The opinion piece begins with a protest over noise.
Honk if you hate peace and quiet.
Noise trespasses into your quality of life. It changes your health every time a lawn mower runs at 90 decibels (85 decibels damages hearing). You may enjoy a motorboat ride, but you probably shouldn’t. From 50 feet away, motorboats, at 80 eardrum-pounding decibels, are louder than a semi.
We have 20 million leaf blowers whose only mission is to move your leaves next door, where your neighbor blows them back over again. What we’re left with is audible litter and leaves that never really go anywhere. (By the way, gas leaf blowers are prohibited in Pacific Grove, so cut it out.)
Most leafblowers in PG are used by gardening services for weekender homes or people that have to work long hours to afford to live here. But anyway, ok it’s a plea to be aware that your noise is not everyone’s noise. OK.
But then the tone shifts . .
While Vancouver is quieting the cars, some cities are eliminating cars altogether, making for quieter, walkable streets. Rome has closed more than 100 streets to cars. Copenhagen and Toronto were leaders in going car-free through the “pedestrianization” of their streets. There are more than 30 pedestrian, car-free outside malls in the United States, which have become thriving tourist centers. People flock to Santa Monica’s carless downtown, and if they miss it, they pay good money to visit Disneyland’s and Universal Studios’ carless artificial downtown Main Streets. We long for it. We’ll buy an admission ticket to see it.
So let’s see which will be the first enlightened city in Monterey County to eliminate cars from a street and not just during a farmers market. Every day. How about Pacific Grove, the first to sign the Environmental Accords? Picture Lighthouse Avenue closed to traffic like a perpetual, thriving, smaller Good Old Days. If 20,000 people can come to Good Old Days and find parking even though Lighthouse is closed, a few thousand can do it every day.
What? Cars are not the biggest noise makers. But Joy’s agenda is to ban them. Why not start with the street SHE lives on? See if her silence is not everyone’s silence.
Part of American’s freedom is the right to move about unabated. Becoming mobile was a part of the great revolution in freedom. Joy wants to put a stop to it.