Visions of the Future

Talking about the traffic in the Bay Area is much like talking about the Cold in the Midwest. It bonds people together as only an incomprehensible foe that threatens group survival can.


As many of people around the nation have now heard, tho weeks ago a large chunk of a truck passing over the bay bridge that connects San Francisco to Oakland and Berkeley caught on fire and literally melted a huge part of the highway.

The event took place on the weekend. Moments after it happened, people were e-mailing each other the news, and the most frequent reaction that I heard was, "Traffic is going to be awful!!". This stretch of highway is quite a challenge even under the best of circumstances. It evokes fear in even them most hardened drivers. The call went out far and wide for two days, you could hear the concerned hum of a thousand e-mail messages zipping through the airwaves "Don't Drive...whatever you do, please do NOT try to drive on Monday".

And Monday came. My roomate, a fiesty one, decided to drive despite the danger. She's a trail-blazer, fearless. She's the Davey Crocket of the highway.

I decided to take public transportation.

When my roomate came home, I was itching to hear just how bad it had been. I've notices that I now say things like, "it took me two hours, two hours to go 20 miles" in the same tone I used to utter "it was 20 below, 20 below without windchill."

But lo and behold, she reported, there was nobody on the road. It was the easiest commute of her year.

The whole community of the bay area found alternatives to driving. Some took public transportation like myself, some worked from home. Some flexed their hours so they weren't on the road during rush hour and shortened their commute time.

I realized---oh. This could be every day.

With all the increased awareness of the impact of global warming, there's been more effort around these parts to reduce fossil fuel consumption. However, it shocked me to see how just one day of awful traffic could motivate people (myself included) to tap into behaviors they have already.

We have the ability here in the Bay Area to consume so much less fuel than we do currently. Yes, we may need the buy in of our Employers that perhaps we don't have on days where there's no immediate "crisis".

But that's the kicker. There is a crisis. And I truly believe now that it's a crisis we can respond to now, with what we have. 30% of all fossil fuel energy that we use in the US is used on transportation. If we could repeat that Monday morning on a regular basis, just think what an impact the Bay Area could have on the enviornment. Yes we may need to be flexible. But it's possible, and the highway meltdown is a challenge for us to make that reality happen.