Zoom-Zoom

I haven’t had a car in about twenty years. I’ve driven, sure, but nowhere nearly as much as since moving to Buffalo. There is a public transit system here—bus routes, and a light-rail downtown—but this is a car culture. My brother finally bought the van he’d been shopping for all summer (with three kids under six, he needed it) and gave me his wife’s old Nissan sedan with 110K on the odometer. It’s a sturdy car, a good car, and a dependable car. He had the leak in the back left tire fixed, so we don’t have to check the darn tire pressure every other day. So now I drive that car everywhere. And it’s pleasant to be able to get up and go whenever I want to, but there are drawbacks.

For one thing, and I’ll get this one out of the way first, there’s the price of fuel. I almost lapsed into I-remember-when, but I’m sure there are people driving who really remember when. Thank God the cost-of-living here is otherwise reasonable, and that for me it’s really at moment a non-issue. There is also the drive-in thing. It’s not just that the food is there, and that it’s convenient. It’s that you end up eating in your car. And what you end up eating is so unhealthy. And you’re not getting out of your car and walking around as much.

But for me the most exasperating thing about the car culture here are the street systems and the freeway system. Driving on the Buffalo streets and highways can make you crazy. Growing up in California, with one of the greatest and best-designed freeway systems in the world, I guess I’m spoiled. San Jose itself didn’t have much to recommend it when I was growing up other than its proximity to other places, but its freeways and streets were excellent. There were ample access lanes; surface streets were wide. Buffalo’s interchanges, on the other hand, tend to be too small for the traffic whose flow they try to manage. Freeway-entrance and exit lanes are so short as to be non-existent. You often have to use the same lane to exit that other drivers are using to get on. Surface street lanes are narrower than the soccer-mom SUVs and ballet-dad vans that crowd them. I learned this when riding my bike; more than once I was honked at or yelled at for following the rule that says you should bike on the right shoulder, with traffic. There is also the matter of the mix of kinds of drivers. Buffalo has young drivers, old drivers, and busy suburban professional drivers. It’s a bad mix. I’ve already become adept at profiling drivers by the way they're driving. But then, maybe I’m being profiled too. I’m an older driver than I was twenty, even ten years ago, but I'm still someone who drinks coffee while he drives. My Bluetooth does allow me to talk on the phone and drive at the same time. At night, however, my eyes don’t seem to work as well as they used to.

There’s also the matter of the wildlife. I've never seen so much roadkill. Skunks. Raccoons. Squirrels. Rabbits. The occasional deer. And that's just on my own street! As I drove here in May in my rental car, a large deer bounded out from the side of the Thruway and I had to brake harder than expected. And just the other morning on my way to Orchard Park, I was talking on the phone and drinking coffee (the Nissan is an automatic, natch) and a woodchuck came waddling across the road. It wasn’t in any hurry. I’ll bet it had an opinion about drivers in Buffalo.