I'm a Stranger Here Myself (12 page)

The other day something in our local newspaper caught my eye. It was an article reporting that the control tower and related facilities at our local airport are to be privatized. The airport loses money, so the Federal Aviation Administration is trying to cut costs by contracting out landing services to some-one who can do it more cheaply. What especially caught my attention was a sentence deep in the article that said, “A spokeswoman with the Federal Aviation Administration’s regional office in New York City, Arlene Sarlac, could not provide the name of the company that will be taking over the tower.”

Well, that’s really reassuring to hear. Now maybe I am hypertouchy because I use the airport from time to time and have a particular interest in its ability to bring planes down in an approximately normal fashion, so I would rather like to know that the tower hasn’t been bought by, say, the New England Roller Towel Company or Crash Services (Panama) Ltd., and that the next time I come in to land, the plane won’t be guided in by some guy on a stepladder waving a broom. I would hope, at the very least, that the Federal Aviation Administration would have some idea of whom they were selling the tower to. Call me particular, but it seems to me that that’s the sort of thing you ought to have on file somewhere.

The FAA, it must be said, is not the most efficient of enterprises. A recent report noted that the agency had been plagued for years by power failures, malfunctioning and antiquated equipment, overworked and overstressed staff, inadequate training programs, and mismanagement owing to a fragmented chain of command. With regard to equipment standards, the report found that “21 separate offices issued 71 orders, 7 standards, and 29 specifications.” The upshot was that the FAA didn’t have any idea what equipment it owned, how it was being maintained, or even whose turn it was to make the coffee.

Even more ominously, according to the
Los Angeles Times,
“at least three airliner accidents may have been prevented had the FAA not fallen behind schedule in planned modernization of air traffic control equipment.”

I mention this because our subject today is large-scale incompetence in my native land. I wouldn’t say that America is a particularly outstanding place to find incompetence. But when you do find incompetence here it does tend to be particularly outstanding. Partly this is because it is a big country. Big countries spawn big bureaucracies. Those bureaucracies spawn lots of departments, and each of those departments issues lots of rules and regulations. An inevitable consequence is that with so many departments the left hand not only doesn’t know what the right hand is doing but doesn’t seem to know that there is a right hand. This is interestingly illustrated by frozen pizza.

In the United States, frozen cheese pizza is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Frozen pepperoni pizza, on the other hand, is regulated by the Department of Agriculture. Each sets its own standards with regard to content, labeling, and so on and has its own team of inspectors and set of regulations that require licenses, compliance certificates, and all kinds of other costly paperwork. And that’s just for frozen pizza. Altogether, it has been estimated, the cost to the nation of complying with the full whack of federal regulations is $668 billion a year, an average of $7,000 per household. That’s a lot of compliance.

What gives American inefficiency its particular tang, however, is a peculiar affection for parsimony. There is a short-termism here, particularly in official circles, that is often simply arresting. Consider an experience of the Internal Revenue Service.

Every year an estimated $100 billion in taxes—a sum larger than the gross national product of many countries— goes unreported and uncollected. In 1995, as an experiment, Congress gave the IRS $100 million of extra funding to go looking for some of this extra money. At the end of the year it had found and collected $800 million—only a fraction of the missing money but still $8 of extra government revenue for every $1 of additional collection costs.

The IRS confidently predicted that if the program were extended it would net the government at least $12 billion of missing tax revenues the following year, with more to come in succeeding years. Instead of expanding the program, Congress chopped it as—wait for it—part of its federal deficit reduction program. Do you begin to see what I mean?

Or take food inspection. All kinds of high-tech gizmos exist to test meat for microbial infestations like salmonella and
E. coli.
But the government is too cheap to invest in these, so federal food inspectors continue to inspect meat visually, as it rolls past on assembly lines. Now you can imagine how attentively a low-paid federal food inspector is going to be looking at each of 18,000 identical plucked chickens sliding past him on a conveyor belt every day of his working life. Call me a cynic, but I very much doubt that after a dozen years or so of this an inspector is likely to be thinking: “Hey, here come some more chickens. These might be interesting.” In any case—and here’s a point that you would think might have occurred to somebody by now—microorganisms are invisible.

As a result, by the government’s own admission, as much as 20 percent of all chicken and 49 percent of turkey is contaminated. What all this costs in illness is anybody’s guess, but it is thought that as many as 80 million people may get sick each year from factory-contaminated food, costing the economy somewhere between $5 billion and $10 billion in additional health care costs, lost productivity, and so on. Every year nine thousand people die of food poisoning in the United States.

All of which brings us back to the good old Federal Aviation Administration. (Actually it doesn’t, but I had to get here somehow.) The FAA may or may not be the most inefficient bureaucracy in the United States, but it is indubitably the only one that has my life in its hands when I am 32,000 feet above the earth, so you may imagine my disquiet at learning that it is handing over our control tower to some people whose names it can’t remember.

According to our newspaper, the handover will be complete by the end of the month. Three days after that, I am irrevocably committed to flying to Washington from that airport. I mention this merely in case you find a blank space here in a couple of weeks.

But it probably won’t come to that. I just asked my wife what we are having for dinner.

Turkey burgers, she said.

A researcher at the University of California at Berkeley recently made a study of the nation’s walking habits and found that the average person in the United States walks less than 75 miles a year—about 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day. I’m no stranger to sloth myself, but that’s appallingly little. I rack up more mileage than that just looking for the channel changer.

