Bus Rider

I have lived and worked in the Houston area for the greater part of my life. Over the years I have gone through periods when I rode the bus to work and back. Ages ago the benefits of riding the bus were pretty simple; it was relaxing, reduced wear and tear on my car and I didn't have to remember where I parked (which in any major city can be a pain). Never once in all my years of riding the bus did I consider saving money to be a benefit though.

Houston has always been a city dominated by cars. In the latest data I could find only five percent of Houston drivers use some sort of shared transportation to work, and that includes carpooling. We've got the seventh worst traffic in the country. Call me a tinfoil-hatter, but I've always suspected our shitty traffic is somehow related to oil company greed. Most of the major oil companies in the USA are headquartered here in Houston and these companies certainly didn't lift a finger in the 1980s of 1990s to help Houston improve it's transportation. The city's solution to traffic has always been more lanes, and that's not a strategy that is working.

One would think that if 95% of the city is driving to work every day then there would be a shortage of parking spaces, making them expensive. This isn't the case at all. In 2002, the last time I worked inside the downtown area, I could find all day parking just two blocks from my office for about two bucks a day, not in a parking garage either, on the ground. At that time driving to and from work, with parking, cost me about four bucks a day in my Honda Civic, gas included (at about a buck a gallon). Riding the bus round trip cost me $7.20 a day with the 20% discount on bus passes I got from work, $9.00 full fare.

My sister, who lived in LA at the time, was flabbergasted that driving and parking was cheaper than taking the bus in Houston. The opposite is true in LA where parking costs the earth and the bus is next to nothing. As she said then "It's like they want everyone to drive." Well, they do in Houston; they want everyone to drive big SUVs and to buy as much gas as possible. The city reinforces the idea that you need to have a car with you at all times by steering clear of the type of public spaces where you can take care of things on foot. I know many people in Houston who would love to car pool or commute but fear the thought of not having a car.

It's five years later now and things have changed. The falling dollar coupled with the speculators in the gas market has caused the gas prices to increase by 300%. The commute with parking that used to cost four bucks now costs ten, and the parking price hasn't changed a cent. The price of the bus has also decreased, believe it or not, to seven bucks, full price, for the round trip to town and back, two dollars cheaper than it used to be.

So the bus is cheaper than driving in Houston, finally, and because of this I am riding the bus again and now I have a new list of pros and cons regarding the bus. On the positive side, the bus is just as relaxing as it always has been, I can read or watch movies on my iPhone while someone else drives, there isn't wear and tear on my car from the 70 mile commute which is good because my car is not doing well in traffic these days, and it is cheaper.

Lining up the negatives has to start with the length of time in my commute; a 60-75 minute car ride has turned into a 90-120 minute bus ride with one connection. This puts my work day out to thirteen hours, worst case scenario, and with a child that is just too much time to be away from home. Fortunately I've got support now with Melissa and a job that is flexible so Colin is well taken care of, but the bus would not have been acceptable at my last job. The commuter solution that Houston's Metro offers seems to be geared towards the 1950s family; where Dad goes into work and Mom stays at home.

At Colin’s after school care facility they have a policy that if a child needs to be picked up, say for an illness, then the parent has one hour from the time they are notified to collect their child. If I am called about Colin and have ridden the bus, then it could take me over two hours to get him. That doesn’t make the bus more attractive to a parent.

Things will have to improve. As gas prices get higher, and they will get higher, there are going to be more and more people who live in the suburbs demanding some sort of high-speed transportation into the city. For mass transit to work it needs to compete not only on cost, which Houston's Metro does only because of the high gas prices, but also on time. There has to be a way that transit cuts the amount of time that you spend in traffic.

There's going to be an interesting balancing act on the freeways of Houston soon. I suspect that as the price of gas gets higher the buses will become over crowded (just yesterday I had to watch two full buses on my route pass by my stop) and the freeways will become less crowded. A less crowded freeway means a shorter commute time; for example if I leave the house at 9:30am I can shave about thirty minutes from my commute. I suspect that the freeways will become a give and take as people decide that the longer commute on the bus, coupled with the over crowding, isn’t worth the savings on gas and will return to driving, then a month later when gas costs another five dollars more a tank, they will return the the bus.

