Kei trucks and transport

 Obsessed today with the idea of buying a kei truck. Picture below in case you aren’t familiar. According to a little reading I’ve been doing, they can haul realistic amounts of stuff (~1000-1500 lbs), have decent mileage (~35 mpg), and go at, uh, “highway legal” speeds (~55-60 mph). Getting one from the 90s is about $3500, or in brain speak, one vespa, three spotting scopes, seven bikes, or 35 trips to deluxe town diner (where I buy). So reasonable!

I do have a habit of making some purchases imagining that I have a different life than I currently do. For example, got a road bike maybe two years ago spurred on by visions of flitting off to go birding before work, unfettered by transit lines, popping over to places for a coffee on weekends, commuting in on sunny days. When the hell do I do that? My commute is long and often early, the odds of going birding before and wanting to bike more following turned out to be pretty low, and anyhow I wasn’t in any shape to properly use the super low drops on the road bike (why did I get that one??) I ended up finding online. Now, having actually used my bike recently, I may be turning the arc of the story around here, but I’m not discounting this as a cautionary tale yet.

What glamorous life am I picturing with a tiny truck? Hauling…something? Do I really want to be the guy all my friends call when they’re moving? Do I really want to be in a paper thin cab on the MA freeways, a state where the average car size is “heavyweight” and people skip through reds based on the “vibes” of a given intersection?

I’ve never owned a car, never really needed to. In some ways this sort of thing seems like… a trainer car. Low risk of killing people (in car-car collisions), easy to park, low cost investment if it turns out to be horrible. But not a trainer in the sense that it’s bad, people actually seem to rave over these things. Perhaps I am eager to reject the American car paradigm with a step into something just lighter. 

I won’t say part of it isn’t birding. Birding as a hobby is extremely car focused, and every rare bird twitcher talks incessantly about their birding battle station in the backseat, stopping at gas stations, sleeping in their car, whatever. It makes sense — wilderness areas are indeed further from urban centers — but the whole thing reeks of car supremacy culture in a way similar to the sneering that comes up whenever someone brings up electric cars (“That’d never work in a rural area!!”). Hence the bike. But is there a middle way? It would really be nice to autonomously chase some gull or whatnot 50 miles away. Otherwise, my autonomy tends to be limited by where train/bus lines run and my stomach for spending extra time trekking by foot. (Bike use pending.) I imagine that this desire for autonomy in my free time is sort of a reaction to the very rote, constrained nature of my day to day work. 

A kei car won’t change my life, ultimately. But it is useful to think about what I really want when I want things, in general. And we can all agree they look sick as hell.