It’s no mystery why America’s transportation arteries are clogged. . . . The problem is: All that suburbanization has extended the distances between where people live and where they want to go. . . . For many, the obvious response is to add supply. The thinking goes that if we could just build a few more roads or add a couple more highway lanes, then there’d be plenty of space to accommodate all the drivers. —Bloomberg
⬩ Every year, thousands of pedestrians (drivers on the way to their cars) are injured or killed at crosswalks. We must remove all crosswalks before anyone else gets hurt.
⬩ Take out the two bad traffic lights under the green one.
⬩ On the Plaza de Las Americas in Washington Heights there is a public restroom. Why? That could be a parking spot.
⬩ Why do bicycles (slow cars with no windows) have entire lanes dedicated to them? What’s next? Lanes for skipping rope? Hopscotch lanes? Lanes dedicated to pugs with GoPros riding skateboards? Sounds a little silly to me.
⬩ No more watching drivers while they parallel park!
⬩ It’s too sunny on the road. Plant more trees by the street to increase shade coverage for cars.
⬩ Climate change (like when your A.C. is broken, but outside your car) can hurt cars just as much as people. We need to work together to find a solution––and soon.
⬩ Repeal the barbaric “congestion tax.” If they want to tax a surplus of cars, they may as well put a tax on too much tenderness, the laughter of children, or the indomitability of the human spirit.
⬩ Central Park? I couldn’t find anywhere to park in that place! Pave it.
⬩ Rain (like millions of tiny wet cars driving out of the clouds) can cause car accidents. Build rainy-day lanes in the tunnels currently monopolized by the subways (long cars with no music).
⬩ Turn museums into parking lots. Take the paintings and use them to label sections of the lots so it’s easier to remember where you left your car.
⬩ We need more lanes. Cut down all those useless trees.
⬩ When we were young, Mother would pick us up and put us in the back seat of the Highlander, where we felt safe and warm as she scraped ice off the windshield. Why doesn’t it feel like that anymore? We need bigger cars that make us feel small again. We need more armored cars to make us feel safe again. We need to stay in our cars until we feel that feeling again. We have to feel that feeling again.
⬩ We still need more space. Pave over the graveyards (parking lots for bones) with expressways.
⬩ Birds sully cars with their droppings. By covering all tree branches and rooftops with bird spikes, we could cut the bird population in half, probably.
⬩ Level the beaches. Pave them.
⬩ Salt the New York Botanical Garden. Pave.
⬩ Spare the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It’s right by my house (big car with bed) and I like walking (driving with legs) there.
⬩ Drain the rivers. All of them. Pave.
⬩ Find the smallest, most fragrant wildflowers still growing out of the cracks in the city’s sidewalks and pour asphalt all over them.
⬩ Everyone deserves open, green space for rest and relaxation––inside their cars. We need to make cars so big that you can lose yourself in a field of juniper and cypress inside them, where you can stop to hear the call of a chickadee or watch the pecking of a robin, all while commuting to the office at seventy-five miles per hour.
⬩ Louder horns.