today envision: a snazzy, high-class dispenser, which sole purpose and sophisticated design is to allot to that man, or anyone who presents him- or herself with the requisite token, a snazzy, high-class, superslick vehicle into which Udom climbs and drives off to wherever Udom must go. When he gets to where he’s going, he deposits the vehicle at a similar high-class depot because—here comes the revelation—he no longer needs it. Having gotten to where he wants to go for now, it is no longer of use or interest to him. So he turns it in, forgets all about it, attends his conference, takes his cruise, does his shopping, or goes for one of his exotic walks.
Whenever he decides he needs wheels again, he approaches one of those high-class dispensers—as frequently occurring in the suburban and urban landscape as juvenile audiences believed immorality was going to be in 77 Sunset Strip—gets another well-calibrated, well-serviced vehicle, and climbs into it to tuck in his next motorized stitch.
Let me point out here the tremendous advantage this represents in freeing Udom from returning to the spot where he last came to vehicular rest. No longer must he, completely harried, comb through vast parking lots, unsure if he’s got the right parking lot. Gone forever are the sweaty moments of desperately lifting his fist and pushing the car-finder beep-retort provoker on his electronic key, hoping against hope to hear the answering bleat that will have him rushing over like a lost shepherd newfound—his relief flushing away the sting of having just let the world know that he lost his car and it had to find him. No, those times are past. In its place, Udom assumes that keenly sought after, legendary, up-until-now purely illusory mantle of freedom of The Free-Rambling Man. He does need that token, though.
To introduce my scenario, certain features would require adaptation: Pride of ownership falls to dust. All cars would look the same. (Am I in heaven? you may ask, fervently hoping you are not.) No more defining your personality through the chrome sweep of a sweet fender, the sexy look of a mock walnut dashboard, the gleam of the season’s color along a highly polished hood. No more powering your way through the streets with deafening blasts of motoric resonance. (Maybe not, you muse; but neither do I honk my horn to speed everyone up, except … sometimes.) No more worry about shelling out for an expensive paint job to cover up the scratch anonymously inflicted on a car too new to let it go without suffering painful moments in the night. No more worries about trading your car in a tad sooner than you would really like in order to gain on trade-in value. No more expensive inspections or worry of brutal litigation because your brakes didn’t work at one particular moment. No need to think about parking or traffic tickets. No need to keep up with the latest technology, or miss out on it because you bought your car yesterday.
Oh, about all those cars looking the same. (Yes, you’re worrying about that one. All the seats in a movie theater look the same. Yuck.) I forgot to mention one thing: You know those iPods, iPhones, iTouches, and the newest darling in the fab series: the iPads? They’re snazzy as all get out, aren’t they? They all look the same. And … everyone wants one. Just think of my terrific technology tidbits as the iCar or the iMove or the iSoar (not eyeSore, you spitball rowdies in the back). These sleek pieces are designed to give you just enough of the best engineering you would never be able to afford on your own that you simply drop off when you’re done in full knowledge that there will be another one waiting for you when you’re ready to ride, from wherever that point may be.
To be fair, cars represent some of the finest examples of engineering the world has ever produced. However, I carp immediately, is that what we want to dedicate our best efforts to? What about the clunkers on the road that are not the finest examples of engineering the world has ever produced? How many of those are still spluttering their way around? Essentially, a car is the me-instead-of-you attitude cast in metal. It serves one unit, one person, one family, and spends how much time simply parked somewhere taking up space until the owner is ready to use it again. It’s the small-gauge track of private power. Non-Christian, a nut might say. I won’t say that.
What I will say, is that we should take a moment to reflect on how warped our pride of ownership has become to consider something equivalent to a grocery cart as one of our most valued possessions. How would we feel if we saw James Dean wooing the belle of the block, swaggering just a little, too, because his arm was cozily curled around his grocery cart? But the auto industry has managed just that. What makes all this a little nasty is the fact that the rampant use of cars is poisoning the air, divorcing us from our landscape, undermining our physical strength, and distorting our civic infrastructures. We live deprived of parks and streams and fields and woods that have been trashed to make way for millions of acres of asphalt and concrete—roads, parking lots, bridges. Autos, both running and parked, take up more space in neighborhoods than the inhabitants do. The absolute precedence they impose, with their noise, stink, and potential for inflicting serious injury, has us scurrying for the curb every time. Their dominance dwarfs even that exerted by the domestic tyrant, the television. They turn our landscape into a dead sea of glinting metallic surfaces that heat up cruelly in the summer and stun us with cold in the winter. No mention of the damage inflicted on the environment due to their voracious consumption of gasoline will be made.
Granted, just giving up private ownership of cars will not solve any of these annoyances. However, I do believe it will demote the car to a status that will allow us to put the device in realistic perspective. Thereafter, very real changes might occur, but that would be the result of a completely human and voluntary response I will not venture to predict or dictate.
But, the first question is, can we release the stranglehold car ownership has on our psyche? Are we ready to embrace that great conundrum, shared private transportation? We’ll still ride from A to B in privacy whenever we want, no worries about insurance, tanking up, passing inspections, getting license plates, or paying taxes. The single condition is that we drop the ownership. Will the satisfaction of investing in a technology purely for the service it delivers compensate for that loss? Or do we as a species tally meretricious convenience higher than wholesome environment? I say, we do. That car is a talisman. Don’t ever let it go. You’re going to need it someday to make your big getaway.
And the tokens? you ask. Caught! Yes, there’s no way around it. Industry will be keeping its juggernaut yo-yo on a string, with my plan or anyone else’s.