I once told my therapist I feel most like myself when I’m driving. And yet, there I was, living a lie as a carless New Yorker. Soon after that breakthrough moment, I broke up with my therapist, bought a car, and now I’m healed. Haha, just kidding! Unless…
I know what you’re thinking: Men will literally buy a car instead of going to therapy. But what if driving could be seen as a form of therapy, helping us reconnect with our thoughts, heighten our awareness, and reclaim our concentration?
I would certainly not be the first to recommend the healing powers of transit. Responding to criticism of the 182-foot-deep escalator ride at the new, $11.6 billion Grand Central Madison LIRR terminal, Governor Kathy Hochul recommended using it as “meditation time,” to “let your mind wander.”
One thing public and private transit users can all agree on is podcasts. Driving back from a recent trip to Montreal, I tuned in to an episode of Monocle’s The Urbanist, as a cosmopolitan thirtysomething traveling from one city to another is wont to do. They were reporting on an initiative by a group called Citymaking!Wien whereby Vienna residents can apply to turn a parking space outside their home or business into a “parklet,” or as they market it, “your own living room in the city.”
Charmed by this idea in theory, in practice I was now a car owner, listening to a podcast about how cars are bad for cities, on my way to a city in a car. It appeared I had picked up a dangerous hitchhiker named Hypocrisy. But Vienna, Bushwick is not. And although restaurant owners taking over parking spaces for outdoor dining during the pandemic had fueled urbanist fantasies, many of these temporary structures have since succumbed to the real forces that control our city: rats, refuse, and restlessness.
My car, on the other hand, is a private parklet for one, taking up 84.5 square feet of street space, its charter granted by the city in exchange for subjecting myself to the hazing ritual known as alternate-side parking. It is a placeholder for my own little green space, my own relaxation, my own control. All I have to do is hop in and drive upstate. (It’s called E-ZPass for a reason.)
My friend Kento, who chauffeurs his massage table around the city in a white Acura MDX, quipped that New York street parking was “free real estate” in the most expensive city in the world. Even with the cost of registration, insurance, and tickets, street parking does feel like a hack to get more space in the city. (Please don’t tell anyone!)
The more the war on cars heats up, the more ridiculous I find all the multimodal martyrdom. Did I become a better person taking the train or riding a bike? No, I got burnt out taking the subway every day, constantly at the whim of a mercurial mass-transit god. And now I have a car to heal my broken ego.
I don’t claim to be making the world a better place, although the virtue signaling of my used Prius suggests otherwise. What I am doing is making the world my place, slowly carving out a life in an unforgiving city. I am not winning, but, thanks to my car, I am still in the game (though not in therapy).