to the Menlo Park City Council
Honorable Mayor and Council members, my name is Tom Sharp; I live on 440 Gilbert in Menlo Park. Please consider three more ideas in this controversy: • The American’s love affair with the automobile • The cult of convenience • The responsibility of government The American’s love affair with the automobile. Where has this love affair taken us? We want it to fulfill our longing for freedom and speed but we are thwarted by traffic jams and traffic signals; too many other cars are in our way. You can’t stop people from loving the automobile, but loving something that doesn’t love them back can diminish their reason, leave them impatient, belligerent. Without noticing it, behind the wheel, they begin to hate whatever seems to stand in their way. They can even kill over it. The most murderous invention in human hands is not the gun, not the atom bomb. Every year, more people are killed and maimed by cars and in cars than were killed and maimed in all the Vietnam war. The cult of convenience. Once our former Council member Gerry Grant angrily told me that nobody in this city was going to turn a public street into a private driveway unless they were willing to buy it from the city and I said, Gerry, don’t you have friends who live on cul-de-sacs? Are you prevented from driving your car to visit them? Gerry didn’t answer. I felt he was confused. Closing one end of a street would only prevent people from using the street as a thoroughfare, a shortcut, which is not the intended purpose of a neighborhood street. I feel that Gerry’s anger and confusion were from his devotion to the cult of convenience. We are willing to pay an incredibly high price for convenience and we neglect to account for its cost— its cost in dollars, its cost to our environment, its cost to our bodily health and peace of mind. It diminishes our lives and most people don’t notice. When one tries to reveal these costs the cult member is angry, defensive, hurt, confused, and wants to remain blind to the reasons that challenge his or her devotion. The responsibility of government. Do citizens have a right to drive their cars wherever and however they please? The answer is No. Does a government have a right to restrict the freedom of its citizens? The answer is Yes, Yes when Yes means protecting us from our dangerous love affair, Yes when Yes means promoting values higher than convenience. The city not only has a right to do so; it has a responsibility to do so. Nobody’s convenience is worth risking the life of a neighbor’s child, whether by your own actions or by the actions of others whose recklessness you allow. Please consider not only who and how many approve or oppose these measures but also why we approve or oppose. I urge you to support these traffic measures, and I feel that those who have opposed them should hang their heads and consider why they do so. If this plan won’t increase our safety, we can find out by installing it. Please let us love our neighbors more and drive less, and drive with more circumspection and consideration, more slowly, making more frequent stops. Let us agree to these measures to passively resist whoever’s crazed love or blind convenience is more important to them than other living things.
26 October 1993