Of cellular phones and the joy of driving.

I've gotten quite adept at yelling, "Get off the phone!" to drivers who appear undeterred by the fact that it's illegal in New Jersey to drive while using a cellular phone. The law that passed in February has been a miserable failure. Drivers know that there aren't enough police to police the law, so they have continued their behavior, and as it is with most laws, the people who are most affected are the ones who respected the idea to begin with. Such is life.

I screamed it at a neighbor who was yakking while waiting at the intersection as I was coming back from a bike commute. She was a hundred feet from home, yet found it necessary to call someone while she was driving. She said something back, but due to the Doppler effect, her whiny tone was lost to science, and thankfully I have no idea what lame excuse she yelled out the window.

Since gasoline is reaching 4 dollars a gallon in the area, there was an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer today telling us that people are buying Vespa scooters at a record rate. They cost about $4,000 and get 72 miles per gallon. The chief reason, we are led to believe, is that it costs about $7 to fill the tank. Several drivers interviewed for the story said it, and it leads me to believe that people (once again) are doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.

It doesn't matter what it costs to "fill the tank" if the tank is less than 2 gallons. What matters is that it's a conservation measure, which is in there somewhere in the convoluted logic that drivers use. Waste isn't a relative measure. If something is wasteful at 4 dollars it was wasteful at two. Driving a giant vehicle with one person inside is wasteful no matter what it costs to fuel it.

The auto makers sold the public on the idea that giant vehicles were somehow "safer" than the rest. The fact is that they are safer compared to the smaller cars, but how safe are they if they are involved in an accident with another giant vehicle? Probably not so much. In America, being bigger is perceived as being better but it ain't necessarily so.

Now, we have reached the tipping point and drivers are starting to understand that their self-indulgent world is crashing down around them. Like the 300-pound man who suddenly realizes that he "has to do something about my weight", drivers are realizing that it's ridiculous to drive a vehicle that can move 8 people when they are almost always moving one.

What made them realize it is the pocketbook hit that their lifestyle has taken as a result of spending $100 to fill their gas tank, which generally only gets them 200 miles or so.

The newly-acquired Vespa riders are the people who didn't need the giant vehicles to begin with, and were sold on the safety factor and the idea that the big tires and 4-wheel drive was a good idea, even though they used it about three days a year. They were duped, but were at least intelligent enough to realize the problem and have taken steps to correct it.

The real issue comes with the people who are still clogging the road and driving like maniacs. Here's a little experiment you can try: Set your cruise control at a few miles over the posted speed limit and see how many cars you pass. The answer: Almost none. I do it every day and I end up being tailgated and passed like a NASCAR driver a lap down almost all the time. It tells me that the general public (i.e. The Masses of Asses) have yet to discover the joy of driving and are still in a mad dash to get where they are going ahead of the rest of the world so that they can be the first to complain about the high cost of gasoline and how much it costs to get to where they are going.

I need to move.