THE NEED FOR SPEED

Once, when I was in my early 20’s, I borrowed a friend’s Camaro, drove it out to a country road and took it up to a hundred miles an hour, not for any special reason, other than to find out what it felt like to go a hundred miles an hour. It was not an experience I have ever felt the need to repeat. I don’t do roller coasters or bungee jumps, either. Speed, I have discovered, is not one of my addictions.

But speed-—particularly in its most easily accessible urban form, the speeding car—is addictive, and we ought to keep that fact in mind as we go about making social policy and trying to keep our streets safe.

Driving around the East Bay this summer, it’s hard to miss the increasing incidents of speed-related activity, mostly by our young folk. Often you’ll see them punch the pedal and take off as if somebody flipped a switch inside their heads, roaring down International or San Pablo Ave for blocks and blocks, whipping around in the parking lanes to pass the cars in front, springs bouncing, arms waving, music blasting, tires throwing rocks in their wake. Sometimes in groups of two’s and three’s, it looks like a rolling party, or a parade. I’m sure it’s infectious for certain other young folk. It can be awfully scary for many of the rest of us.

The Oakland police, bless their hearts, have in recent years tended to blame things combining speed and cars in that city on the sideshows or "sideshow-related activity," whatever that is, which tends, therefore, to overlook the driving force behind their own colleagues gearing up for the thrill and rush of high-speed chases after those high-speeders. So perhaps we ought to look for other aggravating factors.

One is our advertising policy. An oddity of American society is the special interest we often take in encouraging our friends and neighbors to purchase items for the use activities that we thereafter expressly discourage and/or forbid (I’ll wait while you read that over again, if you need to).

The folks at Toyota, normally a sedate bunch, have taken to running television commercials where they speed a Camry down empty highways, every once in a while turning backward circles. The country roads of my youth being far away in both space and time, there are at present no empty highways in the proximate vicinity for one to speed a Camry down. But that’s not the concern of the folks at Toyota, is it?

At the corner of International and 73rd Avenue, a half a block from the spot where Breeona Mobley died in a high-speed single car collision last spring, there’s a billboard of a car half-tilted to one side next to one of those cans of power drinks that so closely resemble a can of malt liquor, in appearance if not in potency. Down the street they have another one, this time featuring a boxer throwing a punch. Throw back a couple while you low-ride and fight. Now that’s a message that’s needed in our inner cities.

But while we’re giving our young folks a wink and a shove on the one hand, we’re slowly squeezing them in on the other.

To appreciate both the beauty and the genius of the East Bay’s streets as they were originally intended, you’ve got to wait until late at night, after 3, preferably, during the week, when the traffic thins and the cities are mostly asleep. You can cruise from Albany to Hayward, first down San Pablo and up the long boulevard south of Oakland as it changes from International to East 14th and then, finally, to Mission, a little old school traveling music on the cd player (my preference is War’s "City Country City"), scarcely a red light or another car to slow your way.

But that was before the population explosion and the car boom of the 50’s, and how many of us can go out cruising at 3 a.m.? Take that same route in the daytime and it’s like driving a forklift down the aisles of a factory…and endless creep broken up by a succession of long stops. Drive in the left lane and invariably, the car in front of you blocks the lane to make a left turn. Swerve over to the right and there’s a UPS truck stopped, or someone waiting for another car to leave their parking space. Or the Oakland choke, somebody just stopped in the car to chat with a friend on the sidewalk.

It’s frustrating for 50 year-olds. No wonder some of these kids want to speed up, weave through traffic, run red lights, zip around in the bicycle lanes to get a few cars ahead.

Am I excusing speeding on our city streets? No. I’m only saying that in the same way that cause precedes effect, solution follows understanding of cause. Just something to think about, on a warm East Bay night in August as the cars speed by up on International.


Originally Published August 22, 2003 in the Berkeley Daily Planet Newspaper, Berkeley, California