I Hate Cars

That there should be more than adequate public transport all around in areas of high population, like Orange County, is to me a given. That I definitely do regret, along with the added pollution more cars make and many other points besides. But there's always going to be room in my silly heart for the type of dumb fun a Hal Needham film will provide. Cannonball Run, where art thou?

Talk of the "Golden Age of the Automobile" is unimpressive: think of Raymond Roussel tooling around Europe in his enormous automobile roulotte, with sleeping quarters for servants and all mod cons (Mussolini, naturally, was impressed), and of Isodora Duncan's, erm, auto-asphyxiation. Late modern takes on Roussel and Duncan: Tati's demonstration van in "Traffic" and Jayne Mansfield on Interstate 10. Contemporarily: the fact that five of six vehicles on American commuter highways seem to be SUVs, and Air Bag Death Syndrome.

The post-war years (the Tati and Mansfield era!): inventive car design, first rate engineering, an auto industry that (thanks to aggressive unions) provided well for the working class. And at least until the early 1970s the passenger railways, and splendid old train cars, hadn't been dismantled. If we're recapturing a moment in the past, can't we do it without thinking of what would be to come? And then, cars were tools of liberation for drag-racing, sex-obsessed teenagers. I suppose it was those same people who, recognizing in some way the use of the car as a political tool, made their SUVs into "suits of armour."

If we could get rid of cars tomorrow I'd be perfectly happy...as long as I could still ensure that I could reach the places I need to go.

However, I need cars for medium and long distances! It's very nice for people who can always ride trains, subways, and airplanes wherever they need to go. I'm envious. We can't all afford to fly more than once a year, so outlawing cars would keep me from going on most vacations unless they were extensive bike trips. Also, I live in a rural school district. If I biked to school, it would take me just under an hour if I rode quickly and smelled horrible for the rest of the day. There are buses twice daily, but not for going in early or staying late for practices and rehearsals. And trains and subways? HERE? Those are luxuries of the city, Momus.

Cars are going to have to stay until I can find some other way to go places. If you want to get rid of them in cities, that's fine, and you've got a precedent. Carriages were not allowed in ancient Rome's city limits. You can be philosophically anti-car, but pragmatically they're fairly necessary for people who don't want to live in a manner so old-fashioned that they have to marry within a twenty mile radius of their homes.

Imagine you have the choice of two men, Man A and Man B. Assume you're all living downtown in a city with fairly adequate public transport. The two men are alike in every way (attractiveness, income level, etc) but Man A owns a car and Man B refuses to, on principle. Which do you choose? Is Man B's idealism a turn-on, or is Man A's environmental recklessness sexy in the same self-destructive, don't-give-a-fuck way smoking cigarettes is?

My hatred of cars started when I got back from Europe six years ago, when after going all over the place on trains spoiled me and all of the traffic that never really got to me that much started to annoy me greatly. Now that I live just across the river from NYC, I take public transportation exclusively and only rent cars when I have to visit the folks in Princeton.

I think there's something to the (erroneous) equation many Americans have that cars=freedom/individualism. I would love to see public transportation take over as the predominant means of moving people around. But it will take a commitment from local and federal authorities that won't be forthcoming any time soon. In no small part because government has to be involved for a public transportation system to work properly and serve the most people, because the high infrastructure and equipment costs as well as the fact that many (if not most) train and bus lines will be money losers mean that there will be little if any profit to ever be made from it. Yet another failure of the laissez-faire mindset of certain American policymakers and opinion-mongerers.

And I'd choose Man B obviously. Alpha maleness is all in the thighs of the beholder anyway, and if both men are equally attractive - we can easily move on to cold hard facts. We both live in the big exciting city right, so who needs to go anywhere else on any semi- regular basis, save to visit relatives? And since they are exactly alike, minus said car, Man B will have thousands and thousands more dollars to put towards his astronomical city rent, while Man A is likely living IN his car. Is there really a question here?

so Um Momus/Nick, how on earth can you sincerely say that "in 2001 you love computers", all the while saying something else that completely kicks the legs out from under it with "I love life, therefore I hate cars"? These things don't exist in isolation after all, so isn't it irrelevant to apply those kinds of separate aesthetic critiques to them?

Anyway, I have no clue why I'm pressing this. It's not one of my big issues or anything. Just had the thought. 'Night all.

i think you can figure out where i stand on this issue.

