A local street near me in London
We’re drowning in a tsunami of cars, suffocated by their sheer numbers and fumes. For over a century, we’ve been in the grip of a collective madness around automobiles. How have we come to continue accepting as normal, a degraded quality of life where we subsist around the margins of these toxic products of a bygone age? – these machines which destroy the atmosphere and our lungs. Private vehicles are killing us. Our lives are built around the dictates of the car. We eke out an existence between the motorways, trunk roads, side roads, which dominate the landscape. My street, like many in cities and towns everywhere, is choked by double rows of parked cars, leaving only a narrow space for one way travel. It’s like a form of vehicular atherosclerosis, with these hunks of metal and plastic coating the arteries of the thoroughfares like cholesterol, as they sit there, gradually deteriorating and depreciating. And plenty of them are tanklike SUVs – in inner London?
Stand back a little and it looks bizarre. If a non-carbon life form from an alien civilisation were to visit planet earth, they might easily conclude that the dominant species here is the automobile and that the humanoids inhabiting the fringes of the car’s royal avenues are there merely to serve this internal combustion creature.
Private vehicles are expensive to buy, to run, to fuel, to insure, and especially so in these financially squeezed times. Car travel is not even efficient: in many cities the average urban speed in cars has not increased from that of the horse drawn carriages of well over a century ago.
Yes, of course, if you live in a rural area I do understand that you still need a car or you will be marooned. But to take the UK as an example, 84% of people live in urban conurbations. I’m talking about this urban majority. So why are we still so wedded to this climate and lung destroying anachronism of the private automobile? It’s clearly not rational. Certainly in most cities, public transport would get us around faster, more healthily and more cheaply. We’re imprisoned in the cult of the car.
Let me start from an insider’s perspective, as a former addict. I was born into this cult and it was a strong formative influence as I grew up. As a child of relatively well to do middle class parents, we were a two car family. My mother, for whom, like many women, the car was just a practical means to get from A to B, had a small saloon car, which served her to travel to her clinics all over the local borough as an NHS paediatrician.
But my dad, who in every other respect was quite abstemious, had a love for sports cars. We had all the classic 1960s British sports cars, from Triumph TR3, TR6, to Jaguar, MGB and MGC. And I would accompany my father to the annual Motor Show and goggle at all the glistening new models, almost like a religious event.
I spent countless hours as a child just sitting in my dad’s current sports car in our drive, fiddling with the radio, admiring the walnut dashboard and looking longingly at the speedometer and wondering if the car would really go up to 160 mph, as the dial suggested it might. I pored over my dad’s and older brother’s car magazines and longed to be old enough to drive a car myself.
When, as an older teenager, that long awaited day finally came, of course it was only a rather battered old Mini which I was able to have, but I had it gradually modified with a larger engine, louder exhaust and other go-faster embellishments. Later I graduated to a hotted up Mini Cooper S, with faster acceleration. The sense of freedom and individuality from driving in my own car was exhilarating. There’s the machismo and sexual power of cars: it’s an expression of oneself as a guy, so you ideally want a powerful sexy motor with maximum horsepower. Men are by far the biggest part of this problem; women are more likely to be amenable to common sense and practical solutions around transport and cars.
Yes, I did use the car to get around, yet it fulfilled many other functions. It was an extension of myself and my identity. And petrol was very cheap then, the roads weren’t so crowded and I would enjoy just driving aimlessly around with my crummy old valve radio blaring. (I remind myself of my own history when I’m irritated by the heart shaking bass sounds from subwoofers in local young guys’ cars).
Soon after leaving college, I read a leaflet from a new organisation called Greenpeace, and my bubble popped. I sold the car, got a bicycle, and that was the end of my car cult membership. For me now, it’s only about the most sustainable way to get around. A couple of times since then I’ve had my own car for short periods for practical reasons, but it’s now 30 years since I owned a car, and there’s no emotional pull. I don’t want to own a car.
I’m a member of Zipcar, one of many car sharing clubs, which means I can book a car for an hour or two on those occasions when I need to go and buy something bulky. It’s far cheaper and convenient to only have use of a car when you really need it, rather than insisting on owning a ton and a half (the average car’s weight) of my very own private vehicle, which rots and depreciates monthly. But to make this change you have to let go of the deep fetish of the car cult’s MY car, then you can appreciate just having a service rather than ownership. Women naturally find this easier to do.
New armoured bulletproof SUV built for domestic use, is able to fire pepper spray
Cars contribute enormously to the atomisation of modern society. They are cocoons of individuality; your self ensconced in a metal bubble. If you travel in your own isolated box with your own sound system, you obviously don’t meet or interact with people on the street. The streets become no go areas for humans and pets and wild animals too. You don’t really see your local environment at all or feel connected to it like you would if you walk around.
Gary Numan, in his famous electro pop single, Cars, captures this sense of alienation and safety of being in your car.
Here in my car
I feel safest of all
I can lock all my doors
It’s the only way to live in cars
Commuter rush hours feature untold thousands of single occupancy drivers in their individual polluting pods, often barely moving and getting stressed out and frustrated. Governments spend vast amounts of money on road expansion but it is self-defeating; any temporary easing of snarl ups just leads to more road users and shifting the congestion points to somewhere else; and meanwhile our countryside suffers the blight from this never ending road building. It’s more and better public transport that we need instead. Historian and urban planner Lewis Mumford famously said that,
“Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.”
Cyclists are understandably intimidated by cars, and bicycle usage remains low in most places because it’s not safe given the way roads are laid out exclusively for car drivers. And the irrational sense of motorists feeling they own the roads doesn’t help. The immense unquestioned sense of entitlement of many car owners often leads to their visceral reaction to proposed safer low traffic neighbourhoods and to installing cycle lanes. Car drivers feel victimised by such moves and try to block or reverse such potential improvements to local life. We build for cars, not for people. New housing developments are still built around the centrality of cars, often with no public transport. The new estate layouts still mainly serve the car driver rather than the human beings who will live there. New housing projects help maintain the atomisation of modern life.
Rural roads are even more dangerous to those not protected in steel boxes. It’s dangerous to even walk or cycle down country lanes with their high hedges and zero pavement space, when at any moment a car may come hurtling round a corner at you. It means that for a couple living in a rural area, they are likely to need two cars to avoid being marooned and isolated and often feeling unable to go out anywhere on foot.
This all perpetuates the car economy. Many people acquire their vehicles by leasing and on average, this consumes almost 20% of their income. In my local and fairly deprived area, many have glitzy mercs and BMWs, a situation my local community charity calls bling poverty. Finance for fancy cars is easy to get, and is enticing, though the monthly payments you are then caught in, are steep. People unwittingly become car cult members while having to scrimp on food and their kids.
If I were in charge, I would ban all private cars from cities. There would be exemptions for those with disabilities and there could still be taxis, Ubers, and delivery vehicles. These would be electric and air quality would improve dramatically. There would be a single one way lane for the greatly reduced vehicular traffic and one side of each street could then be greened: planted up and giving everyone the chance of a growing patch if they would like one. This would really bring nature into the urban environment. The quality of life and health would definitely increase. I know this won’t happen any time soon, but this is my fantasy utopia.
A greened street in a Dutch city
And just to say, while electric vehicles are obviously the direction to go in, the biggest change needs to come by changing from private ownership to public transport. Otherwise there will be traffic jams of Teslas, and apart from exhaust emissions being removed by going electric, all the other problems I’ve talked about would still remain. Consumption of resources needs to decrease, whether they’re green or not. And we need to redesign our built environment for human beings to thrive in (and other nature too) rather than for cars.
