Silly Cars

I ran some errands today on my bike. The agility and precision that I have on my bike makes car-watching hilarious by comparison. Cars have to run through all kinds of complex maneuvers to get out of tight spots, sometimes people even do all the maneuvers for spots that aren't that tight. Thats because the driver generally doesn't have a good understanding of how long or wide their vehicle is, so they end up cranking on their steering wheel for a couple minutes doing 20 point turns, 15 cm (6 in) forward or backward at a time. Whenever I see cars driving slowly they always remind me of stupid animals. I had to laugh when I saw a Neon or something like it that looked completely bovine as I was going through a neighborhood. It only makes the analogy better when you see the faces of drivers sitting at stop lights or rolling slowly through neighborhoods because they always look really bored and a fair bit bovine themselves. Occasionally I get the people who see me on my bike and then sit frightened at the stop signs from when they spot me until I pass since I'm not driving a car and therefore must be insane. That behavior reminds me of cows too.

That being said, I have nothing against drivers. I do my fair share of the bovine driving and parking thing as well. I think its tragic that we've all become accustomed to traveling 30 km (19 miles) to find friendly people to eat dinner with. Not that long ago, travel was a time that you spent your days outside and had plenty of time to look at and appreciate nature. At nights, you would stop and spend the evening sitting or meeting people. Now our cars cut us off from all of that. We travel in climate controlled boxes playing canned noise to counteract the noise from our vehicles. We stare at the stripes in the road as they fly by. If we're not on highways, we might even catch glimpses of the communities that we thunder past. Cars are another example of the paradox of technology, they are meant to connect us with each other and increase our quality of life, but they actually disconnect us from and often destroy our communities and the nature around them.