Last year, when hauliers blockaded petrol depots in Britain as a protest against high fuel taxation, a perhaps unpredicted result was the space and freedom afforded to pedestrians because the petrol shortages forced drivers to really consider whether individual journeys were worth the limited fuel supply. It was fabulous; buses got to destinations more quickly, cyclists rode pretty much without fear of being pranged. THE STREETS WERE EMPTY. It was a surreal and pleasant couple of weeks.

I must confess that my bike hasn't come out to play for a month or so - I have good transport links nearby and a fear of getting mown down by the lorries that drive past my window. Also, I absolutely adore black cabs (which constitute a kind of public transport).

Thing is, nearly every hardcore driver I know SAYS they'd happily give up their wheels for the purposes of commuting, but when it comes down to it, they don't. I think we should all know how to drive, just so we can hire a car for road trips (fun/necessary) or just in case of an emergency.

There are some ingenious, beautifully-engineered little folding bikes here in Tokyo which cost almost as much as cars, and are ironically sometimes made by car companies (eg Peugot Japan) and sold in car showrooms as rinky dinky little accessories to stow in your SUV.

The idea being that you drive to a beauty spot, polluting as you go, releasing carbon monoxide and CO2 into the atmosphere, causing global warming and irreversible climate change, leaving a trail of small animals fatally wounded by the roadside, contributing to Bush's re- election campaign funds when you stop for fuel and making all the more inevitable the refinerisation of the Alaskan nature reserves... then you hop on your bike and enjoy Nature.

By public transportation, my commute to work is AT LEAST 1 hour 10 minutes.

Also, by driving I spent a total of $130 on transportation and lodging for a wedding in Ontario this past June. Without a car, I would have had to pay something on the order of $800 to $1000, meaning I wouldn't have been able to go.

I'll stick with my car, thanks.

So much of Britain's pathetic dependency on the car is the fault of the car-worshippers (and "future" / technology-worshippers more generally) of the Macmillan era, who might have given us something as unquestionably great as "Telstar", but also landed us with this mess.

Amusingly the bike-sold-by-car-company story Momus recounts is virtually indistinguishable from the paradoxical "preserve the countryside but keep us free to pollute it as much as we damn well want" slant of the hauliers who also seem to be heavily in league with the Countryside Alliance. What Suzy mentions was the one good thing to come out of an apparently negative event, something which may cut through the hauliers' self-interest in the long term (good thing too).

Fucking cars.Fucking cars! The fucking ruiner of all things good. Never had a car, never want one. Why would I want to buy a ton of metal to crawl to the shops and back? I just don't get it, because this 'freedom' the car drivers speak of - WHERE IS IT? All I can see, all I ever see is people locked in their seperate tin boxes going back... and forth... and back... and forth, slowly following each other down the same roads day in, day out, day in, day out.
Me, on the other hand, leave for work each morning and walk past the huge, long line of traffic that cra-a-w-w-ls into the city centre, moving, then stopping, moving, then stopping - I can walk faster than the cars can move! FACKT! And when I'm across the Severn bridge, I turn off and walk the rest of my journey to work along the river, under the trees and I watch the swans glide serenely about and the din of traffic slowly fades away...
Plus if I had a car I would have to leave my house earlier as the one way system where I live means that drivers have to go right round the reekin to get anywhere. Seems I am the one with the freedom, and nor do I have to pay for the privillage.
Cars = constant drain on resources, road rage, isolation and WAY too many accidents. Momus is right, the immense death toll due to car accidents is disgusting. So many deaths - not counting none-fatal accidents - would not be tolerated if it was caused by anything else, and it simply cannot be justified in any way. So what if it would take longer for some people to get to work.
Cars = spiritual & psychic [and literal] death.

Plus... everyone looks stupid in a car.

Plus - car journeys are BORING. Travelling any distance by car is just so cripplingly, appallingly dull, fucking dull, DULL. Like a motorway - dark, grey and long. Endless grey, endless cars. Anything and everything is better.

"I had a dream where the car is reduced to a fossil"

http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0074/0074_01.asp

a must read

The more I put off getting my license, the more I detest my carless situation. I live in a fairly large metro area with a moderately okay bus line, but I can't even begin to tell you how many job opportunities I've had to turn down because they were in Eden Prairie or White Bear Lake or some other suburb that's a 45-minute drive but doesn't even have bus service past a certain time of day. And since I rely on the bus and feel like a self-conscious idiot carrying large amounts of goods down their skinny aisles on my way to one of the few open seats, attempting to maintain my balance while standing/walking in a vehicle going 30-40 MPH, I don't often go out shopping for any sizeable purchases other than groceries. If I want to go out and get a new turntable or take my computer in to be upgraded, I have to get a ride. Fah to that.

