Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Home for the Holidays?

So the Sober Pundit and I were talking today about how the christ we're going to get home for Thanksgiving. We were lamenting the lack of reasonably priced transit options for car-free individuals. It sucks for me, because I basically have to rely on friends with cars to get back to Cleveland unless I wanna shell out $300 bucks for a plane ticket or spend nearly as much on the goddamn Amtrak only to arrive six hours late and drunk off booze bought by some crazy AWOL Army man (true story). SP's got it a bit easier, being from Philly, but her options aren't much better. Not wanting to deal with the trials an tribulations of the Chinatown bus, she's decided to take the Greyhound. Here's to hoping her fear of being stabbed, decapitated and eaten doesn't come to fruition.

I really do enjoy living without a car here in DC, but there are certain times like these when it would be really nice to have one and not have to get raped paying for inefficient, shitty transit options. A rational person would tell me to suck it up and acknowledge that this is the price I pay for embracing and relying on mass transit without owning a car. But fuck that, I'm gonna bitch anyway.

The US really needs to get its shit together when it comes to transit. As much as I hate to admit it, those snobby European pricks got it right a lot sooner than we did on this front. Of course it was probably easy for them to focus on since the entire continent has produced nothing of significant cultural or economic value since before WWII (and don't try to present a rational argument to me about the Euro or any of that other pansy bullshit -- Europe basically exists to get bratty, self-entitled white kids out of their parents' hair during their college or post-college years).

So who can we look to to solve our transit woes? Well fear not, good citizens. Once The Obama comes to power and takes everyone’s cars and gives the highways back to nature, there will be a Metro straight from DC to anywhere we could possibly wanna go. Then we will still get pissed when we have to wait 19 goddamn minutes for the next Alabaster Line train to Seattle or when the trains to Mecca are packed on Obamadaan and they're only running four-cars.

Getting home for the holidays will be that much sweeter.

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