For the suburbs to survive gas prices around six bucks a gallon then the needs to the suburbanites will have to be met. The long commute times in Houston both in the car and on a bus take valuable time away from our families. If we do not find a way to get people into the city in a more efficient manner then we are going to see an exodus from the suburbs back into the city (already a trickle in that direction). People should not have to pay a higher cost to use public transportation, in time or in money. Public transportation should be designed to improve the quality of life on many fronts. Houston’s transportation seems only to offer concessions to the people of the city.

This needs to change.

Fear with Child

Last week I touched on the topic of the paranoid parental fear that seems to be gripping the country. As a parent of a young child I am constantly being told by friends, family and even people I hardly know that the world is a very dangerous place for my child and that only through constant vigilance will I assure my child will reach adulthood without being kidnapped, molested, murdered or bludgeoned. Even the TV news gets in on the stoking of parental fear
by making any case of a missing child or worse the lead story of the night's broadcast (they even have a quaint name for this).

To all this I say poppycock, which is a old fashioned way of calling bullshit on the culture of parental fear. I've read books on the subject of the exploitation of fear (The Culture of Fear by Barry Glassner) and one of the things that I have learned is that reality is not as dangerous a place as we are lead to believe. The crimes that most parents spend countless hours worrying about are at historic lows and statistically, our children are safer now than they have ever been in the history of our country.

Kidnappings are at a historic low. Sexual abuse of children by adults have been declining also. It is a fact that children today are less likely to be molested, kidnapped or killed than their parents were thirty years ago, and the odds of these things happening have continued to decrease generation after generation. And yet we, as a society, think that letting our kids go to the park or take the subway by themselves is akin to neglect and abuse. Again, poppycock. This is what kids need.

What we are doing is raising a generation of children unable to take charge of their own lives because they are so accustomed to having their safety managed by an adult. If a child doesn't have the chance to get into scrapes and little bits of trouble when they are young then they will have no capability to deal with scrapes and trouble when they are older. This is what childhood is for; it is a relatively consequence free period of life where you learn the cost of mistakes and how to deal with them productively. A child who doesn't get into little scrapes as a child will get into bigger scrapes as an adult.

Pitting the facts and logic against this culture of fear is getting harder and harder to do. As a father who has custody of my bi-racial son I read articles about how this fear gripping our society is affecting men and I worry. I worry about a father in Boston who is investigated by police for telling his daughter to 'please be quiet' while on the subway because I have told my son the same thing many many times in public. He and I don't share the same skin color and in the back of my mind I do often wonder if other people look at me and my child and let their fear run away with them. Do I set off the ‘stranger danger’ alerts in parents?

This fear of being labeled a threat to children actually makes our children less safe. I firmly agree with Hillary Clinton's premise that it takes a community to raise a child. We all have to look out for children to protect them, but what happens when one lives in a community overrun with illogical fear? Do we create men like Clive Peachy who did not stop to help little Abigail Rae because he was worried that people would think he was an abductor? Is that where we are going with this fear? Would you, put into Mr. Peachy's place, have stopped to help Abigail?

Now, there are things for parent's to fear in our communities. This Venn diagram that I came across last night is a good illustration about how we are directing our fears towards the wrong things. Statistically our children are less likely to encounter a molester at school, but far more likely to encounter a man who will actively stalk them, lie to them and once trusted by our children, send them off to a strange country where their lives will be in danger. Why do we fear the long shot and allow a greater threat to our children unlimited access?

People tell me that it is a dangerous world and that kids these days are growing up faster than before. All this attention and protection aren't helping. As Tim Gill, author of the parenting book No Fear, puts it, “our fear of [stranger danger] is magnified so dramatically, we deny our children the basic freedoms and experiences they need to grow up.” We are raising children in a protective shell who will be ill-prepared for the harshness of life.

The experiences we offer our children in childhood set their expectations in life. If a child grows to adulthood without experiencing the wrong side of a swindle, then they will grow to be an easy mark. If a child grows without criticism then they will not be able to handle it as an adult. As a parent we have to give our children the space they need to inoculate their character against the hardships of life, or they will remain a child forever.

Colin complains about the troubles in his life on occasion. He will voice his frustration by telling me “it isn't fair Daddy.” He is right, life isn't fair. Life is hard, and for long periods everyone will suffer through hardship and loss, money will be tight, expectations will not be met, and then there's high school. I try to instill in my son the tools he will need to make the best of life, hardships and all. Part of my job is to let him learn a lot of these things in little ways, now that he is a child.

