Today, on my drive to work (or maybe my drive home), I will have finished the last of the Scott Turow Kindle County books and will have no more to read. It’s my habit to go back and forth between genres, but I’ve been listening to nothing but Turow for over a month now.

I’m taking a CD for John Grisham (The Client) and another Douglas Adams (Holistic Detective Agency) to carry on where Turow leaves off.

Any Turow fans out there have any recommendations?

Audiobooks are a godsend when it comes to long commutes. If you’re driving less than half an hour to work, music is better. Anywhere from 30-60 minutes it depends. If your drive is an hour or more, though, audiobooks can keep you sane. In fact, they can give you something to look forward to on your commute. No surprise, but I’ve been listening to a lot of audiobooks over the past few years.

There is more to an audiobook than some guy reading the book to you. In the good ones, the actor or actress can come up with good voices for the characters that are distinct enough that you can tell them apart even without every line ending in “he said” and “she said”. It’s also helpful to have a good voice to match the overall tone and mood of the book and/or its narrator. It’s interesting the different way that different producers have approached this:

Most Audiobooks: Have a man or woman doing the reading depending on who the narrator is or main character is. Typically, their voice works best for the main character, but the actors are versatile enough that it’s not a distraction when they’re reading other parts, regardless of gender and ethnicity. Special props go out to the narrator of Richard North Patterson’s “Protect and Defend” for being able to produce different, geographically appropriate southern accents. The main reader for most of Scott Turow’s books also has a special gift for differing voices with different ethnicities without sounding condescending or cartoonish. The one Turow book (so far) read by someone else had the absolute perfect actor for the part of the narrator. In the Discworld series, the narrator sounds like you would imagine Terry Pratchett himself sounding. That works, too.

Harry Potter Series: Read by Jim Dale or Stephen Fry, depending on which version you’re listening to. Since HP is ostensibly a series of children’s book, having a grandfatherly voice reading it works pretty well. It’s easy to overlook the man’s voice dedicated to the female characters because it’s all part of bedtime storytime as you listen.

Ender’s Game Series: This was a particularly novel approach. Each book has numerous voices reading the book. Different sections are read by different people. The ones that focus on female characters are read by women and the same for men. Though Orson Scott Card writes in the third person, it tends to be the limited third person so each one is told from the point of view of the character and the language is altered accordingly. But the female reader for the Valentine-centric scenes also reads the parts for Ender or Peter or whoever. So it’s this odd sort of thing where each character’s lines are read by half-a-dozen readers. Sometimes during dialogue is split between the actors. It’s all really skillfully done. It’s one of those things that I couldn’t imagine it working if it were described to me, but it may well be my favorite format.

Graphic Audio: Graphic Audio bills itself as a “movie in your mind” so it’s only one-part audiobook while being another part radio show. Unlike most audiobooks, there are sound effects and music. There are a lot of actors and each of the main characters seems to get their own and the narrator is a voice unto himself. But unlike a radio show, there is description of action. The narration and music makes for a really neat combination and makes what would seem difficult (putting a comic book to audio) very compelling.

Old-Time and BBC Radio: When I was a kid I was a big fan of old radio shows that would come on a local news radio channel from 8-10 on Sunday nights. For my birthday I would get Shadow cassettes. I enjoyed them greatly, but without narration it’s a tough format. Particularly for anything that has action, wherein you’re left with characters saying things like “Look, he’s going at Jerry with a knife! Keep evading him, Jerry! Go! Go! Go!” Interestingly enough, this could be the type of broadcast that I would be most suitable to write since I’ve always been very dialogue-driven, but it’s really a small sandbox with which to work.

It involves comprehensive auto insurance, a town about 400 miles from here, and my green 1998 Ford Escort.

When I was driving to work this morning, I was at a temporary stop thanks to traffic. I decided to take the opportunity to clean my glasses. As I did so, they fell apart in my hands. Both lenses.

It’s easy to forget how blind you are until you don’t have corrective lenses to fix your eyes right up. To make matters worse, there was this white stuff falling from the sky and my windshield wipers weren’t doing a very good job of shoving it out of the way, preferring instead to spread it around more evenly.

When I got to the parking garage, at about two miles-an-hour I rammed into a concrete wall.

At my workbench in the Secret Vault were some contacts I’d accidentally left there over the weekend. What’s funny is that I was wearing some pretty old glasses (hence their falling apart) I keep around as back-up at work. Then at work are my contacts, in which I don’t see as well anymore as I do with my glasses. When wearing either of those two things, I complain to myself that my vision is limited.