Eighty-five percent of us, according to the Berkeley study, are “essentially” sedentary and 35 percent are “totally” sedentary. We have become a nation of sitters and riders.

One of the things my wife and I wanted when we decided to move back to America was to live in a manageably sized town within walking distance of a central business district. Hanover, where we settled, is a small, typical New England town, pleasant, sedate, and compact. It has a broad central green surrounded by the venerable buildings of Dartmouth College, a trim Main Street, and leafy residential streets. It is, in short, an agreeable, easy place to go about one’s business on foot, and yet as far as I can tell almost no one does.

I walk to town nearly every day when I am at home. I go to the post office or library or bookstore, and sometimes, if I am feeling particularly debonair, I stop at Rosey Jekes Cafe for a cappuccino. Occasionally in the evenings my wife and I stroll up to the Nugget Theater for a movie or to Murphy’s for a beer. All this is a big part of my life and I wouldn’t dream of doing it other than on foot. People have gotten used to this curious and eccentric behavior now, but several times in the early days passing acquaintances would slow by the curb and ask if I wanted a ride.

“But I’m going your way,” they would insist when I politely declined. “Really, it’s no bother.”

“Honestly, I enjoy walking.”

“Well, if you’re absolutely
sure,
” they would say and depart reluctantly, even guiltily, as if leaving the scene of an accident without giving their name.

People have become so habituated to using the car for everything that it would never occur to them to unfurl their legs and see what those lower limbs can do. It is worth noting that 93 percent of all trips outside the property in the United States now involve the use of a car.

As with most old New England towns designed for another age of transportation, Hanover isn’t a particularly obliging place for cars. Nearly any visit to town by automobile will be characterized by a long and exasperating hunt for a parking space. To alleviate this, the local authorities are forever widening roads to speed traffic flow and building new parking lots— Dartmouth recently tore down an unexceptionable old hospital building in order to insert into the heart of the campus a couple of more acres of numbingly soulless parking lot—failing to understand that it is the absence of these features that makes the town desirable in the first place.

But it isn’t really the authorities who are to blame. It is the people who wish to take two tons of metal with them wherever they go. We have reached an age where college students expect to drive between classes, where parents will get in a car and drive three blocks to pick up their children from a friend’s house, where the mailman takes his van up and down every driveway on a street. We will go through the most extraordinary contortions to save ourselves twenty feet of walking.

Sometimes it’s almost ludicrous. The other day I was in the little nearby town of Etna waiting to bring home one of my children from a piano lesson when a car stopped outside the local post office and a man about my age popped out and dashed inside (and left the engine running—something else that exercises me inordinately). He was inside for about three or four minutes, then came out, got in the car, and drove exactly sixteen feet (I had nothing better to do so I paced it off) to the general store next door, and popped in again, engine still running.

And the thing is, this man looked really fit. I’m sure he jogs extravagant distances and plays squash and does all kinds of exuberantly healthful things, but I am just as sure that he drives to each of these undertakings. It’s crazy. An acquaintance of ours was complaining the other day about the difficulty of finding a place to park outside the local gymnasium. She goes there several times a week to walk on a treadmill. The gymnasium is, at most, a six-minute walk from her front door. I asked her why she didn’t walk to the gym and do six minutes less on the treadmill.

She looked at me as if I were tragically simple-minded and said, “But I have a program for the treadmill. It records my distance and speed and calorie-burn rate, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.” It had not occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.

According to a concerned and faintly horrified recent editorial in the
Boston Globe,
the United States spends less than 1 percent of its $25 billion-a-year highway budget on facilities for pedestrians. Actually, I’m surprised it’s that much. Go to almost any suburb developed in the last thirty years and you will not find a sidewalk anywhere. Often you won’t find a single pedestrian crossing.

I had this brought home to me last summer when we were driving across Maine and stopped for coffee on Route 1 in one of those endless zones of shopping malls, motels, gas stations, and fast food places that sprout everywhere these days. I noticed there was a bookstore across the street, so I decided to skip coffee and pop over. I needed a particular book for some work I was doing and anyway I figured this would give my wife a chance to spend some important quality time with four restive, overheated children.

Although the bookshop was no more than seventy or eighty feet away, I discovered that there was no way to get there on foot. There was a traffic outlet for cars, but no provision for pedestrians, and no way to cross on foot without dodging over six lanes of swiftly moving traffic. In the end, I had to get in our car and drive across. There was simply no other way. At the time it seemed ridiculous and exasperating, but afterward I realized that I was possibly the only person ever even to have entertained the notion of negotiating that intersection on foot.

The fact is, we not only don’t walk anywhere anymore in this country, we
won’t
walk anywhere, and woe to anyone who tries to make us, as a town here in New Hampshire called Laconia discovered to its cost. A few years ago, Laconia spent $5 million pedestrianizing its downtown, to make it a pleasant shopping environment. Esthetically it was a triumph—urban planners came from all over to coo and take photos—but commercially it was a disaster. Forced to walk one whole block from a parking lot, shoppers abandoned downtown Laconia for suburban malls.

In 1994, Laconia dug up its pretty brick paving, took away the benches, tubs of geraniums, and decorative trees, and put the street back to the way it had been in the first place. Now people can park right in front of the stores again, and downtown Laconia thrives anew.

And if that isn’t sad, I don’t know what is.