Car commercials are clearly a lie. They portray driving as a direct path to autonomy and the self-satisfaction that comes with it.
It’s just you and the open road. Okay, maybe you and Matthew McConaughey and the open road, but still, it’ll be fun and fulfilling in ways that can only be achieved if you’re the master and commander of a motor vehicle. You will be relaxed. You will be smiling. You will be probing life’s deeper meanings as its mysteries open to you and only you at some dusky hour on a windless day.
It’s one of life’s more quiet disappointments, then, when you realize that there is no Promised Land of automotive autonomy. This usually happens right at that moment when you’re waiting in a long line of traffic with the great unwashed mass market of motorists, who are all more or less going to the same place to buy more or less the same thing.
This is decidedly not the road less travelled, we tell ourselves with a sigh.
Just when we’re coming to grips with the disappointments of not getting what was advertised by automotive companies (caveat emptor), we are plunged deeper into misery these days by the price of gas, which is apparently determined by the spin of a giant wheel (“Big money! Big money!”).
And if you’re a resident of this particular city, you’ll also be negotiating robust potholes outlined in red or yellow paint to alert the driver to the possibility of a catastrophe, but also mark the exact place and shape of the road at the moment of its death. These are not so much potholes as more evidence that the Sudbury basin was created by meteor impact.
Added to mix these days is the not-so-small matter of inflation (and the BOC’s response to it). It is no small financial matter to replace a rim and tire anymore. It is no small financial matter to fill up at the pumps, either. And it is certainly no small financial matter to have to pay a $300+ fine for running a red light after being caught by the new surveillance cameras that have popped up around our city.
There are also now neighborhoods whose speed limit has dropped from an already sedate 40 km/h to a somnambulant 30 km/h, which is 13 km/h slower than Usain Bolt’s top running speed. It is not a great feeling as a motorist to be passed by somebody running, but it is made far worse to find out later that you’ve also been fined for it.
Most of us have come to realize that there is no promised land that an automobile, no matter how opulent, can magically transport us to. From the initial price of the car (the worst investment you’ll ever make), to the unstable price of fuel, to our terrible roads probably always being terrible, we know that our driving experience will not bring much personal satisfaction and will instead be a grim affair fraught with hazards and expletives.
And into this volatile mixture that makes up our public road experience our city officials have added More Ways to Frequently and Steeply Fine Motorists, right at a time when many of those citizens are having difficulty finding two nickels to rub together.
We all want reckless driving curbed, but to do so in this penal manner and at this pinched pecuniary time is to proceed like a heavily blinkered workhorse, a plodding and oblivious creature who would likely still incur a speeding ticket in a 30 km/h zone.
D’Arcy Closs lives in Greater Sudbury.
