I like driving.  I don’t drive as much as I would like to because my job keeps me really busy and it’s a short distance from home.  I drive in my spare time because I like to see the lovely part of the country where we live.  I suspect if I had a long commute for work, I wouldn’t be so fond of driving.  An old friend from the office used to travel nearly every day from Burley to Twin Falls.  It ground her down.  Eventually she found work a five minute drive from her house. 

Driving is liberty and it may be the one activity where choice is most evident to the masses.

Many people I know in Idaho have extensive trips between job and home.  I get on-air calls from truck drivers and people with sales routes.  One guy told me he drives five days a week from Twin Falls to Salt Lake City.  He’s on the road for at least six hours from start to finish.

Yet, liberals keep telling us the age of the automobile needs to come to an end.  In San Francisco they can grab a street car after hop-scotching piles of poop!  In New York City there’s an extensive subway system.  There are rail lines in Washington, Chicago and Boston.  And in many other congested places.  A writer at the very liberal publication Vox believes if we simply built more of these, we could give up our four wheels.  I’ve got news for you, Bubba, and it paraphrases a legendary sports movie.  If you build it, they won’t come!

Friends in Seattle tell me bus lines are aplenty but also filled with ghost riders.  It’s not efficient.  Cost/benefit analyses would prove this is a really bad model.  People like to drive on their own because they can stop for a coffee or bathroom break on their own schedule.  It’s why I like driving while on vacation.  Planes don’t land when I want a burger for lunch.

Bloomberg has a story about all the failed pedestrian malls across America.  This was a fad from the 1970s and 1980s and highly promoted by liberals.  Most were abject failures and have since re-opened to car and truck traffic.  If you build it, they won’t come!  Public policy needs a dose of reality.

Now, you could probably mandate people stop driving.  We’re currently experiencing a test run in America when it comes to coercion.  This eventually could give a whole new meaning to forced busing.  And you’ll see a rebellion in rural America.  Driving is liberty and it may be the one activity where choice is most evident to the masses.

LOOK: See the iconic cars that debuted the year you were born

 

LOOK: Here are the 50 best beach towns in America

Every beach town has its share of pluses and minuses, which got us thinking about what makes a beach town the best one to live in. To find out, Stacker consulted data from WalletHub, released June 17, 2020, that compares U.S. beach towns. Ratings are based on six categories: affordability, weather, safety, economy, education and health, and quality of life. The cities ranged in population from 10,000 to 150,000, but they had to have at least one local beach listed on TripAdvisor. Read the full methodology here. From those rankings, we selected the top 50. Readers who live in California and Florida will be unsurprised to learn that many of towns featured here are in one of those two states.

Keep reading to see if your favorite beach town made the cut.

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