I’ve never been an auto enthusiast. When I was in high school, I knew these two guys who could converse for hours about what the rest of us eventually labeled ‘car porn’ – in depth discussions about rebuilding engine blocks, the merits of this classic car vs. that classic car, synthetic versus natural oil, and on and on and on. I don’t identify with any of that – cars just don’t turn me on. I don’t see a huge difference between the Mercedes that my former boss used to drive and my Mazda Protege, except that he sprung for the leather seats (which probably didn’t make much of a difference to him since he could afford a Mercedes).
On occasion, I do have fun driving my little car places, though. My current car is a step up from my old Geo Prizm, which I bought new when I was working my first job and had no extra features (for a long time I was the only person I knew with manual window cranks). It did get 40 miles to the gallon (something I desperately miss), but I did eventually come to admit that Ray’s jokes about it being powered by rubber bands weren’t too far off the mark. It went from zero to 60 in about ten minutes — it was, however, a nice step up from the car I drove before that: a used Ford Escort with no air conditioning and a blood red interior more suited for a bordello.
Yesterday, Natalie and I had to go to Houston for a morning meeting and an afternoon presentation, and I drove since I have a toll tag in my car. Cash tolls are really hard to get reimbursed for unless you can get the toll-taker to give you a receipt, which they’re not always willing to do — and who the heck wants to wait in that line anyway?
The thing I love about driving in Houston is the High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lane on US 290, which is the main artery from the northwest (and also the road that goes to Austin). We don’t have HOV lanes in Austin. They talk about putting them in on I-35 every so often, and then the environmentalists complain that they won’t do enough to reduce traffic, and everyone gets into an argument and then they decide to do nothing about traffic congestion and the problem just gets worse.
In general, I do support environmentalism and being green and recycling and if I hadn’t been forced to replace my car at the wrong time after an accident I would probably be driving a hybrid. However, the Austin environmentalists have this tendency to deal with being in one of the nation’s fastest growing cities by adopting a “wait and see” attitude toward development projects, which means that by the time any action is taken the problem is exponentially worse than it was when it first came up for discussion (see: the new airport, the new toll roads, and the still-not-approved plan to reconstruct I-35, which is jammed up pretty much during all daylight and most nighttime hours).
Where was I? Oh, yes. The US 290 HOV lane. I discovered my inner teenage boy yesterday as I relished in the sheer, unadulterated, completely adolescent pleasure of speeding along at 70 miles an hour while traffic sat at a dead stop in the main lanes of the freeway on the other side of the concrete barrier. The HOV lane rises and falls at various overpasses, and at a couple of points I barely restrained myself from yelling out, “Wheeeee!” as we rose and fell and bounced down the road like we were in our own private roller coaster car.
It helped that we’d left a rainy, cold Austin and arrived in sunny (OK, partly cloudy) Houston where the temperature was hovering around 80. It just sort of made everything perfect.
On the way back from our afternoon session in the southern suburbs, I experienced something I’ve heard about but never seen for myself: the unique Houston rush hour, where traffic is jammed in bumper-to-bumper and everyone is going 75 miles an hour. It’s one of the most exhilarating and terrifying things I’ve ever experienced — at one point, I remember thinking, “Dear God, don’t let anyone sneeze or we’ll all be truly fucked … ” Fortunately for me, traffic slowed down to a crawl by the time I needed to change lanes because I was starting to break into a cold sweat of trying to work out the mechanics of shifting across four lanes of tightly packed fast moving traffic.
And so, this morning, as I sat on the freeway in slow traffic in the rain, I looked longingly at the grass median strip where there may, someday, eventually be an HOV lane and I thought, “wheee … ” It made me smile just a little.
