It’s good to be in Carolina

Until I was 20 yeas old and joined the USAF in 1951, I had only been out of Massachusetts twice (excluding trips to N.H. for swimming). When I left with the Air Force I never looked back, although I maintained a curiosity about my home state. After all, I had a mother and sister and other relatives living there and visited on occasion.  

So it  came as no surprise that I would be interested in the work of the Spotlight Team ((won Academy Award, for Best Picture, 2016) of The Boston Globe, reporting last November on the traffic mess in Boston. (So, it takes me awhile to catch up on my reading.) 

The Team reported, for example, that the number of cars and trucks registered in Greater Boston jumped 300,000 from 2014 to 2019. And traffic was a mess in Boston before I went in the Air Force. It isn’t the jump in the number of cars alone which is the problem.  

It is the growth in the population and number of workers driving into Greater Boston, the increase (59,000) in people driving to work alone (Americans love their cars), and the age of the subway system (two decades older than many residents) and the lack of bus lanes.

Seattle has 40 miles of bus lanes, London 180 miles, New York about 100 miles. Boston has roughly 10.

So when you drive to work in Greater Charleston and your mean travel time is 24.6 minutes on either I-26, I-526, Highway 17 or other roads don’t gripe.  

It’s good to be in Carolina.