Trains, Planes, Automobiles… and Yachts?

Phil Polizatto,WWH – In terms of traffic, Seattle is the 9th most congested city in the United States. Since I am an admittedly white-knuckle driver and freeway-phobic, my heart goes out to the commuters in the other eight most congested cities. We all know what gridlock looks like and feels like. It is not pretty. It is not healthy. It is a great metaphor for Congressional gridlock. But I am here today at the beginning of this Labor Day Weekend to talk about the gridlock that commuters face every workday.

It used to be very congested only during rush hours, but now it seems to be a 24/7 problem. It is so bad, that our largest private employer, Boeing, had to stagger the times their workers finished their day by releasing them at ten minute intervals in an attempt to alleviate the problem. It didn’t work.

Exacerbating the gridlock is the nature of our topography. There are so many waterways, large lakes, and Puget Sound, that even if the monies were available, it is difficult to find the room for adding lanes to existing highways, or building new ones. But there are also antiquated laws which if repealed could help. I don’t know what the laws are in other states, but in Washington State, waterways have the right of way over surface streets, including highways and freeways.

Imagine getting off work at 4:30 PM. Traffic is backed up the feeder roads which lead to major arterials or highways. You creep along at a snail’s pace, and then just when you think you are making progress, you come to a complete standstill. Why? Because some yacht, with partiers on the top deck, drinking their martinis and relaxing, decides that 4:30 is when they want to go for a cruise. So despite ten thousand people trying to get home in time for dinner, they have to wait for the drawbridge to open, let the yacht through, and slowly close, before the snake of cars and trucks can resume the tiring and blood pressure-raising commute home. Sometimes the draw bridges get stuck in the open position. Then you may be sitting there, bumper to bumper, for an hour or more. Ridiculous! Since when does a $500,000 yacht have the right to severely impinge on the flow of drivers who have already put in a hard day’s work? Since the late 1800’s, that’s when! Once again, common sense does not seem to prevail in this or many other situations.

Seattle has 139 bridges, three of which are draw bridges and one, a swing bridge. All of them intersect major commuter roads at street level. Why the City or State cannot pass a law restricting the times of day a fishing boat, a cruiser, a sailboat, or a freighter may navigate the waterways, most of which lead to the open waters of Puget Sound, baffles me. At the very least, a waterway should not have the right of way over a surface street during peak rush hours. Let the partiers on the yacht relax and party, but not at the expense of thousands of cars and trucks. Sometimes these drawbridges take so long to open and shut just for one yacht, that people turn off their ignitions, and step outside to stretch… or bitch!

I can understand the fact that railroads have the right of way over highways and surface streets. It is not feasible for a 100-car train to stop at a red light! I guess it is too much to ask that either overpasses or underpasses be built to alleviate the added congestion caused by stopping to wait for a train to pass. Though to be fair, freight trains customarily do their best to pass through town in the wee hours of the morning or late at night.

It is understandable to me that commercial and military air space has the right of way over general aviation airspace (light planes, private jets, etc.) There are legitimate safety and military defense reasons for this. It is just common sense that a 757 bound for New York should not have to worry about some yahoo in his homemade and unlicensed experimental aircraft or that Beechcraft Bonanza getting in the way and endangering the lives of the passengers who wish to arrive in New York in one piece. It is especially dangerous at lower altitudes when commercial jets are landing or taking off.

But I cannot comprehend, in this day and age when the most traffic-congested cities in the country have a hard enough time to do what they can to relieve congestion, the existence of an archaic law that allows waterways to take precedence over highways. However, I would like to share some interesting observations I have had while my car idles a few feet from the car in front of me on the road to nowhere.