I do not want my son to grow up miserable and unhappy. I want him to have the skills he will need to make the most of life and find happiness in the face of all the uncertainty and unfairness of the world. I want his expectations of life to match the realities and if that means bucking against the culture of fear then that is what I will do.

Hillary's Political Baggage > Hillary's Political Capital

Yesterday's post about Hillary's refusal to accept defeat got me thinking about the reasons that I'm not supporting her in this election. One of the most important reasons that I'm not throwing my hat in to Hillary is because she is a Clinton.

I voted for Bill twice and hell, I even invited him to my wedding many years ago. Bill Clinton was the first person I voted for in my life, having only become a citizen before the 1992 election. I thought he was a great President, mainly because of his efforts to expand opportunity to more people and his work to establish peace in many conflict regions around the world. I even listened to his entire autobiography, all fifty plus hours of it, during my commute a few years back.

For a long time Hillary Clinton was on my 'List of Five' (see the Friend's episode - and yes, the list was laminated). Along side Madonna, Sharleen Spiteri, the Spice Girls (all of them, at once), and Angalina Jolie, Hillary was one of those people who I wouldn't mind sharing a hot tub with. This was eight years ago folks, when she was on her way out of the White House as First Lady. I felt that Hillary needed a good night's company in the arms of yours truly to buck up her spirits after Bill's misdeeds. So, you can't say that I don't like the Clinton's.

Not everyone likes the Clinton's, most people in my part of Texas (Tom DeLay's old district) have this feeling that Hillary is the evil Sith lord behind Bill. They despise her to the point that that when I revealed Hillary on my list of five, they would go into apoplectic fits, red faced and incredulous. As a topic in conversation in Texas I have heard that Hillary and former Secretary of State Madeline Albright were secret lovers, that Hillary was selling secrets to the Chinese and that Hillary had Vincent Foster killed. All of which are egregious lies of course.

These same people, who when not damning Hillary for causing male pattern baldness, would often talk with earnestly about God and Jesus to me mistaking my distance from religion as a lack of experience with churches and not the opposite. How hypocritical they were then when they tut-tutted about the Monica Lewinski scandal and then damned Hillary again for sticking with Bill through the ordeal; which I considered to be a very Christian thing of her to do.

Years later Hillary's candidacy is driving these people nuts. They wonder how people can even think to vote for her. Their hatred of Hillary is so string that the GOP could nominate an Arab homosexual who wants to solve the world food crisis by letting people eat aborted fetuses over her. I speak with no hyperbole here, in my part of Texas this is how things are.

It is this hatred for the Clinton's, and absurdly for Hillary, that would prevent Hillary from doing the single most important task of the next President; holding George W. Bush and his administration accountable for all the laws that they have disregarded and their abuses of power. The rule of law has to be upheld. We can not let Bush's crimes and trampling of the Constitution go without punishment if we hope to prevent his kind of Presidency from ever happening again, and we do want that.

Hillary doesn't have the political capital necessary to go after Bush because she is a Clinton. The media will find a willing audience for the accusations that Hillary is only interested in taking a pound of flesh from the party that was responsible for the attacks on Bill and her during Bill's years in the White House. Any accusation of the GOP's corruption or the illegal actions of the Bush administration, no matter how solid the facts, from a second President Clinton won't have the traction needed to move them through the legal system. The pundits will claim her a failure for not being able to let the past go and that will be the story of her Presidency.

I believe Barak Obama has the communication skills necessary to muster even the most cynical GOP devotee behind a call for accountability for Bush's crimes. Hell, even John McCain would have more luck prosecuting George W. Bush and his administration than Hillary would, but I'm still not going to vote for him.

My misgivings about her refusal to suspend her campaign aside, were Hillary Clinton not a Clinton then she'd make a wonderful President. Were she not immediately following the criminal presidency of George W. Bush, she's make an excellent President. Now is not the right time for her.

We need someone who can hold Bush accountable and be a strong leader. Only Barak Obama has the political capital and the leadership skills necessary to heal our country.

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More on this subject from the press:

• Would Obama Hold Bush Accountable?
• Fitzgerald, Bush, and the Public Trust