I have not driven a motor vehicle (hold on to your steering wheels, SoCal-ers) …

For 67 consecutive days!

And I do not miss it one bit.

It’s an age thing, I think.

Remember when you were in high school? You practically counted down the days until you were 15-and-a-half, when you could get a learner’s permit and drive, if you had an adult in the car. In California, anyway. I imagine I got my learner’s permit within 48 hours of turning 15.5 … and got my regular driver’s license probably right on my 16th birthday.

And after that … you drove for the hell of it. For the fun of it. To go somewhere. Or not. It was just cool to be in control of your own movement. (Remember how stoked you were to drive on the Autopia, at Disneyland, when you were even younger?) What a rush.

Well, that goes away the older you get. To the point that you get to a place like Hong Kong and you not only don’t miss driving, you’re happy not to.

About age. Yeah. I think the older you get, the more conscious you become of the risks of driving. The peril.

It’s from experience, in part. This or that guy is about to cut you off, or drift into your lane, or stop short. That little kid is going to dash into the street, and that guy tail-gating you can’t possibly stop in time if we have to slow in a hurry.

So, what used to be a rush turns into a … well, it’s still a rush, but a bad one. The sort of rush you associate with heart failure and nausea. When you’re young you have no idea that could happen to you someday. But it does.

That’s where I’m at, now. Commuting around SoCal gets me way more geeked up than I care to be, middle of the day, doing nothing. I don’t want to be having an adrenaline rush just because I spent 20 minutes driving from Riverside to San Bernardino and noticing the 164 opportunities I had to be in a grinding wreck.

So there’s that. Who needs driving? It just makes you nervous at an age when you almost always prefer sedate. (And when was the last time you saw a bunch of 50-year-olds on a roller coaster? Exactly.)

Then there’s the specificity of Hong Kong. (Don’t you love the word specificity? So fun to say. And how many English words have two soft “C” sounds in them? Not many.)

As indicated in the cycling blog post, below, the roads here are cuh-razy. Nuts. Jammed. I’ve thought for weeks now, that at certain times of the day HK is a three-car accident and a broken-down bus away from gridlock. Literal gridlock. Where 5,000 cabs and 1,000 buses and the handful of private cars will be nose-to-tail, and no one anywhere can move.

So, if I were to drive, now, I would have to rent a car … and then drive on the “wrong” side of the road … in an environment that makes the west-bound I-10 at 8 a.m. seem like a calm, rational, idyllic experience.

So, my car? Don’t miss it. It just now struck me I hadn’t even thought about my car in weeks. Not once. I left it for my niece to use. Has she wrecked it? Don’t know. Don’t really care.

Anyway, you can get around this city just fine with the subway, the cabs and the buses. You don’t need a car. And at this point in my life, that’s fine. Really. It is.