Cars and Freedom
I was challenged to a fight last Wednesday. A pot-bellied bedraggled black Toyota tail-gated me up the road as I cycled home from work, horn blaring intermittently. This on a residential street crammed with parked cars, with nowhere for me to go to allow him past.
Sadly this is fairly average, what happened next, not so much. He eventually tore past me. Slammed on the brakes, jumped out and started making simian arm gestures while shouting at me. “Come on then you c**t!”
I chose to mount the pavement, amused, and was quickly past him. He may have seen my smile. I may have blown him a kiss. He then roared past me again, and pulled in outside the local Spar. Out he lunges again, rotund in sweatpants and sports gear that’s never seen a gym. Right out in the middle of the road, screaming death and violence at me. I pulled in behind a parked car a distance back from him and folded my arms. This guy was clearly disturbed.
Or was he? Like I said, this behaviour is extreme, but not all that unusual. An outlier if you like, but still on the graph. As I watch him froth, dance and gesticulate, I ponder.
I know a lot of what I’m about to say isn’t going to make me popular. People like their cars. Car ownership has mushroomed in my lifetime. I understand the convenience and I have nothing against car use. It’s the model we have adopted as a society where every household has to own at least one car and have it sitting most of the time slowly rusting on the street. Car shares or car clubs, some form of shared use, communal, solution seems a much more sensible way to go. Have a car available when you need it, without permanent exclusive use of it. But folk like having their own personal vehicle.
So folk are often mildly surprised when I tell them I have never owned a car and never learned to drive. I’ve generally lived in urban areas and I don’t see the advantage. I get big grocery shopping delivered. I’m confident cycling, it keeps me fit and saves me money on a gym membership. (I’ve always found the drive-to-a-gym-to-do-a-spin-class-like-a-lab-rat thing a bit weird.) Any time that I have to get somewhere remote I happily spend the money I save from owning a car on taxis. This has worked well so far.
So I suppose I am coming from an observers perspective. I’ve never been in the car owners club but from the outside looking in there are a few things that seem pretty clear.
Cars are sold as freedom, but they deliver the opposite. Look at car advertising. It’s all open roads and sweeping vistas, soaring alpine or coastal views. The reality is gridlock and crawling through tarmacked urban decay. There’s not even the freedom to read a book or stare out the window of a train while you drive yourself to work. This is part of the problem, when folk buy a car they think it will give them this sense of freedom, an escape from the grind of commute, work, commute, sleep, repeat. Instead of the promised freedoms folk get bills. Insurance, maintenance, fuel, none of it cheap and all compounded by inexorable depreciation in the value of your car as it sits outside your house. You end up working more to pay for your transport to work. This is not freedom.
Cars are sold as safe, but again don’t cut it. Brake, the road safety charity points out that every 16 minutes someone is killed or seriously injured on UK roads. 1608 deaths and 26701 serious injuries in 2021 alone and these numbers are more or less constant over time. This is not acceptable. Yet people think that by putting their family into a glass and plastic box then hurtling down a stretch of tarmac at 70 mph they are making a safe choice. Never mind the danger to pedestrians, made considerably worse with the rise in 4x4s in urban areas, a particular danger to young children. I’m a typical Gen Xer who grew up in the 70’s and 80’s when we could play outside on Glasgow streets without much fear of motorised death. We went out after homework and tea and stayed out until the street lights came on. This sort of play simply isn’t a thing any more. This is a tragedy that’s largely down to the rise in the number of cars in residential streets. Parents are scared, and rightly so. This isn’t a safe transport system.
There’s a deeper aspect to the safety illusion. The idea that you are somehow insulated, separate, cut off from the world in your mobile living room. If I cycle through an Aberdeenshire village, the bloke cutting the hedge waves and smiles, I am greeted and acknowledged as part of the scene, not ignored as a dangerous object hurtling through it. This adds to atomisation in society. Cars give folk the impression of being in a cocoon, apart from people around them. On public transport or on foot you are forced to at least acknowledge fellow humans, and sometimes you even get a chat. Cars encourage seeing other people as obstacles, obstructions in the way of their journey.
At some level I think car owners know all this. It’s just hard for anyone to admit that they have made a wrong choice. Essentially that they have been fooled into buying into the money pit of car ownership. Is this the root of Toyota man’s rage?
