People With Cars

This post contains a portion of an story called "The Eyes of Benjamin Squires" by someone using the pseudonym of The Lavender Quill. It has been bouncing around the internet and came to my attention because it calls to mind my friend Gimpy. Note that the narrator is blind, but I think the general feeling applies to a lot of us without disabilities. Betty, in fact, recently posted in her blog that she chooses to walk certain places, even though she has a car -- yet another example of why we are Satanic Siblings from Hell. This post is dedicated to us few who have cars but behave more like People Without Cars.

“Oh, okay, cool. I never thought of that. So, um, you wanna ride? I drove over.”

“No. I’d rather walk, if that’s okay.”

I loathe cars. Well, that isn’t entirely true. There are two kinds of people: people with cars, and people without cars. People With Cars can go wherever they want whenever they want. And they can get there much faster than those of us without. People With Cars live life at an entirely different pace than those without. Those without must either walk or rely on buses or other forms of public transportation. We must walk to a bus stop which may or may not be convenient to where we live, and then wait for a bus, which takes two or three times as long to get where you want to go as a car as it winds along a circuitous route, stopping every few blocks, to eventually deposit you at another stop which may or may not be convenient to your destination. I can occasionally bum a ride from someone with a car, but I cannot rely on the charity of others all the time. I cannot return the favor, and if I asked all the time, I would soon find myself with no friends. Even when I do ask for a ride, I am still at the mercy of People With Cars to take me when it is convenient for their schedule, which is not always convenient for mine.

Furthermore, I can’t see cars. It has become obvious to me that this city, and indeed most west coast cities that have grown up in the last hundred years, are designed with the automobile foremost in mind. Roads seemingly take up as much room as the buildings they surround. And all those cars require places to park, so buildings are interspaced by vast areas of asphalt, spreading them out, and increasing the distance that I must walk.

I can hear cars well enough as they whiz by. Mostly we grudgingly coexist, cars and me, so long as they stay on the road and I stay on the sidewalk. But intersections and crosswalks are always a crapshoot for me. At intersections, the sidewalk and road become one, and I’m forced to venture into territory claimed by cars. There’s that whole thing about knowing when I can go.

I can pretty much tell when the lights change. I can hear traffic stop in one direction and start moving in the other. Usually it is safe for me to cross then, but not always. Sometimes I get fooled at intersections with left turn lights, when it sounds like the cars are going the same direction as I want to walk and then cross over, sometimes in front of me so close I can feel the heat emanating from their engines. Sometimes People With Cars forget that crosswalks are for People Without Cars, and I frequently have to navigate around a car that has stopped in the middle of the crosswalk instead of behind it.

It irks me that I have to rely on People With Cars to see me, since I can’t see them. Mostly that works, but not always. Some times, drivers are making a right turn from a stoplight. They look left to see if a car is coming, but don’t always look to see if someone is in the crosswalk. This is all assuming, of course, that they are sober enough to see in the first place. I’ve nearly been hit a number of times, and know of several other blind people who have been hit. Usually just bruises or a broken bone or two, but one lost her spleen, and spent a month in the hospital with other assorted internal injuries.

So if this all sounds like I am a little bitter and jealous of People With Cars, and fearful of the thousands of pounds of metal they regularly propel down the streets, well, then I confess that it is probably so.