My definition of “limited vision” has officially be re-calibrated. Limited vision is running into concrete walls. Being unable to read things from across the room is something else entirely. Something a lot less dangerous.

Ever have a case where you’re watching a movie or reading a book or something and you’re finished with the piece before it’s finished with itself? I don’t mean that you don’t like it and don’t want to finish it, but rather you are satisfied with the story at a point prior to its conclusion? And as the pages or minutes roll on you get a sort of disjointed feeling like you’re not supposed to be in the character’s lives anymore?

It’s the sort of feeling you can get when you go to a sporting event that goes into overtime or extra-innings. On one hand, for you to still be there at the end of the game it must be of something interest to you. Who can argue with more of what you’re enjoying? Besides, any game that goes past the buzzer is by definition a competitive game. I suppose it could be a boring defensive game, but good fans appreciate those, too. But whenever I’m at a game that goes into overtime, I never think “Sweet! More game, no extra cost!” Instead, I start going through my mind for the things that I should be doing and getting anxious. A sort of feeling like it’s wrong to leave a game before it’s open. If you don’t care how it ends, why go?

I’ve been listening to a good, albeit long, audiobook on my commute. The story concluded about an hour ago, listeningtime. But it just kept going on. I have no complaints with where the story is going. It hasn’t stopped being interesting. But my interest in it has become distracted by the idea that in my mind it should be over and the idea that I should be listening to the next thing on my queue. and I can’t shake it. The last time I felt this sort of tension was the movie The Departed, but in that case not only did the story go on longer than it needed to, but I didn’t like the developments. In this case, it’s character-focused stuff which is usually my favorite part. And would be my favorite part… save for the fact that there are no super-speedsters in red costumes running around in the story like there would be in the audiobook I’d be listening to if the story would just end already.

Finally, I went forward just to see how much time was remaining and discovered that the story that should have ended an hour ago had over two hours left on it. So I decided that if I was going to spend the whole time in an agitated state that I would just go ahead and take the CD out, put in The Flash, and listen to the rest of the audiobook over my next couple lunches at work or something. That way I can enjoy it without the sense that I am supposed to be listening to something else.

Will posits the issue of public transportation, and (more to the point) the discrepancy between his few stellar experiences with it, and the more-overwhelming negative set of experiences with it.

As a design case, public transportation is interesting. The problems of it are nothing new; decades ago, Monty Python famously made a pretty hilarious mockery of the convoluted nature of British commuter rail schedules. And it’s certainly the case that the tighter-packed a city is, the easier it will be for a city to make affordable/profitable trains and public transportation that get people where they need to go relatively quickly – certain Japanese cities coming to mind, or certain venues in New York. If you have a smaller city wherein there’s one main business (say, an agricultural or manufacturing plant), a “main street” where 90% of the businesses are located, and a residential district off to the side, then there’s a certain amount of sense in a bus or tram line running one end of the city to the other.

Then you have cities like Colosse. Colosse itself resembles nothing organized at all – it’s more like a giant amoeba sprawling over the landscape. “Population density” is pretty low, and growth in the city/metroplex has come in the form of newer and newer subdivisions being built outward, each further out of the city limits. Nearby to most of these subdivisions is an industrial park/business park/stripmall or three, because historically the “new subdivisions” pop up on unincorporated land, make a township of themselves for 5-10 years, and then only get annexed when their tax base is large enough that Colosse’s city council decides to gobble them up.

End result? Colosse has 3-4 major “downtown” areas as such, a number of sub-downtown areas, a smattering of businesses all over the place elsewhere, and then each little township (whether currently annexed, self-incorporated, or otherwise set up) its own little mini-downtown. It’s not all that unusual for people to work in Thessalonica or Mayne and commute all the way to Corinth or Cruston – it may not be the original plan, but personal employment changes (job loss/switch) or businesses relocations (usually there’s better rent in one of the mini-downtowns) can be fairly regular occurrences.

Being an original resident of Melleorki, I’ve seen two instances that have bearing. Both come out of the same deal: ~10 years ago, a group of “Mayors of large cities” were invited to another large city in the South to view that city’s “major works”, and one in particular, the city’s light rail system. The mayors of Melleorki and Colosse at the time both promptly got penis envy about this, because neither of their cities had Light Rail and “logically” if it worked so well for that city, well then it would have to work well for their city too!

