traffic

Cyclists in Trinidad and Tobago.

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Cyclists don’t make sense to me because even with lanes, with cars driving by, there’s all this carbon monoxide coming out of exhausts and carbon monoxide latches onto hemoglobin faster than oxygen.

I should start with why I’m writing this. This morning, I stopped for coffee before some groceries and noticed a lone Trinidad and Tobago police vehicle following a cyclist on the Trinidad and Tobago version of a highway.

That seemed like a waste of taxpayer money. How many cyclists would be worth it? 3? 7? I don’t know, but 1 police vehicle driving behind one cyclist seems like a waste. On the way to the store, I saw that the group was waiting, and there were about 12 cyclists, so that doesn’t seem like a waste of taxpayer money.

But there were about 16 pickups and cars escorting them. I don’t know who they were. Friends, family, that awkward one night stand from last night who isn’t sure if they’re supposed to be there – all of them driving cars. That’s a lot of gas and diesel to be burning driving around watching spandex covered butts. It seems like joining a yoga class would be a lot less trouble for the same view, but everyone’s different.

In Trinidad and Tobago, there aren’t that many dedicated cyclist lanes. A few decades ago, they made one between San Fernando and Marabella, which no one actually used for a bicycle that I have seen. On an island, it’s hard to add cyclist lanes because there’s not as much space, so that makes sense.

Factor in that without a bicycle lane, traffic forms behind the cyclists which creates more emissions, because when traffic isn’t running smoothly, the accordion effect happens. Every acceleration burns more fuel than a nice, steady speed.

I get the idea of the open road, riding a bicycle as far as a feeling of freedom and self-determination, but when you’ve got more vehicles than cyclists involved, you have to wonder whether cycling is good for the environment. Sure, if there were one car per cyclist, you’re cutting emissions in half per vehicle and yet you’re creating emissions that don’t have to be there. There’s really no environmental argument.

The health argument is one I can roll with, though as this article points out increasing your lifespan 45% by cycling rather than taking the bus can give you the carbon monoxide levels of a smoker. Don’t judge someone who lights a cigarette if you’re cycling in traffic. There’s a fun argument sure to annoy everyone.

I like the idea of cycling, riding a bicycle here and there, but in a tropical country it can be an olfactory disaster wherever you arrive. In Trinidad and Tobago, it makes little sense to me and I know people who ride bicycles and I listen to them talk about it with the same fervor that other hobbyists have. It’s their thing, I get it, and yet…

I don’t get it. If it doesn’t affect other people, it’s no big deal, do whatever you want – but if you’re creating traffic and spending taxpayer’s money, it is affecting other people. Some countries have the bicycle paths, some don’t. Some have trails, some don’t. Cycling ain’t the same everywhere.

I don’t have an answer. I don’t want to say cyclists should stop cycling, yet I also would like to see it practical.

Monday Traffic Thought.

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It’s that time of the week again as I watch people begin their rolled marches to work in their vehicles, the beginnings of Monday morning traffic on the nearby highway. It’s a highway in Trinidad and Tobago, but in larger countries it might be simply a road, just as what we call a river here would be called a drain in Guyana.

The traffic, though, is real, as people grind their way toward dropping their children to school, getting to work and maybe even being productive there after the standard amount of time talking about how bad the traffic was this morning.

Somewhere in government, some idiot is probably trying to find a new way to decrease traffic while filling their pockets. The usual suspects will get contracts and kick money back, and there will be more roadways to have traffic on such that more people can talk about it in the morning.

Over the weekend I encountered an unnamed local politician’s question on why the local temperatures were so high, as if he had just awoken from a slumber. The question bothered me for a few reasons.

First, it was a question central to Trinidad and Tobago, as if the rest of the world didn’t exist – and I expect in his mind other places only exist to hold money outside of the purview of the local government. He may have even visited these places and treated them like Narnia, coming home to tell everyone of the wondrous and terrible things he saw. Maybe he could write a book. The fact that temperatures have been breaking records world-wide seemed to be something he was completely oblivious to.

Second, and probably even more importantly, as someone with all these connections to have his position, the fact that he didn’t know why temperatures were so high should bother people, but it doesn’t. People were helpfully commenting on his facebook post, trying to remedy his lack of knowledge.

These are the sort of people that are ‘leading’ society in Trinidad and Tobago, it seems, and perhaps why the solutions they present suffer their own lack of understanding of the problems.

Or maybe they’re just popular idiots. There seems to be a trend globally for electing popular idiots.

Traffic.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 5 Comments

Streaming twice a day on the nearby highway, I see the cars pile up into patterns, each one encapsulating it’s occupants in their own common individuality.

The SUV, the taxis, the sports cars, the lowered cars, the raised pickups, the work trucks… each one we associate with a person in our minds. A stereotype, a bias. Despite stereotypes, we know they’re all individuals that have common traits.

The sports car guy, the lowered car guy and the raised pickup guy probably spend a good bit of time in automotive parts places. We can picture them there, dressed up as mockups of our stereotypes. That’s how Netflix picks your movies and other algorithms make recommendations for products, content, and more – by associating you with a computerized stereotype that is based on actual real time data.

They’re all heading in the same direction twice a day, at about the same time. Very individual. And each suffers individually in the congested roadways, knowing that tomorrow they will do it again. Part of it is stupidity of some employers, part of it is the stupidity of people, part of it is the stupidity of… well, there’s a lot of stupidity causing congestion. It’s like a virus that we can get over, but are permanently scarred by.

Each one of these individuals is doing it for some mix of reasons, from taking over the world to making sure that their children have food. Each of them has hopes and dreams. Each of them has aspirations, each of them has their lifetime’s worth of experience.

Each of them is a physical record of their ancestors, dating back to their, marked by life events – living memory. In minds alone, each human brain is 100 terabytes, with a range of 1 Terabyte to 2.5 Petabytes according to present estimates. Factor in all the physical memory of our history and how we lived, we’re well past that. That traffic is really a huge bit of network congestion – increasingly so with computer controlled traffic lights.

That’s a lot of people. That’s a lot of data.

All stuck in the same spot because… the individuals are on leashes that pull them at the same time.