Cars drive us

[matril]

If you've seen my previous rants about cell phones, you've probably pegged me as a Luddite (albeit a hypocritical one who uses the Internet all the time. ;) I hate how they're becoming a necessity rather than an optional luxury, and I hate how things like pay phones and even regular landlines are being phased out in favor of cell phones. But that's nothing to the subject of my current rant. I hate cars. I hate how they've become a necessity rather than an optional luxury, and how they've phased out such modes of transporation as riding a bike or, say, walking.


Here's a list of reasons why I hate cars:

-They cost oodles of money to own, but even when that's paid off, you're constantly throwing money at them for maintenance, repairs, registration, inspections, not to mention frequent offerings to the mighty god of gasoline.

-Unlike owning a home, it's basically throwing money into a bottomless pit that will never, ever pay you back, and eventually, assuming it doesn't get wrecked, you will either sell it for far less than you bought it, or just drive it into the ground.

-Since we have become a car-based world, we have made it impossible for anyone to get much of anywhere if they don't have a car. Residential areas and commercial zones are most severely separated - there's hardly ever a corner grocery store anymore. Stores have to have massive parking lots - which are often still not massive enough - because no one is close enough to walk there. You cannot get by without a car unless you live in the middle of a city with excellent public transportation, and far too many cities don't invest in a decent transportation system, because hey, everyone has a car, right?

-I'm no environmentalist, but good grief, cars totally trash the ecosystem. Making hybird cars is only putting a teeny band-aid over an enormous, festering wound. It's an all-too-common trait of humanity. Rather than going for the obvious solution that demands a major change - becoming much less dependent on cars - we just scramble around for some way to keep living the same comfortable lives we want to live without feeling quite as guilty about it.

-All of the great big mess in the Middle East is directly caused by our addiction to automobiles. What the heck do we need all that oil for? Certainly not for food, shelter, or clothing. But cars have become the fourth necessity of life, and the world is suffering for it.

-Cars are deadly weapons. No, really. Vehicular homicide is not a metaphorical term. Ironically, people tend to get more stupid rather than less when driving cars. They see other cars as objects getting in their way rather than vehicles with living people in them. They risk their lives and the lives of others to shave mere seconds of time off their drive. I know; I've done it myself. It's like we drop several points in IQ while driving. And we let 16-year-olds behind the wheels of these things? Is any degree of convenience worth all the deaths every year due to car crashes?

All right, I'm well aware of the great advantages cars bring us. We can travel much farther distances, we don't have to depend on public transit, blah blah blah. I just think the cons far outweight the pros. I'm also aware that my complaints stem partly from the fact that we only have one car and when my husband drives it to work, I'm pretty much trapped within our immediate neighborhood. But it's just made me all the more aware of how much our world has been shaped to accomodate cars, and that seems a terrible shame.

I doubt this will ever happen, because people don't like to change, and they especially don't like to sacrifice convenience, but here's what I wish for. More tightly-knit communities, where shops, banks, libraries and other such stuff are all in easy distance of homes, for biking and even plain old walking. I wish that all cities had safe, dependable public tranportation systems. We'd have cleaner air, we'd get more exercise, we'd have far fewer accidents, and we might actually step outside and interact with other people instead of seeing them as things in our way. It's a pretty unlikely dream, but I hope at least something changes, because the way things are right now is downright troubling. To paraphrase Thoreau: we don't drive cars. Cars drive us.

Comments

[krpalmer.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm pretty lucky when it comes to my neighbourhood. When moving to start my current job, I had to find a place to live in a hurry, but managed to come across somewhere where, although I do have to drive out into the country to get to work, I can walk to the grocery store, walk to the library, and bicycle to my church in the summer... (I suppose what would make it that much better is if the person in the townhouse condominium beside me would stop playing bass-heavy music through the walls.) Just because I'm lucky, though, doesn't mean I shouldn't stop thinking about how to help other people get the same sort of thing.