In late May of this year, I wrapped up my work as a Faiths Act Fellow with the Interfaith Youth Core and Tony Blair Faith Foundation. My site-partner Hafsa (you can read Hafsa’s wondrous blog here) and I lived in the South Bay, and we used office space provided by Islamic Networks Group. Our interfaith/malaria work (strategy here) invariably had us driving to San Francisco two or three times a week. It’s a little over 100 miles roundtrip. We did a lot of driving.
For the first chunk of the year, our regular route had us traveling Highway 101 up the east side of the peninsula and right into downtown San Francisco. Highway 101 is a big, grey piece of road with too many big billboards and not nearly enough lanes. For this reason, I sort of dreaded each drive. It often meant getting stuck in traffic, both on the way up (for morning meetings) and on the way back (for afternoon meetings). Hafsa brought along a small speaker for her iPod so that we could listen to something instead of each other’s voices on the days when traffic brought tension. :)
While mapping directions for an unrelated event one day, I found that many times our travel time could be shortened by about ten or even fifteen minutes by traveling Highway 280, which runs up the west side of the peninsula and empties on the west side of San Francisco. Our meetings were very often smack-dab in the center of the city, so it made sense to take the less-trafficked route up there. After that, we very, very rarely took Highway 101.
280 is a beautiful highway. No billboards, thousands of lanes, and huge, lazy hills full of cows and trees and lakes. It’s a beautiful drive. When the fog rises up over the hills, it can be downright breathtaking. It’s also faster than 101. We looked forward to that drive. It was a natural paradise between two urban centers. So how do the differences between 101 and 280 explain (almost) everything?
Highway 101 represents the overcrowded, overworked pathways of our world, digital and otherwise. When you’re driving along it up the peninsula, you’ve got to keep your eyes super-active – the lanes are tight and there are lots of cars. The billboards and advertisements, many of which are big and distracting, are a non-stop feature. It’s tense!
Highway 280, on the other hand, is the open space. I mean that literally and figuratively. There’s still too much to take in visually, but it’s all so smooth and evenly-placed that it has a real calming effect. The lanes are big, and even when it’s packed, it’s not really packed. It doesn’t feel like a commute, it feels like a vacation from the city.
As it just so happens, taking the smooth, open, and relaxing path ends up being easier on both my car and myself, not to mention my passengers. It is also faster, I think, precisely because it doesn’t attempt to do too much with itself. It’s a road that acts as a road should – a path from A to B. I think that’s the important part of the explanation.
Highway 101 is a road masquerading as many different things that tries to get too much done at once. Highway 280 knows what it is and what it can do and does it well. There you have it. Whew. Those of you familiar with these highways might agree or disagree. I really didn’t think that this post would come together, and you can certainly argue that it actually hasn’t, in which case I can totally agree. I hammered this out on a lark and it made me smile.
Photos by Flickr users richardmasoner and Our Hero.
*** This post is part of the “Blog Every Day Challenge“, which I have undertaken in homage to John Haydon, a captain of social media and inbound marketing for non-profits. A few months back he did the same thing. Granted, all of his posts imparted some kind of value to his readers (and he has many). I’m blogging about the same old stuff. Don’t call it “general interest”, because I think that it goes without saying that humans should generally be interested in what I’m doing. :) ***
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