In Melleorki, the city council went through the motions of figuring out where Light Rail would have to run, what sort of infrastructure would be needed, how much it would cost… and nixed it every time the mayor came back.

In Colosse, alas, “Light Rail” was going to happen whether we liked it or not – the Mayor had a number of his political cronies on the city council, enough to ramrod it through, and so Colosse took it right up Main Street. The net effect? Main Street, and the street it adjoins with later on, are now virtually impassible. Their traffic capacity was cut in half (to make room for ground-level rail), turning/crossing them is difficult at best, businesses along the streets struggle (hey, wouldn’t you if you ran a restaurant/store and nobody could get to you?) and nobody likes the rail line. Worse yet, the rail line runs for less than 8 miles, just barely enough to connect two of the “Downtown” areas to each other… and doing nothing to make parking any easier for anybody. In short, our Mayoral Penis Envy got us a Light Rail “system” that was too small, barely functional, and no fun.

It doesn’t stop there, though. Colosse Public Transportation (CPT) has recently been cutting rail times and bus lines all over the place, with the argument that the ones being cut are “not financially viable.” In my view, this is the biggest downside of CPT: the fact that it is run not as a public service, but as a business.

When public transportation is a public service – even if it operates “at a loss” and requires subsidizing – it can work. Run it as a “business” and cut “unprofitable” lines, and you quickly doom it. The logic isn’t hard to follow: public transportation will work best (and be used most) when it achieves something sorta-kinda near to the flexibility of normal commuting. The more limited it is, the less people are going to use it.

Take my normal day: I get up. I go to work. I may (or may not) have plans to be somewhere after work. These plans may (or may not) take me to various areas across Colosse. During my day, these plans may change. I may get a phone call, or email, indicating that I need to be in another place instead, or that plans are canceled. If I were married or had children (more to the point, especially with children involved), the dynamic would almost certainly be similar. With a car, I’ve got the option of adapting to changes.

If public transportation were to be (a) ubiquitous and (b) easily tracked, I could probably make do without a car. Change of plans? Get on a different set of buses, 2-3 connections tops, and get where I need to be. Where this breaks down is that CPT’s routes are not predictable, reliable, or usable. Getting where I would need to be is not a matter of 2-3 connections, more probably 5-6. Getting home (or even to the Park-n-Ride) via CPT and then going elsewhere via car is much more inefficient than simply having my car with me at work… and given the day, probably leaves me an hour behind schedule. The “alternate” option offered by the New York model, that of flagging down one of the city’s 13,000+ taxicabs, isn’t available in Colosse; hiring a taxi is more a matter of calling up a company, waiting 30 minutes or more, and then being charged $40+ to get where I need to be (and the same when I go home later).

The basic problem is adaptability. If you only service the “profitable” routes, adaptability isn’t there. Mornings are easy; you can predict that a certain critical mass of commuters need to get to work. In the afternoon or evening, you can predict a critical mass of commuters going home. If you have a vaguely centralized area where a great number of businesses are, you know where they’re going.

If you don’t service the “unprofitable” routes, however, you lose commuters in the morning. Anyone with a concern about being stranded is going to want to bring their transportation with them. The more commuters you lose in the morning, the less your available pool in the main evening hours. Thus, the “profitable” routes – the theoretically high traffic ones – need to be subsidized with the routes that may only carry 10 people, and perhaps even less from time to time, simply to be available should they be needed.

It’s my supposition that the balance for best commuter service, which maximizes the number of commuters and minimizes commuter automobile traffic, necessarily is going to operate at a loss (or at least closer to “break-even” than to a huge profit). The less options there are in the evening, the more people are going to have to ignore public transportation for the flexibility of their own vehicle. It’s one of those things that either the city/county needs to decide to just suck up and subsidize, or widespread usage will remain out of reach.

I really wanted to jot down a quick post before going to bed tonight, but quick jot-down idea I have has turned into a future, feature-length post to be written somewhere down the road.

All I got is this:

Sunday I was stuck in a pitch-black Loew’s parking lot I accidentally turned into for ten minutes. The exit the GPS kept telling me to take was a one-way street going the wrong way and the real exit was hidden in the one corner of the structure that I wasn’t looking in.

Hate it when that happens.

That’s the only short thought that I have.

Sorry.

