By Sarah Phelan
Slow is how I was feeling in all this heat, as I drove towards the Bay Bridge, direction San Francisco, and maybe it was because I was driving slowly, too, that I saw the huge illuminated “Don’t Trash California” sign that’s been newly installed on the approach to the toll gates.
Brought to us by Toll Roads, an Orange County and SoCal-based organization that has partnered with Caltrans, the sign is obviously intended to stop people trashing our state (at least physically, if not verbally).
Nice touch, I thought, as the driver in front of me tapped cigarette ash out of his window, and a plastic bag flew across six lanes of freeway traffic. It’s time people stopped dumping shit out of car windows. Maybe if they could see where their shit ends up, they’d give more of a shit about their shit.Maybe we need Al Gore to make another documentary, following the path of a fast food wrapper from your car and into someone else’s lneighborhoods and into the waterways that lead to the giant silver mobius that is the World’s Ocean.
Or maybe we could just use our friggin’ imaginations. The kids in West Oakland WON’T enjoy finding your beer can in their back yard. Nor will the sea lions at Pier 39. And it won’t help feed the starving polar bears.
And if the California Department of Transportation, Division of Maintenance, didn’t have to spend more than $40 million just to clean up litter on freeways and highways, maybe they’d have more dough for fixing the pot holes that drivers are always complaining about.
