The local press here in Cambridge, along with local people – to judge from the press's reported swelling mailbag – has been up in arms this week about plans to introduce a limited version of London's Congestion Charge. People would be charged for any driving they did within the bounds of the city – admittedly, only a relatively small area – during the morning rush hour between 7.30 and 9.30. Too bad for all those urban tractor-driving school-run mums, if they exist in Cambridge – Cambridge is probably more aptly described as the land of the sensible, environmentally-friendly super-mini second family car. They'd be charged the same fee as the lolloping 4x4s in any case – possibly, an incentive to get one: it would certainly encourage more car sharing; or would it?
We're so used to the madness of modern driving and the hopelessly inadequate measures to control it that we've become immune to it. Driving really isn't a sensible modern means of mass transportation in many circumstances any more. But we're wedded to the ideal of car ownership and driving because of the ideal of personal liberty with which it is bound up in our minds, along with the whole culture and romance of driving, associated with power, the thrill of speed, technology, wealth and social status. I used to enjoy driving for some of those very reasons, but it's increasingly become a stressful chore and more often an impingement rather than an enhancement of my liberty, as I literally spend hours taxi-ing my non-driving, mildly disabled partner around between appointments and 'essential' shop visits, thereby greatly taking advantage of the benefit of ' flexible' working hours that my work as a freelance writer and researcher supposedly affords me.
Clearly, there are some activities and situations where driving is the most convenient, even necessary, mode of transport, e.g. carting kids around on their hectic and random timetable of social, scholastic and leisure engagements; transporting infirm or disabled persons; emergencies; and those 'essential' out-of-town-centre superstore visits – but is that really the best and most enjoyable way to bring in the provisions? But equally, there are possibly more situations where the alternatives to driving either are already or could be both more practical and enjoyable, not just from the green perspective but from that of quality of life.
For me, it sometimes requires a situation where I have to walk, rather than hop into the car, to appreciate how much I'm missing through all the driving. I recently took a 2½ mile walk from one village, where my car was being serviced, back to the village I live in and was struck by the landscape I was walking through in quite a dramatic, unexpected way. My whole perspective on the physical environment was shifted; there were so many things I hadn't noticed and so much hidden beauty along this stretch of road I'd covered in the car a thousand times before. It was really a kind of epiphany, and I thought to myself that if my circumstances changed, I would drastically cut down my car usage – maybe even get rid of it altogether. That could be quite liberating!
My experience during what our non-car-owning forefathers would have considered to be a very short walk brought home to me just how much not only our physical environment but also our ability to connect with it has been degraded by the car. The road I was walking on for half of the journey was a major A-road, albeit one-lane; and on the face of it, it really wasn't a pleasant environment to be walking through. An endless string of large lorries, vans and cars came thundering past, literally shaking the ground and stirring my hair with the wind drag. Some of the drivers appeared surprised and even suspicious to see a pedestrian of what I like to call 'smart-shabby' appearance walking in their direction, even though there was a footpath. And really, it was not a road you would normally have chosen to walk along because of all the noise and pollution; indeed, I don't think I ever had walked along there throughout the 11 years I'd been living in one of the villages it connected to the outside world, although I'd cycled along it back in 1997! And yet, as I say, there was so much to see and enjoy.
It's difficult to envisage how we can ever become 'environmentally sensitive' in our automotive usage and technology, and in our technology per se, unless we become truly sensitive to the environment: aware of our surroundings, emotionally attached to them, and concerned about what happens to the physical fabric of the places where we live. But the car, even the more eco-friendly variety, tends mostly to militate against such an engagement with the environment. The places the car allows us to access become both symbolically, and on occasions literally, no man's lands: places we pass through, at speed, on the way to our destination; not an intrinsically valuable, indeed priceless, reality that can enrich and interact with our senses and emotions at every step – nor, indeed, a landscape filled with human activity and life of which we are and feel a part (rather than from which we are apart).
As I write this, I've become struck by a sudden increase in road traffic passing through the village high street on which I live. There must have been an accident or some other hold up on one or other of the local arterial routes. It's usually the A14, which has one of the densest vehicle-per-hour ratios and highest accident rates in the country. Whenever there is an accident – often fatal – the whole road system for miles around can get grid-locked. I remember one occasion when it took over four hours to make the five-mile journey back home, when the A14 and surrounding routes got paralysed by a sudden heavy snowfall to which the gritters did not react in time. Some poor folk were stranded in their frozen vehicles for 24 hours.
There's much that could be said about the madness of that. But I wanted to make a couple of observations about my road. The reason why I noticed the sudden increase in traffic is that normally, outside peak hours such as rush hour, lunch time or school pick-up time, the road outside is generally quite quiet – apart from, ironically, six o'clock in the morning when the postal truck unloads its cargo at the village sorting office next door! (But then, given my 'flexible' working hours, I'm normally up at that time anyway trying to catch up on time lost on taxi duty the day before!) But then occasionally, some driver (and not just the boy racer type) sees fit to let rip on the accelerator as soon as he turns on to the road and storms along at 50 mph+. This turns me instantly into 'indignant from Cambridge', as it just seems so needlessly reckless and dangerous, especially as it is a residential road with a school on it.
Mostly, this behaviour happens in the evening, when there are few pedestrians, let alone children, about. But that's not really the point: with the freedom that car ownership brings should come the responsibility of driving safely; or at least as safely as possible and practical, given the fact that driving is inherently a life-threatening activity, as the rate of accidents on the A14 – many of which are not due to driver error – testifies.
And that brings me to the question of what is the acceptable level of risk, injury and fatalities that society should be prepared to accept from widespread car ownership and usage? And that is a question I will consider in the next instalment of this blog.
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