Car free day / Miracles / Tough question / Cars and California

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself. Salman Rushdie

Car free day

Today was the official, annual car free day. Since parts of the city center were close from private cars, the other parts were more congested than usually. Personally, I rode my bike and enjoyed the quiet, car free parts of the center. Little do they understand that such days will be the norm in the near future, except that the car free area will be much larger, the whole city.

Miracles

Quite a miracle has taken place. Or a surprise at least. Accidentally, doctors have found out that giving sleeping pills to people in persistent vegetative state wakes them up. So, someone hits his head, becomes a vegetable for years and more or less seems to sleep all the time. You give him sleeping pills, he wakes up and tells that nothing has changed! Quite strange. Read the article. By the way, after a while the effect of the pill wears off and the person becomes a vegetable again. Until you give him another pill.

Tough question

I again spent some time by reading book the Tokoi-bay park. Again, there were some drunkards, of which about 5 had already passed out. The police drove by in their van and decided to removed the passed-outs. I cycled closer to observe the happening. Later, when I was leaving the park, I stopped for a while to watch some drunkards pushing and fighting each other. A drunkard woman walks to me and asks: "Are you some park observer? You do look like one". (Ook sää joku puistotarkkailija, hä? Näytät siltä.).

Cars and California

The state of California has sued the car manufactures for contributing to the global warming. They use a "public nuisance" clause and claim that by not improving mileage of cars, the manufacturers are creating nuisance.
It is sign of broken political system, that such court cases are necessary, or even imaginable. Car manufactures certainly have done evil things in the past. For example, GM and others conspired to destroy the 1600-mile railsystem in LA in 1920s. First, they replaced trains/trams by busses of their own manufacture. Later, the bus service was allowed to degrade and cars to take over.
That was a evil deed indeed, but hardly something GM can be sued at the moment. Sueing car manufacturers for not improving mileage of their cars is plain hypocritical. No single manufacturer can raise the mileage, for doing so makes cars more expensive. Other manufacturers would simply outsell any stupid manufactures attempting to do so. In short, the other manufacturers would free-ride.
The only realistic way to increase mileage is that the state mandates the increased mileage (or, raise gasoline taxes). This would remove possibilities for free-riding.
For history of LA and trams, see Kunstler's "Home from nowhere". For free-riding and mandates, see "No one makes you shop at Wal-Mart" by Tom Slee.

Alun perin julkaistu kuukausikoosteessa "Blogs July to September 2006".