Live and Let Drive
Advice on driving in the time of a virus
Being cooped up inside is never fun. Being forced to is worse. And you don’t need me to tell you that even homebodies need to stretch their legs. Cabin fever is as real a disease as coronavirus.
With shelter-in-place and safer at home orders locking people across the globe into their small, domestic worlds, the search for reasonable means of escape has become a feverish scramble for sanity. I, for one, have taken to going to the supermarket in thousands of separate trips rather than one single, economically sound voyage. Stupid, I know. But a difference-maker for me? You bet.
Between my grocery runs and circuitous walks around my neighborhood, little else has prevented me from morphing into a 21st century Kaspar Hauser. But loving both my car and the act of driving, I started to look into whether some aimless driving would please the coronavirus era police state.
It seems innocent enough. You’re alone, sealed in a moving bubble and certainly more than six feet from any other drivers. Further, it seems reasonable since the only thing distinguishing it from a trip to the store—which is of course perfectly legal—is a lack of destination.
As it turns out, the desire to go cruising comes with a heavily loaded, albeit vague burden of guilt. But beyond the designation of this action as legal or illegal, it is clear that American freedoms abound greatly—even during times of international emergency.
Wanting answers, I began researching online, looking at state and local resources hoping that some niche FAQ form would impart to me some word from on high. I found nothing. I mean nothing. Naturally, there were the odds and ends of essential shopping and similar destinations, but not a smidge about driving itself.
Frustrated, I went straight to the source. I called the police department for my hometown of Pasadena. After spending 10or so minutes being ping-ponged between City Hall offices, I got ahold of an officer who would talk to me. She told me two things.
First, the “safer at home” order means just that. Regardless of the activity, the police deem shutting yourself indoors as far more advisable than any other behavior. Second, in a defeated admission, she told me there was nothing the police department could do to enforce the order.
Great. Tons of research and all I got was a wishy-washy groan of defeat from a downtrodden police officer working the phones. With that, it seemed clear I was okay to get out and rip around the neighborhood if I so chose—nobody could stop me.
It should have been an exhilarating feeling. At last! I don’t need to spend money to leave the house. I opened this article by saying we are living in a police state, but of course nothing could be further from the truth. Despite the pandemic, I have been given the privilege to essentially do what I want. And as long as I wasn’t doing anything to directly infect the public, the police could do nothing about it—on paper at least.
But something didn’t sit right. I didn’t immediately grab my keys. Instead, I stayed online, reading headline after headline about the pandemic. In my perusing, I stumbled into a moral conclusion through my favorite comic and the man whose face I will likely inherit in 30-some years, Marc Maron.
On April 11, Maron tweeted out a seemingly innocuous question.
“It’s still okay to just drive around with no destination for a few hours on a beautiful day, right?”
Responses to his tweet varied from resounding support, to mid-life-crisisers sharing photos of their cars, to wildly disproportionate and nearly illegible ramblings from furious fans.
“No,” said one such incensed respondent. “We expect #healthcare, #retail, #supplychain, #farmers, #truckdrivers, #FirstResponders to help us through a #pandemic & we can't do your civic/moral duty & stay the f[*]ck home! There's your #privledge & #entitlememt. #COVID__19 #publichealth.”
An hour passed and Maron followed up with his tail between his legs.
“i really had no idea asking if I could take a drive would become a divisive sh[*]t storm,” Maron said. “i understand my impulse to do it and i get why its a bad idea right now. thank you internet.”
As furious as Maron’s detractors may have been, they respond to an underlying inequality fomented by crises like this one. While I have not yet been approached by law enforcement, the same cannot be said for all people.
In Philadelphia a bus passenger was violently wrenched from his bus by police officers because he was without a mask. In another part of Pennsylvania, a woman was ticketed by police for driving without a destination and was fined nearly 300 dollars for doing so. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered his police to gun down any person who violated his lockdown order in an extreme display of power.
If this imbalance exists, it seems the right thing to do would be to follow the letter of the law as best I can even though I may have the privilege to bend the rules.
On a minute scale, driving my car means putting pollutants out into the air. While small in the grand scheme of things, this lessens air quality and could damage those infected with coronavirus. Beyond that, were my driving to result in a crash, my rightfully mangled body would need the attention of first responders whose experience would be better used attending to those desperately in need of coronavirus treatment.
But what does this long line of hypotheticals and “what-if’s” mean? And what should we make of them?
It means a few things. First and foremost, you aren’t a bad person if you want to bend the rules. We all want this to be over. And honestly, you still aren’t a bad person if you act on those impulses. But in the long run, every time you do so, you roll the dice. You run the risk of spreading the disease, you run the risk of putting undue pressure on hospitals and you also exercise a freedom that many globally do not have or may never have again.
But just like the laws on driving, there’s an unfortunate lack of absolutes. So play it safe. Take care of your house. Stay in your house.