I meditate. The blood returns to my knuckles. My hear rate decreases. My blood pressure returns to normal. And I allow myself the luxury of a reverie. I am transported to the opening day of boating season when hundreds of people line the ship canal that goes out through the locks to the Sound. Small and large cruisers, schooners, yachts… each one more impressive than the previous. They too are “bumper to bumper” waiting their turn to pass through the locks. It gives the onlookers plenty of time to absorb the elegance of the vessels and envy the party atmosphere aboard the boats. They seem to be coming primarily from the East side of Lake Washington, where the Microsoft, Starbucks, and Amazon.com millionaires live. I have a difficult time grasping the fact that so many people have so much money! The onlookers wave. Those enjoying their drinks on board might wave back. Or they might just ignore the hoi polloi, thankful that the narrow waterway still provides a barricade from the masses, like a moat around their own exquisite floating castles.

Among those watching from the banks is a homeless, wheelchair-bound vet, holding a cardboard sign saying “Will swim for food.” One of the more generous, perhaps slightly inebriated on-board partiers throws him a beer. All eyes are on him as he reaches for it. It misses its mark and lands a few feet away on the grass. An elderly woman strains to bend down to pick it up and hand it to him. He thanks her and then yells at the boat, “I am not a drunk. I am hungry!” But it’s the most attention he’s gotten from anyone in a while, so he clings to the hope that maybe some will throw money… or a sandwich.

A 20-foot cabin cruiser costs about $50,000, a 30-foot weekender yacht costs around $200,000. Fifty-foot cruisers are around $1,000,000, and 100-foot plus yachts range from $8-10 million. The most expensive yachts have an average price of $64.37 million. And the parade of cruisers and yachts lasts so long that most of the bystanders get bored and leave. And we are in a recession? It seems that there are many who have avoided it.

My reverie continues as I fly to the sky and look down at the freeway. I take a mental snapshot of a mile of the three northbound lanes and the three southbound lanes, all in gridlock. I wonder how much money is represented by the vehicles congesting that one mile. The average length of a car is 13.5 feet. (Anything over 16 feet is considered a commercial vehicle.) Add on 3.5 feet for a reasonable distance between cars during gridlock and you get a total of 310 cars per mile. 310 times 6 lanes = 1860 cars in one mile. The average price of a car today is $30,000. That means one mile of bumper to bumper traffic represents an expenditure of $55, 800,000! In addition, a typical driver spends 63.3 cents a mile including fuel and maintenance, or $9,489 a year.

Conclusions? The discrepancy between the very rich and those living from paycheck to paycheck is not just economic theory. It is visible, palpable, and disgustingly obvious to the naked eye. The political resistance to alternative energies and transportation is due almost exclusively to the pressure from Big Oil and corporate lobbyists. Imagine what could be built at a cost of $55 million a mile! Construction of one lane-mile of freeway averages $4.65 million. Six lanes would cost $28 million. Is it too visionary or too far a stretch to imagine what could be built for $55 million a mile? Is it beyond our national will to invest what we are already spending to get to and from work on clean rapid transit, bridges that don’t require opening and closing to let the boating world thrive without adding to our commuting miseries, constructing overpasses and underpasses to accommodate the railroads? Is there no brilliance left that could devise better ways to get people from point A to point B? Have we seen the death of American inventiveness, which once made this country great?

We will soon find out. If Congress stymies an infrastructure stimulus package to fix what is broken, to innovate new ways of transportation, to create millions of good-paying jobs for our people here at home, and to mend the national mental trauma a dysfunctional political system has wrought, then I suggest the next time you are caught in gridlock, you and everyone else turn off your ignitions, walk away from your vehicles, go to the nearest bridge, grab the nearest obstructionist Congressperson, and… heave ho!

To contact Phil or find out more: check out his website and blog For a copy of HUNGA DUNGA
Phil Polizatto – Worldwide Hippies Bureau Chief – West Coast USA, is a graduate of The School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. He was a feature writer for the overseas division of UPI, a copywriter for CBS, and an award-winning corporate film producer. Mr. Polizatto is a published poet and a regular contributor to Worldwide Hippies as well as a variety of other arts and literary journals. Hunga Dunga is his first published novel. He resides in the Pacific Northwest.