[Re: “You Can’t Fool Mrs. Sykes,” September 15]
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Car usage, like tobacco usage, is an addiction that once begun is very hard to stop. I didn’t use cars regularly until I married into one when I was 37. By the time I was 40, I was a two-car user. Now, at 54, I will soon be a member of a three-car family. I live a block from one el station and work a block from another; that is to say I live in the city. While some addicts don’t recognize the damage done, both to themselves and their society, I do.
Yet while I can repair the damage car usage does to myself simply by giving up the habit, my own actions alone cannot repair the damage that car usage does to our urban environment. Just as the societal damage of treating drug usage as a legal problem is not cured by individuals giving up those drugs, but rather only by society changing to treating that drug usage as a medical problem, so can the urban societal damage of car usage be treated only at a social level.
As an aside, some people in Andersonville were three-to-one against a bunch of stupid red cylinders; three-to-one against confused walkers and drivers who didn’t know when to stop and when to go in what looked like a cross between a construction site and a UFO staging area. Needless to say, it bore no relation to traffic calming.
