Baby, you should drive your car

[question everything]

StarTribune.com

Baby, you should drive your car

Erik Lundegaard

Published: June 17, 2007

It was a cool Friday evening in June and I was planning on riding my bike to Jim Walsh's final hootenanny of the season some 30 blocks away -- it was a perfect evening for a bike ride -- but a friend was tagging along, she was bikeless and we were going to dinner afterward. Cars were invented for this kind of thing. As I got into my car to pick her up, I noticed a green piece of paper stuck under the windshield wiper. It was a notice from the Minneapolis Police Department -- Traffic Control Unit. There'd been a complaint and my car had been chalked as abandoned. After 72 hours it would be tagged and impounded. The notice had been filled out 48 hours earlier.

My car is a '96 Honda Accord, in good shape, no visible rust, clean. Every time my father rides in it he always asks if it I bought it new two years ago. "Seems new," he always says. The last time I'd used it was the previous Sunday, when I'd driven my brother, my father and my stepmother down to Arlington for my nephew's high school graduation. After the ceremony there was a gathering at the family farm, accessible only by dirt road, and when I parked my car that evening it had a light coating of dust on it. The street was crowded, too, so I parked a few houses farther south than normal. Maybe the homeowners there had never seen my car before. Maybe they were freaked by the light coating of dust. Maybe it looked scary to them. Who knows? The complaint was made, the vehicle was chalked, but, thanks to my bikeless friend, it escaped towing.

It's sad, of course, that I don't know my neighbors well enough so they know my car well enough so they won't call the cops if it's sitting in front of their house for 72 hours with a light coating of dust on it. But it's the notice that gets me: "City Ordinance 478.250 prohibits any vehicle to remain upon any city street in excess of (seventy-two) 72 consecutive hours." Here's what that implies: How could someone not drive their car for 72 hours? That's like three whole days. What kind of freak would own a car and not drive it for three whole days? Someone call the cops, quick.

In retrospect I'm lucky this is the first time my car has been tagged as abandoned. I live in south Minneapolis and work in downtown Minneapolis. If there's snow on the ground I walk to work (45 minutes); otherwise I bike (15 minutes). It's easy. I lived in Seattle for 15 years and biked to work there and Seattle has hills and constant drizzle. Minneapolis just has wind and an occasional fierce thunderstorm. Almost every week, in other words, I'm breaking City Ordinance 478.250, because almost every week, Monday to Friday, my car just sits there, not using gas. How dare it? How dare I? Don't I know there's all this extra gas to be used? How selfish can I be?

(snip)

In Copenhagen, 33 percent of commuters bike to work. In Amsterdam it's 40 percent. Embarrassed by their low numbers, these cities are trying to encourage more bike commuting by building parking facilities that can hold up to 10,000 bikes and increasing prison time for bike thieves. That's the direction they're going in. The direction we're going in? Drive your car once every 72 hours or we'll take it away. Oh, and one day a year we'll have a "day" in which we "encourage" people to "bike."

(snip)

Erik Lundegaard is an editor at Minnesota Law & Politics.

http://www.startribune.com/562/story/1249166.html