I have a confession: I’m twenty years old, and I don’t know how to drive.
Actually, that might be an exaggeration.
I took driver’s ed for a semester during my senior year of high school, but I was so bad that I didn’t bother trying with a driver’s test. Incidentally, that’s a little more embarrassing than not knowing how to drive at all, and so I usually stick with the first claim if people ask.
As a kid growing up in a city, I was arrogant enough to assume that I would never actually need to know how to operate a car. After all, my sister’s 24, lives in her own apartment, and doesn’t know how to drive! (Sorry to throw you under the bus, but I say this with nothing but love.) Armed with a Metrocard, the city is your oyster and you can go wherever your heart desires.
Think about it. Driving in New York City is terrifying. You have your aggressive jaywalkers who assert their dominance by making direct eye contact with the driver of an oncoming car. Then you have the equally aggressive drivers. Years of driving experience in a city gives one the confidence to break all rules of driving etiquette. Sharp swerves and cutting twenty people off in the next lane does not, apparently, elicit any significant driver’s guilt. However, it does elicit verbal hostility from everyone within a fifty-foot radius of said guilty driver. This I’ve learned from sitting in the backseat of many taxis operated by overzealous cabbies.
Traffic in any city, really, is atrocious. It just so happens that traffic in New York is extra-atrocious, unpredictable, and occurs at the most remarkably inconvenient of times. If there’s one thing this city loves, it’s putting on flashy events. Naturally, parades and street fairs will always shut down exactly every street you want to drive on. If you want to get from the East side to the West side during the Israeli Day Parade (how could you have forgotten it was coming up??), good luck. What would normally be a ten minute drive is going to be triple that when you have to drive up and down an extra sixty blocks.
Of course, there’s also the matter of $$$ when it comes to cars. Why spend $20 a day to park your mini cooper? The other alternative would be to find an ever-elusive street parking spot and risk leaving your baby out in the open to be preyed on (ie, by strangers who will throw food at your car “for fun” and pigeons who will roost on your car and claim it as their own).
However, I suppose I will one day need to face my fears. Everybody loves to gleefully warn me that if I ever live anywhere outside of New York City, I will have to know how to drive. And if I’m being completely honest, I like the idea of living in the millennial’s promise-land of California. Or taking my friends on a road trip to New Orleans, where we’ll eat oysters and visit jazz clubs where we’ll sip our whiskey (on the rocks) and feel like real adults. If I get my act together, I could turn this fantasy into reality.
But should all else fail, I do have a backup plan: the self-driving Google car that’s coming out in 2019. God bless Google.
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