Here I am, then, sitting in the cafeteria of the hospital of a town about 30 miles away from Cambridge, having once again discharged my taxi-driving duties to bring my partner over here. The A-road connecting the two towns has recently had a substantial upgrade, and most of the journey is along fresh-surfaced dual carriageways. While the convenience of a quicker and easier trip is greatly appreciated, the road now has the soulless, dehumanised character of many of today's routes, which bypass the towns and villages through which once they passed. We build our highways from scratch 'in the middle of nowhere', as the saying goes, with the deliberate intention that they should not pass directly by and through human habitations and settlements.
This has involved a total transformation of one of the main purposes of roads. In the past, roads were designed for 'connecting people', to adapt a well-known corporate tag line. That is, they went directly to where people lived; they were for journeys by people to people – lifelines connecting people to each other and the outside world. And they operated at a human level: your journey not only took you to specific people, but you could and would have encounters along the way with people you hadn't intended to meet: other travellers, with whom you could exchange greetings because you were proceeding at a pace that allowed such pleasantries; or just people living and working by the wayside. And there were roadside inns, farms and villages where one's basic needs could be met and further human contact could be had.
Nowadays, along our soulless dual carriageways, chance encounters are often of the unwelcome kind: when your car breaks down, suddenly exposing you to a sense of vulnerability as an individual who find yourself alone in remote surroundings without the friendly assistance of strangers; or with strangers who appear willing to assist but whose motives you can't trust. Or when suddenly, you get stuck in a traffic jam that seems to extend further than the eye can see, caused by further road development or maintenance ahead, or yet another accident. However, in such circumstances, there is always the mobile phone to connect you back to civilisation: to summon break-down assistance, or to alert family or business colleagues that you have been unavoidably held up.
The mobile phone provides one of the main supporting infrastructures for roads that are built in the 'middle of nowhere': it enables a tenuous link to be maintained between the remote, impersonal road environment and the human environments that are the points of departure and arrival. This, plus the additional array of in-car entertainments and navigational aids with which we surround ourselves, allows us to fool ourselves that we are still in a human environment: that there is a kind of seamless connectivity between A and B that accompanies us on our way. The reality is that we have become disconnected from the physical environment through which we move, and that this is no longer a place that has a comfortable human face for us. So we hasten to pass through it as quickly as possible. Our car is a little bubble of civilisation: its synthetic, technological smells and air-conditioned atmosphere a welcome means for us to forget the carbon emissions we pour out into the sweet fresh air of nature; the radio or CD player a lullaby that makes us unconscious of the engine's roar.
Yet, the irony of the mobile phone – or what were originally called 'car phones' until their use got generalised across all our activities – is that, while it perfectly fulfils this purpose of keeping us connected to our activities and human contacts during the temporary suspension of our involvement with them as we pass through an alien landscape, it has not yet adapted itself to the real human situation of driving. It is dangerous to use the mobile, precisely, while we are mobile – at least in what might be described as the archetypal context for its use: the individual driver maintaining a connection with points A and B as (s)he drives between them. Just how dangerous is of course demonstrated by the terrible lethal accidents of which mobile-phone use while driving is still one of the main causes – such as the killing of that 64-year-old granny by a 19-year-old 'texter-driver' referred to in the previous post in this series. And yet, the very utility of the mobile phone for drivers as they are driving – delivery men keeping in contact with the logistics office; husband and father phoning to say he's on his way after being detained at that meeting; friends organising their evenings while travelling to meet up – is the very reason why the law proscribing mobile-phone use while driving is so regularly flouted. And why the mobile-phone companies have made damn sure they provide optimal connectivity alongside motorways and other major trunk routes.
I pointed to these paradoxes when I made a layperson's contribution to the public consultation on the proposed law banning mobile-phone use by drivers a few years ago: that the technology and infrastructure as it has been established and made readily available creates a reasonable expectation on the part of ordinary drivers that they should be allowed to use their mobile phones while actually on the move; and that there might be some mitigating circumstances where using one's phone could in fact be safer and more socially responsible than not – so long as it was genuinely safe to use the phone in the specific driving situation. These circumstances included things like arranging for someone to pick up the children from school if one had been badly delayed by the traffic; or a 'life and death' situation, where a woman, for instance, might feel she needed to call the police because she was afraid she was being followed by a potential aggressor and obviously, therefore, didn't wish to stop.
And this is one of the major problems: because our roads pass through the 'middle of nowhere' – and because they enable us to travel in a little cocoon of civilisation through areas we would never dream of visiting on foot, particularly at night – there are many roads where there just aren't enough safe places to stop. This is another way, as with the mobile, in which the support infrastructure and physical circumstances of driving are not adapted to real human needs and limitations. It always strikes me as absurd when you pass electronic signs on the motorway – messengers of some vague motorway-surveillance authority; but are there actually any people on the job sending and updating those messages? – reminding you that 'tiredness kills' and urging you to take a break; often when you are miles away from any service station, or even – on some A-roads – when most of the service stations are closed. Someone on high has recognised that the expectations that have been built into our road-transport system – that people should be able to undertake their journeys, contrary to the traditional pattern of human life and work, at any time of the day or week (24/7) – might just be a tad out of sync with the way our human minds and bodies work. We need to take a break, but we've built our roads in a way that deliberately and literally by-passes normal human life – facilitators of seamless transition from point to point but without any intrinsic human value or reality. So we then haven't created places along the way – such as the inns, farms and villages of old – where people can safely satisfy their basic needs and renew contact with their own and others' humanity.
Our journeys, then, have been transformed from intrinsically human events to a somewhat tedious process of transition between points A and B, where the space in between has no fundamental value or relevance for us. And the car is what has enabled this to take place. So what?, you might say: the benefits outweigh the costs. Well, I suppose that is the heart of the matter: what you think the real costs and benefits are, and how they balance out. There's no doubt that the environmental costs have been monumental and continue to get worse. How much of the world's carbon emissions are accounted for by the internal combustion engine? I don't know what the latest estimates are but I'm sure it must be much, much more than the 3% attributed to air travel that everyone seems conveniently to get so het up about. And the carbon cost is just one of the many environmental impacts that our thrall to the car has brought about.
But more so even than the direct consequences of car culture on the environment, it is the impact on the culture in general that needs to be re-examined – particularly, the way the car has contributed massively to the break down of communities, and our alienation from the physical and human world around us. The next entry will return to a discussion of these matters.
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