San Diego’s Big Lie: The Belief that Residents will Take the Bus and Walk for Transportation
It’s the story of San Diego resident’s hypocrisy and their cowering behind shame that fuels the fire of a maddening contradiction. How is it possible for the well-educated including lawyers, doctors, teachers and law enforcement to not accept the truth? Well, it’s very simple. They are ashamed to admit the truth. So, they form a society in which the falsity of their folly goes on and on like father time.
My name is Dan Smiechowski and I have been taking the bus and walking for transportation since 1967 in San Diego. Everyday I witness cars bumper to bumper for miles in my home of Clairemont. This is organized public insanity. It is not normal. Outside of a few local homeless folks, I am the only citizen lugging thirty pounds of groceries from Trader Joes in Pacific Beach up Balboa Ave to my home in Bay Ho. Is it a coincidence that only a few 71-year-old men my age maintains any reasonable health and fitness? Meanwhile, society is screaming at everyone to preserve their God given health.
Ten years ago, while on the Clairemont Community Planning Group, I implored local leaders to ditch the idiocy of Vision Zero and Circulate San Diego, two agencies with good intentions but failed results. Only when the government recognizes the truth of human nature will public policy reflect realty. Otherwise, we are doomed. San Diegans will not take the bus or walk for transportation and the reason is simple. It is beneath them. It is second class. And their misguided sick society says so. We elect leaders who take away your rights and these leaders are reelected. No one will admit the truth.
Instead of telling citizens what they want to hear, I tell them what they ought to hear, not a wise choice to be elected. Next month, the San Diego City Council will hear proposals for further restricting parking in the downtown area. There is a great public denial in this double pronged public policy. Why can’t residents take the bus and trolley downtown? Why can’t they walk? Why do some households have two cars? We must rethink our antiquated ways and in the words of the Chambers Brothers, “The time has come today.”
In conclusion, know thyself, sacrifice for the good of our city and stop pretending to elect leaders who espouse to your beliefs. They do not.
Daniel Smiechowski has been a resident of San Diego since 1967, is a former Clairemont Town Council and Clairemont Planning Group Director and dubbed the “Million Mile Man.”
