If movies are the heart of the city then roads are surely its lifeblood.
Six lane arteries clog to capacity with a million gas guzzling corpuscles jostling for position, devouring the slow and punishing the frail. Ramping off and on, endlessly flowing, keeping the profits flowing and the carousel turning.
It’s a bumpy ride. Road building on a fault line can’t be easy. A rickety roller coaster suspended on precarious ground.
Constant tremors and earth shakes deform road and pavement alike. I worry if a big one were to strike. It’s happened before and will again. https://earthquake.lacity.org/ You can almost hear the slow beating of the sleeping monsters heart through every bump and dip in the road.
These concrete carousels are the hunting grounds for all kinds of ferocious behemoths too. Bungalow sized beasts, wheels the size of family saloons, bulldozing their way through with the hunting call cacophony of military grade, off road tyres on concrete savannah. Oversized, overhyped and overdone, mimicking the ecosystem in which they blend with the camouflage of opulence and flatulence of wealth.
But a revolution has come. Those gargantuan monsters are gradually disappearing, fazed out by the more stealthy and nimble mammalian movers. Tesla’s predominate. Leaders of their genus. The gas guzzlers and the carbon crunchers slowly becoming rare as fossils. Like the Lincolns and the Cadillacs before them. A dying breed destined for the breakers yard.
All is getting quieter, cleaner and more like the future we fantasised about as kids watching Star Trek. We have the communicators, space travel, cash is gone, and the cars are sleek and silent. Ultimately It’s all moving in the right direction, a new world is dawning. I just hope we survive long enough to benefit from it.
