Suburbs, The Ultimate Sign of Choochiness

I’ve spent parts of the last three consecutive weekends in and around the suburbs of Chicago. Even after growing up there, I have absolutely no idea how six million people do it.

Imagine you live in a rural area. You have plenty of land around you, and a great community. It takes a long time to get anywhere you might need to go, but that’s the price of a certain privacy that your family enjoys.

Now let’s turn the tide. Imagine you live in a heavily urbanized area. You still have a great community, and you can share a large local public park. You don’t enjoy all that much privacy from those around you, but anything you might need is within a ten minute walk.

Now, let’s imagine a place that has ALL of the following…
*No community
*Long travel, nothing within walking distance, somehow combined with
*No privacy

And, as a bonus, we’ll throw in…
*An artificial energy demand
*Few options for public transportation
*Zero county- or state-wide urban planning commission

What do you get? The suburbs!

In suburbia, it takes 30 minutes to get anywhere, and you drive through a lot of nothing to get there – much like a rural area – except that after you arrive you realize you only drove six miles.

Transportation in an area of extreme suburbia is kind of like a junior high science fair at a wealthy private academy. It’s a really really big deal to the participants, no one works together, no one would dare ask for help, they all demand that the faculty and staff bend over backwards to make their pursuit easier, and in the end we have nothing that will do much to help the scientific community.