Cars are sold as status symbols and sources of freedom and happiness, but they only seem to me to be a money sink and a source of stress. Maybe that stress is the root of his anger at me, or maybe he was just having a bad day. After a couple of minutes he got tired, the rush of blood passed. That or the 5 young lads laughing and pointing at him made him see what a fool he was being and he growled off. I cycled home, listening to the blackbirds.
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The fairly universal attachment to ‘cars’ is a vestige of a former society becoming ridiculous in it’s extravagance and self-indulgence. The planet can’t afford it but that doesn’t dissuade the car drivers living in the past. It’s a similar selfish approach to that which results in the burgeoning private jet flight market or even the idea many have that they are somehow entitled to fly off to the sun on holiday and to hell with the consequences (Heathrow apparently had its busiest day yesterday since before the pandemic). We live in a world where the buyers of school-run Land Rover Defenders (£100k a pop) don’t realise how stupid they look.
I agree with many of your sentiments and would posit that in many the car is an extension of their ego, rather than being seen as a tool it is considered a part or extension of their self. I would like to ditch the car as most of the time it sits unused or underutilised, however, I am a rural dweller in Dumfries and Galloway where there are no car clubs, no trains and few buses. Good transport is not only a necessity for city dwellers but essential for rural dwellers.
I also am a ruralist, but yearn for better ‘public’ transport connections amongst rural communities. Our reliance on the private car, while ‘convenient’, detracts from the possibility of such better public transport. (I acknowledge the benefit to myself of the free travel, and of the recently-introduced free travel for young folk.) But we rural communities are just as neglected as many of the deprived and run-down inner city areas that have suffered from the ‘care-less’ Tory rule of the past decade and a half. There is no need for this neglect; a new approach to wealth, land and the health of the biosphere; a new ‘care-ful’ system of taxation and social security that recognises and valorises the validity of ‘care’ and of ‘community’ is urgently needed.
We are rushing headlong into a desperate future for our children and grandchildren, and our governments have become greedy, corrupt, lazy and complacent, and really don’t ‘care’.
Nice article Doug. I liked the line, ‘We went out after homework and tea and stayed out until the street lights came on’. Being from the same generation, it’s easy to forget how free we once was, as this was once the norm for kids up and down these islands. There was a youth club down ‘our end’ but I hardly needed to go, because we just played in the streets. Whole games of football played across roads, gate posts to gate posts as goals. Maybe every 10 minutes (sometimes longer) a shout went up “car!’ , everyone would stop, wait for it to pass, then the game would resume.
These days kids are lucky to have a youth club down their end, and certainly no football in the streets, even for the less busy ones due to the bumper to bumper parked cars rusting away…
Hey Scott,
Yeah the effect on children being able to play outdoors is often blamed on “stranger danger” but in reality it’s cars that are the problem. There’s a whole other discussion that comes off of that though on how patterns of play have been affected in late capitalism.
I share your concerns about the lack of youth clubs or the like. So many young people with nowhere to go that doesn’t cost money, the result of commodification of public space and cuts to spending on these vital resources. Then folk are outraged when they see young people hanging around at malls or on the street…
@Doug Haywood, well, it is kind of both, isn’t it? The ease of child abduction off streets is facilitated by enclosed prison-like vehicles which can be speedily driven from the area without checkpoints to any part of the country.
“A whistleblower, who works for Home Office contractor Mitie, and child protection sources describe children being abducted off the street outside the hotel and bundled into cars.”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/21/revealed-scores-of-child-asylum-seekers-kidnapped-from-home-office-hotel
Not all car drivers, of course, but there tends to be a closing of ranks anyway. The range of crimes associated with cars (and other privately-owned motor vehicles) is extensive, of course.
I see research by TomTom has just shown that driving speeds in Edinburgh are around 19mph – about the speed of a trotting horse. It backs up the maths by Ivan Ilych (‘Energy and Equity’ c1970s) which shows that when you add together the time spent driving, the time spent working to pay to buy the car, fuel it, repair it and tend to it, then divide by the average number of miles driven per annum you get an average speed of roughly 10mph – that achieved by a fairly slow Victorian horse. That’s what we call progress.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-64641426
A pal of mine used to live in Chiswick (West London). The local paper had regular letters of complaint about how the drays from Young’s brewery were holding up traffic – when, in fact, they weren’t. You’d move faster but have to stop more often, whilst the horse would just keep plodding on and arrive around the same time.
