Today there is a letter in the Sarasota Herald Tribune about how city staff approves of a plan to "force people out of cars". I know this is essentially true because the phrase has been approvingly repeated now and then by an incumbent City Commissioner who out of civility I will not name. Not only that, the sentiment is often echoed by "developers". Who decides if you drive, anyway, you or these hyper-qualified "experts"?

The idea they are pushing is that they will deliberately make traffic so bad for the car driver that he or she will decide to leave the car home - in effect wasting his/her investment in it, walk two blocks, wait in the blazing sun or pouring rain for a bus that seems to never come, pay a fare, ride for an hour, walk another two blocks, work his or her shift and missing the last bus, walk five miles home - perhaps carrying packages, blessing the messiah city government the whole time. Yeah, right.

Never mind that the bus is stuck in the same traffic that forced you out of your car.

Some time ago when I was deciding what things meant, "forcing" someone out of a car sounded like a carjacking. I guess when the pointy-headed intellectuals from the ivory tower are doing the forcing that makes it somehow OK? I call it dictatorship in the fine tradition of the "other guys" of the cold war era.

My approach is far different. I will support a public transportation system that is so good, so convenient, so economical and so appealing that people will voluntarily choose it on its merits, with not any recourse at all to this new f-word. Force people indeed!