Traffic Life : Passionate Tales and Exit Strategies
Edited by Stephan Wehner
An Anthology
 
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vi Foreword in Paris. Imagine the blonde in the sports car riding the Metro. And imagine all that in an American suburb. However, we are not yet free to be walkers in a walking world. We are currently pedestrians and bicyclists strug- gling to exist in an autocentric world. A world that is indif- ferent-and hostile-to us. A world of traffic. As easy as it is to grow cynical, deep down inside I am inherently an optimist. Most advocates are. We would never work so hard for so little financial reward if we didn't believe that this world could be a better place. But where does one start? The public needs to realize that there is a problem, and that there are solutions that do not involve more cars and more roads. That is why I produce my cable television se- ries, Perils For Pedestrians. Raising public awareness of the issues is an important step towards fomenting change. So it is with the arts. Good poems, stories, drawings and music capture the essence of a moment. They can draw out a hidden meaning. They can inspire a vision. A television program, a book, or a website will never re- place the grass roots advocates testifying at endless plan- ning board meetings. But they may inspire someone to go to that meeting, and their ideas might be received just a little bit more warmly. I hope that you, the reader of this collection, will gain a vision of what could be. If you help spread that vision and act on that vision, it will only be a matter of time before we see the necessary policy changes. Someday we may finally tame the most defining charac- teristic of post World War II suburban development-Traf- fic. John Z. Wetmore Bethesda, Maryland December 2003 Producer of 'Perils for Pedestrians' www.pedestrians.org
  
Preface When I was living in San Francisco, I would go to one of the coffee shops to enjoy my coffee before cycling to work. While I sat at a sidewalk table, absorbing the morning, I would hear over and over again, 'one large-soy-decaf-latte- to-go' and would watch as this latte was carried to the street, to be swallowed into the anonymous interior of a vehicle. To this day, I can't see the point of drinking coffee in a car. While moving from San Francisco, California, to Van- couver, British Columbia, I was sitting in traffic in a rental truck. I looked around and saw car after car in front, behind, beside, and sometimes over and under me, and I thought: how silly this is. Here we are, all moving mechan- ically-somewhere. Bodies stationary in a moving frame. Exchanging places. One should have a book of nice little stories about this. A book that covers values, feelings and addresses the cultural ethos. We have a car culture that has produced communities of thousands of people without a store, where everyone arrives home and leaves again by car, where neighbours hardly know each other, isolated by an insidious mecha- nism. A mechanism that is fed by exaggerations and misconstruc- tions. Look at ads for cars: Grandiose, glamorous, brilliant. Landscapes, open roads, speed, agility and excitement flash and bleat at us from every media outlet. Yet everyone knows the banality. Reality is different. All but a few cars spend their time just sitting around-or in traffic. And cars, cars ­ vii ­

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