I have recently bought a year’s bus pass as an experiment. I found myself buying 3 or 4 day tickets each week for going to weekend films/gigs/pubs and so on and found that a pass would be cheaper – and allow me to use services not permitted to the day ticket. As a result, I have started taking the bus to work, which is a bit of a pain in that I have to be at the bus stop at 7.30am to get to work for 9 – but if I sleep in, I have the motorbike as backup. I also have a van (useful tool; just back from a loan to a friend) and a car that I don’t use much. Pushbikes too, but I don’t use them as much as I should.
I have also been racing cars for the last 25 years (done now, I think); despite that, I’m quite a light fuel user compared to the average. My annual mileage was low before I took the bus pass – all of my vehicles didn’t add up to the annual Glass’ Guide mileage by some margin – so it’ll be interesting to see what they end up like this year. I would like to add that riding a motorbike can do wonders for your well-being, even if it’s raining heavily. It’s like dancing in the traffic, sometimes.
I don’t get annoyed at cyclists generally, but I wish that a certain number of them would set their bikes up better. Is this because they’ve been bought online, or are shops just concerned with sales and not aftersales? Saddle height, feet sticking out and/or in the wrong place on the pedal, bike frame too big or too small. And then there’s headphones…
Toyota Man’s problems may well come from elsewhere; work, home, money, kids – and the only way he sees of expressing this may come in random situations. I’m not defending him; just wondering why.
It’s a depressing situation isn’t it. I live in a village in West Lothian and at night when everyone is home it looks like a car park with some houses in it.
I own a small hatchback purely out of necessity but I appreciate the absurdity of mass private car ownership and the damage it is doing. Sadly so many young people can’t wait to get on the road.
The author mentions car advertising which, when it is for electric cars always shows the vehicle driving by wind turbines. They are implying that EVs are environmentally benign, which they most certainly are not.
When I retire I will happily become car free.
Great article, Douglas, thanks!
My own experience is the same. My wife and I have never owned a car, by choice.
Although I live in Glasgow, I have not worked within the city since 1982. I have always used public transport or walked or cycled to get to work in places like Shotts in the east and Johnstone to the west. On occasions, I was given a lift to work by sincerely generous colleagues. However, the times on the journeys were not significantly different from public transport, but were often fraught due to congestion and poor driver conduct – a very small minority, but given the number of cars, at least one is encountered on any journey. I mostly used the train and this gave me time to read the newspaper, read documents or just look at the window and relax after a day’s work. When I worked in Shotts I had an hour between the end of work and the next rain. I used to go for a swim or a run. These were great ways to unwind after work.
The last oaf I encountered was about two years ago as I cycled home along a residential street with parking on both sides. He was parked in the middle of the road, engine running. There was a narrow space between his car and the parked ones, so I cycled slowly along it. Unfortunately, he had dropped a drinks can out the window and as my front wheel hit it, I wobbled. I placed my had on the car roof to steady myself and continued. He was out of the car like a bat out of hell: “You touched my car,” he shouted. I replied that if he had been considerate of other road users I would not have had to squeeze past.To which he replied, “I can do what I fucking like and no cunt is going to stop me.”
If you accept the idea of a global per-person energy budget, expressed in Watts, as explained in Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics by Troy Vettesse and Drew Pendegrass, then no plan for survival will accommodate private fossil-fuelled motor vehicles.
https://www.half.earth/
An interesting book with many reasonable ideas, though not without a few flaws, I’d say.
As a child, I was well aware of the tsumani of propaganda gushing towards me from the automotive industry. I had turned away from cars by adulthood, but I understand the allure. By no means are cars essential for human life, quite the opposite really. Yes, optimal transport implementations for rural and other areas have to come from political change, and a rebalancing of the world. But we can start now. Without the prospect of mass buy-in years ahead, automative industries will collapse in the near future anyway, and bringing that forward will bring forth alternatives. Hopefully not a rise in personal armoured vehicles, a line of Mad Max specials appearing at your local showroom.