And when I do get a car, it probably won't be some SUV monstrosity or a pollution-belching '70s behemoth (as terribly horribly badly as I would die to have a '71 Charger R/T or a Javelin AMX). I'll probably wind up with a Civic or a Celica or if I'm lucky a WRX (can't ride no bike in Minnesota in January, man, you gotta move through on 4WD Colin McRae style).

It's not so much that everyone owns a car than it is that everyone drives it when they don't need to. Commutes I can understand if, like me, you work somewhere that you can get to quicker than the bus does since it avoids the congested freeways (or happens to be at a time when the freeways aren't congested in the least). But if the video store is ten blocks away and it's nice out, the hell with it, just walk or bike or whatever.

I am willing to make one concession: "Tour De France" is a cooler Kraftwerk song than "Autobahn".

Nate's points are sound, but could be addressed by funding far better public transport. I believe in cutting car use, but the best way to do that is improving the alternatives, maybe at the same time as discouraging cars. We shortly have a new initiative in central London, where it will cost like £5 a day to drive into the centre; all funds raised by this are going into improving public transport. How far this will get us I don't know, but I applaud the intent. If there were three times as many buses, Nate, doing without a car would be much more tolerable.

No they couldn't. I'd still be lugging three bags of groceries and a 12-pack of Coke on the 63 and smashing the eggs when the bus driver decides that waiting for me to set my groceries down before pulling out is too inconvenient for him.

Oh. My. God. I cannot believe that I ever wrote this!

go to the grocery store more often and buy less

stop buying groceries

I have attempted solution 1 by getting some things at the Walgreen's two blocks from me. Solution 2 seems slightly impractical.

nb this is not a criticism, people who refuse to contradict themselves are dullards

having a car is for many people an excellent transportation value.

the main thing i dislike about my car is that i am often angry while i'm in it.

as far as "i love computers" vs. "i hate cars": let's not pretend that computer manufacture is environmentally friendly! silicon valley, for example, is incredibly polluted. i remember driving past vacant lots that were rendered unusable due to such heavy contamination, right in the middle of town. a sign in the laundry of my sister's apartment building warned "this property contains chemicals known to the state of california to cause cancer in humans." hooray!

http://www.checnet.org/healthehouse/education/articles-detail.asp?Main_ID=142

I've yet to see a trail of dead animals and other 'roadkill' behind my computerlook in the poisoned river, they're floating in there!

Josh: I ordered a sammich from Jimmy John's!

Wow. dave q. Wow.

yeah i have. and then i moved somewhere with a supermarket down the street. problem solved.

Cars kill more people per year than anything else ever and yet no one calls for them to be evil or banned or anything, its crazy.

elvis telecom, felicity redwell, and i'm pretty sure that's it, unless shared cabs and rental cars count.

xpost

And yeah Jim it was from the Robbers, from memory.

I can't stand riding the bus here. Everyone's so familiar but in an annoying way. I really liked riding Toronto and NY subways, actually. No one really liked it when I chatted up that insane Vietnam vet but I was on his side so I knew it would be ok.

I also could not cope with public transportation. Having a vehicle frees me up in that I at least have the belief that I can "go anywhere". Having a vehicle prevents me from being on someone else's schedule, from having to rely on someone else's assistance, from following someone else's path. Like I've said here before, I could not possibly get all that I needed to get done if I had to rely on the bus as my form of transportation, and it seems (from what I've heard, anyway) that subway systems only really work if you live in the central part of any city. That's really limiting, and I guess one of the few ways I actually live up to the Texan stereotype is that I really HATE being limited.

So, unlike some here, I will continue to love vehicles, to think of some of them, at least, as quite beautiful. I'm very willing to modify them so they can get better gas mileage (30 mpg sounds reasonable enough) and don't go cruising or anything similarly wasteful, but I still want to be left at the end of the day with my trusty and reliable vehicle.

I hate cars.

I wanted to start a thread about my hate for cars, but this one was already here.

I fuckin hate cars!!