cars
(posted on 2007-03-28 06:45:42)
Today's Age has a piece by Catherine Deveney about four wheel drives. Ok we all know that 4WDs waste more petrol than other cars, create more pollution, and are more dangerous to pedestrians and other motorists. (Why doesn't this knowledge stop people from buying them?) But she also quoted stats to show that 4WDs aren't even safe for the people inside them. So drivers who think they're protecting themselves and their relatives inside a 4WD are not even being selfish, they're just being sucked in by ads. It's brave of the Age to run this story - one suspects their readership don't want their expensive investment mocked in public.
A 4WD driver I know came out with a clanger once. He said one thing he likes about his 4WD is being up high in the traffic where you can see better. I pointed out that by doing this he is making it impossible for drivers behind him to see ahead and anticipate having to stop. His reply? - everyone is free to buy a 4WD, and should if they have trouble seeing past 4WDs. I was stunned. Do all 4WD drivers think like this? How would they respond if someone proposed to build a skyscraper next door? - add extra stories to their house?
Anyone who lived through the past couple of Melbourne summers knows that climate change has arrived. We now have Queensland's weather. A cold, wet winter normally starts like clockwork in early March. Right now it's nearly April, and still warm. It doesn't rain like it used to. The parks have died and we're rationing water. Under these circumstances the familiar car takes on a sinister aura. It's hard to feel positively about car drivers when we're suffering from bad weather they caused.
The car lifestyle is sad because it doesn't work anyway. Car ads show drivers zipping around mountain curves and racing along city streets, but in real life so many drivers are trying to do this that no-one ever does. A car drive is mostly sitting in traffic, a frustrating series of waits at red lights until the destination is reached and there's nowhere to park. Car companies should be forced to show drivers idling in traffic in their ads, if for no other reason than truth in advertising. Allowing car ads to show happy winners zooming around is like allowing cigarette ads to show sporting heroes smoking. It's not just dishonest, the beliefs engendered are dangerous.
With permanently-expensive petrol costing many drivers fifty to a hundred dollars a week, and climate change and congestion making anti-car legislation inevitable, the car era as we know it is just about over. I don't mean cars will disappear overnight - rather, for most people driving the car will become like catching a cab - an expensive option that we make use of only when it's really necessary.
While it's obvious that cars will go, it's not so obvious what will replace them. Bikes and public transport will be part of the solution for some of the people, but that's all. For parents of young children, people traveling outside public transport routes and times, the aged or disabled or anyone who has to move stuff, cars are very hard to do without.
The truth is that nearly everything in Australia more than five kilometers from a city centre was built according to the logic of the car. You can't live in the outer suburbs without one. I live close to the city and ride a bike to work, but I grew up in the suburbs and know that none of the car alternatives that have been proposed are realistic there. The real issue may become not so much what will replace cars, but what will replace suburbs.
reply 1 from Amber: Nice blog. I can recognise many of my own thoughts in this article, thoughts which I didn't think were shared by many. I simply can't understand why many people are so addicted to their cars, and blinkered to the damage they cause to our environments and society. Many of my friends say to me "but how can you do the shopping without a car?", not realising that before cars were common there were small shops to be found on many suburban and city streets. I think that when cars go people will have to adapt to a slightly less mobile lifestyle. With improved cycling infrastructure, public transport and general health and fitness resulting from more active transport options, most people will remain quite able to get around though. I've always thought if people are not well enough to walk to their nearest bus stop, then they probably shouldn't be driving. For the ill and disabled I think some kind of community taxi/bus service still has a place. Hopefully though, our neighbourhoods will quickly react to people's reduced mobility to lessen the need to be so mobile, and as people start meeting their neighbours again the more phsically fit will help the elderly and infirm! I wonder how many of today's social problems are partly due to a reduced sense of community due to our increased mobility thanks to the car. But as you point out the problems that cars create go beyond pollution, and for this reason I cringe every time I hear politicians proposing "clean fuel" solutions to car emissions rather than simply trying to reduce the number of cars out there. Given the incredible number of fatalities and serious injuries on our roads, and the huge cost of this on our health services, I find it hard to believe that car use is still encouraged by government budgeting more than any other form of transport.
reply 2 from Greg: Thanks Amber. It does seem like an addiction. It's easy to became habituated to anything which is enjoyable, so the vendors of cars trick them out with heating, cooling, radios, cd players, windows that go up and down, plush seating and the list goes on. This shuts out the uncomfortable outside world and gives people an illusion of control. We've been conditioned to schedule our time as if there is no space - we can simply be wherever we have to be whenever we have to be there. Things break down when all the people trying to do this squeeze onto finitely spacious roads.
reply 3 from David Nichols: Another thing people used to do - there are still the scantiest vestiges of this in contemporary life - is get things delivered. You would go to a shop, choose an item or many items (or even, go to a grocer's or supermarket and choose many items), and they would deliver said items to your door. Of course, as all of us know who ever needed something delivered (or a tradesperson to come by), the timing was never perfect, and the system was partially predicated on people (that is, housewives, primarily) being home all day. Most people aren't, and can't be, home all day anymore (when I was a boy though the supermarket would just deliver the groceries to the front door, and leave them there; it was reasonably hidden from the street). Now I said there were only scanty vestiges (some supermarkets will still deliver, for instance) but of course this whole system is back back back. People shop online and have products delivered to their door, even for supermarket groceries, but also for much larger items which are in some cases even produced to order. Personally I like to go to the supermarket and browse like a big grazing cow, even panic buying or allowing myself to fantasise about what particular products might do to enhance my life, and then pile it all into the station wagon and drive home. But I suppose this is learnt behaviour.
reply 4 from David Nichols: By the way the assertion that anything 5km from the city centre is predicated on car use is untrue. Have a look at a map of Melbourne (for instance) in 1930 (which is when the last substantial bit of suburban rail infrastructure came into being). It was very spread out. Obviously, it could have been planned a hundred times better, but my point is that what the car has done is made it possible for closer 'infill' between public transport points which have, in turn, deteriorated as the car takes over - white ants, if you will. As for what will replace the suburbs, I'm a Ted Trainer man myself. Check out his stuff.
reply 5 from Greg: Fair point, the railway lines extended before cars did. But they were arteries - most of suburbia is post-car, or to borrow your term, most of suburbia is the "infill". I could say *most* of what lies further than 5km from the city centre is predicated on car use. I'd suggest this doesn't change the nature of the problem: in environmental and social issues it's the "most" that matters.
return to the main blog page