-{The following was written a couple months ago and apparently fell through the cracks}-

The commute terrors continue. On Thursday my morning drive to work alone took three for no discernible reason. I have discovered that if I leave early enough I can sidestep that. “Early enough” can be defined as sometime between 5am (wherein there was no traffic) and 7am (wherein there is much). I’ve been pondering whether or not to start going in to get there at 7, spending two hours in the cafeteria novel-writing, and then working from 9-6. I’ve also determined that since Friday morning traffic is not generally as bad, if I were to come in early on Mondays and work a couple extra hours and come in late every Thursday I could keep the horrendous traffic down to two days a week (and inconsistent Fridays).

One thing that I have not really considered is public transportation.

The main reason for that is that there is no direct route from Soundview, where I live, to Enterprise City, where I work. In order to take the bus, I’d have to drive to a Soundview Park’n’Ride, take a bus to Zaulem, then hop buses to Enterprise. On a good day, that alone would take me two hours. It’s not hard to imagine days where I miss the connect and it takes considerably longer. The upshot would be that I could spend my time doing something other than driving. But that’s about the only upshot and right now audiobooks are keeping me somewhat entertained.

Historically, I would love to take public transportation to work. When I had jury duty in Colosse I had a bus pass and it was awesome. I drove to the PnR in Mayne, got on the bus, and got off near the County Courthouse. To anyone that lives in the suburbs and works in downtown, it’s absolutely great. What a lot of boosters of public transportation don’t realize, though, is that that’s actually only rarely the case. Newer cities are not generally built cleanly around the downtown/suburb model that many people imagine and may see in their own Historic cities. Had they been built around public transportation from the outset, public transportation would likely make a lot more sense for a lot more people and it’s quite likely that we would all be better off. Even with that admission, though, the facts on the ground don’t particularly support public transportation in most cities. The main reason being is that only a fraction of a city’s workforce typically works downtown except in very few metropolitan hubs. Instead you see more things like my current situation where you’re driving from one part of a metro area to another and everybody is driving too and from separate parts.

I frankly have difficulty seeing a more robust public transportation changing that. The industrial parks have already been built. Housing patterns have already been established. It’s possible that in rapidly growing smaller cities like Boise or Reno that they could make a dent, but not in cities that have downtown areas that are simply too small to support the bulk of the city’s workforce. Colosse has an economically robust downtown area in the daytime, and maybe if the incentives were in place more taller skyscrapers would be built, but never enough to keep up, really. You could set up alternate downtowns and the Colosse has done just that, but not enough to justify direct public transportation in many case and the only places for further growth are in the suburbs, which makes it so that public transportation is only supportable from that half or quadrant of the city.

On the other hand, if the goal is to get more cars off the road, it does seem to me that there are cases such as Soundview to New City to Enterprise might be a good idea even if not economically profitable. That’s certainly a case where a not-insignificant number of people would likely take advantage. I think that the biggest problem at the moment is that any such bus route would involve the same Splinterstate that I deal with day in and day out where the HOV lane often gets just as backed up as everything else and for it to work you would need constant back-and-forth which is probably not supportable by the current commuting population. What Cascadia (in concert with my employer, Mindstorm) has instead done is double-down on Vanpooling.

The basic idea behind Vanpooling is that if you can get enough people, the Cascadia Metropolitan Transit Authority (CMTA) will spot you the vehicle and Mindstorm will give you primo parking. I’ve thought about going this route, but the problem with that arrangement is that you lack flexibility. You have to all go and leave at the same time, and in a dynamic work environment like Mindstorm and really most every job I’ve ever held, that’s not realistic. You don’t always know when you leave in the morning what time you’re leaving for home at night. With regular bus service this isn’t a problem because you can just take the next bus, but when you’ve only got one ride home that’s a problem.

What I guess would be ideal would be some sort of system where enough people could pool in together in order to have one bus arrive at 8, one at 9, and one at 10 and then leave at 5, 6, and 7 respectively. That’s a lot of cats to herd.

Awake.

On our way to the bus stop.

Arrive at the bus stop and find the parking garage nearly empty. We wish that we had thought of the bus yesterday. The thought had actually crossed my mind after my successful adventure on the bus on the way home from the airport on Tuesday, but I figured that the chances that I could convince Clancy to haul our heavy luggage from one place of transport to another were pretty slim. On my way back from Shaston, I didn’t have the heavy luggage. She would have said that taking the bus would be completely unnecessary and really I couldn’t have disagreed with that. Neither of us saw the parking thing coming. If I had thought about parking I would almost certainly would have thought that maybe the main garage would be full, but it wouldn’t even occur to me that all of the private lots would as well. The bus was completely unnecessary.

We discover that the parking lot I parked in was only for commuters and the private lot next door was by-day only. I know that there is parking around here somewhere, but at this point I figure that the safest place to park is actually the Amtrak lot down the road. There are signs that it’s for Amtrak people only, but my experience on the Shaston trip was that they really didn’t seem to keep track of it. So I set Clancy up at the stop, drove down the road, and walked back. The bus was arriving as I was driving away. We’d catch the next one.

The next bus arrives on schedule. We lug our stuff aboard.

This time we’re three hours early, but that works out because we have a connecting flight in Los Puertos, California, that’s through a different airline. This gives us the opportunity to wait in the Transcontinental Airlines line after getting our bags set up at our primary airline, Northern Airways. Unfortunately, Trancontinental won’t give us our seat numbers. Both the Trancontinental and Northern Airways reps say that there should be someone from Transcontinental waiting at our gate to take care of us. That seemed unlikely, though. At first this is a mild irritation, but as the morning would wear on it would become fear-inducing as the reality of the situation set in: They overbooked.

Airborne.

We arrive in Los Puertos and there is nobody waiting at our gate for us. When we got to the Transcontinental Airlines ticket counter, Clancy is curtly told that they were taking passengers on the late-running 9am flight and not our 12:05 one. They’d be concerning themselves with that at 10:00 or so, they tell us.

Nobody is at the kiosk. We know that there are absolutely no more flights out of Los Puertos today and that if we miss this one, we’re either going to have to connect somewhere else (with more risks) or we’re spending Christmas night in California. Clancy decides that she’s just going to stand at the counter until someone shows up and she takes her book with her.

A woman shows up and Clancy tries to flag her down, but she shrugs it off saying vaguely that the flight is overbooked but that she is sure that it will all work out. At this point, I expect nothing to work out. She’s gone as fast as she arrives. Things are not looking good. If they can’t get us on this flight, I decide that I am going to put my foot down and we are going back to Cascadia.

The curt guy from before makes a reappearance. Perhaps sensing Clancy’s anxiety, he helps her out immediately. We’ve got seats. All is right with the world.

Airborne.

Land. Get our luggage. My father is waiting for us at the airport. That’s one form of transportation that we have no reason whatsoever to doubt. That’s a really nice feeling.

We’re eating Christmas dinner.

Awake.

On the road.

We’re at the airport, trying to find the parking lot. The only thing we can find is $26 a day and we can’t believe that’s right. That must be the hourly lot and we need to find the long-term parking lot. Honestly, though, I am so anxious that we decide that $26 a day is worth it just to make sure we get on that plane. The problem is that the parking lot is full from near-top to bottom. I say “near top” because the uncovered roof was closed to parking due to the snow. So now we set off to find off-airport parking. There were plenty of lots that we passed and most charged under $26 a day.

Nearly every lot we see appears to have signs about it being full. No matter, though, because we have time to take a longer shuttle from a farther-flung parking lot. We stop at a couple lots that don’t have signs about being full only to find out they’re full to.

We manage to get our car stuck in a hotel parking lot trying to turn around. This is just what we need. It takes us a good 10-15 minutes to get out.

We come to the determination that there is literally nowhere that we can park. If we had thought about it sooner, we could have gone all the way out to a Park’n’Ride, but we didn’t know where any were and by the time we got there it would be too late anyway. And so it was that on the day where Clancy consented to the earliest arrival she has ever consented to in her life, we still missed our flight. Devastated, we make our way home

We call the airline and cancel our seats. They say that they can get us out late the next day (Christmas) if we upgrade to first class, but we’re not willing to. I wish I had realized that Clancy’s reluctance was the belief that she could find us something sooner or better priced because I would have disabused her of that notion really quick. I thought we had just given up. Instead, she spent the next three hours trying to arrange something. I am simply exhausted from attempted travel and have ideas that we might just spend a quiet Christmas together. She disabused me of that notion quickly as it became apparent that if we were stuck here over Christmas, she would spend most of it wishing that we were in Delosa. So when she found an extremely expensive flight out the next day, I consented and we decided to spend Christmas day in transport.