Car Culture: Time For a Change? (Part Four)

Possibly the most significant impact the car has had on the human environment is its contribution to the erosion of communities. There was some radio poll earlier this week, when people were asked to vote for their choice of the greatest contemporary social problem - or some such. I won't bore you with my Top Ten; but my number one is definitely the break down of community. Of course, a topic like this is itself somewhat question-begging. What do you mean by 'community'? Are you in danger of sentimentalising the value of community per se or the qualities of specific communities in the past? Would you really want to live in a close-knit community where everyone knows each other's business - having grown used to the privacy and self-reliance of modern living?

There undoubtedly is an element of viewing things through rose-tinted spectacles when we talk nostalgically about the loss of community. However, the absence of community throughout much of modern Britain, and the sense that it is something that we've lost, is undeniable. But how much of this is really attributable to the car? The decline in communities is usually ascribed to more general socio-cultural trends such as greater social 'mobility'; technology reducing our dependence on other people; increased materialism and individualism; women's access to work and careers diminishing the time and energy they have to devote to community building, which was largely driven by women in the past; the collapse of traditional social structures that gave people a sense of their place within a community, such as marriage, class and the church; and the increased levels of crime and delinquency, making people feel unsafe and forcing them to retreat into their own homes.

All of these are of course contributory factors, although some of them are arguably more by-products of community break down rather than causes. The car is another such contributory factor: it is, to coin a metaphor, an accelerator of all of the above trends. It's possible to think of ways in which the rise of universal car ownership has facilitated each of these social changes. For 'social mobility' substitute mobility in general: the way in which - in part thanks to the car - people are no longer tied to a particular locality (viz community) to be the centre of their personal or work life. Similarly, because of automotive technology, we are no longer dependent on public (local community-provided) transport, or on assistance in moving ourselves and our possessions provided by neighbours or local acquaintances. Women's access to careers, too, has been greatly advanced by their access to cars, meaning they have far more choice about the jobs they do; their work becomes personal and aspirational, rather than being involved in the provision of basic services to a local community, which was often the only work available to women.

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, I used to think it was ridiculous and - when I learnt the meaning of the term - decadent for households to own more than one car. This was based on the model that father either used the car for work, in which case mother didn't need a car (because she either didn't have a job at all or, if she did, this was more locally based); or else, father used public transport to get to work and mother than had the use of the car (which was my childhood situation). Nowadays, of course, it's common to see houses with at least two, sometimes as many as four or five, cars in the front drive and in what used to be called the front garden: at least one for each of the master and mistress of the household, along with cars for each of the grown-up children as they stay on in the parental home increasingly longer. And indeed, it would be hard for the families involved to envisage how they could manage without their cars if they all have 'no alternative' other than to travel out to work and to use the car for social life - neither of which are centred around their local area. For myself, I grumble about having to provide an unpaid taxi service to my non-driving partner. But I wonder what the effect on our relationship would be if she did pass a driving test and acquire a car. Would we miss the time we spend together in the car and the opportunity it provides to talk about things? Would our lives diverge even more if, instead of using only one car to go about our chores and our pleasures (the more sociable and greener option), we started using two? Individual cars lead to separate lives and careers, which in turn so often lead to separation.

I'm not trying to imply that women shouldn't enjoy the independence and freedoms which the car has played its part in bringing about. The car has undoubtedly brought tremendous social benefits - but, as I've said before, there has also been a social cost. One of the biggest of these, related to the whole community question, is the restriction of our children's freedom to roam and play outdoors. The two main reasons why parents are so afraid to let their children go out on their own nowadays are both directly car-related: 1) they could get run over; 2) they could be abducted (most easily by someone driving a car or van who can whisk them away in a flash).

The first of these concerns relates to the fact that we have still not adapted to the lethal potential of the car, in ways that I've discussed in previous instalments of this blog series. This is ultimately a case of our tolerating a certain quotient of child fatalities because of our personal and economic dependence on the car. But if we really wanted to put a stop to these accidents and reduce at least this aspect of our fear for our children, then only radical measures would do, such as banning cars and commercial vehicles altogether from driving through residential areas in hours when children are about, and imposing strict speed restrictions backed up by draconian penalties for violations - and even more so for any accidents involving children that still occurred. Is this a social cost we'd be prepared to pay to protect our children and let them play outdoors; or is endangering children's lives the cost we're willing to pay for the convenience of driving around wherever and whenever we want? And it's not just a case of reducing the number of road deaths but of a massive quality-of-life improvement that could result: for our kids who could suddenly reclaim the great outdoors; for parents who would no longer need to live in fear; and for all the 'community' who could enjoy the reduction in noise and pollution, and even start to enjoy walking around their own streets and getting to know their neighbours.

But what of the other concern of parents: that their kids could be abducted or 'befriended' by a paedophile who would then abuse them? Wouldn't children be more vulnerable not less to the unwelcome attention of local paedophiles if they were all out playing in the streets? Yes, if you're just looking at this with today's context in mind: the lack of a community that is watching out for the kids and is even out and about in the streets in question; cars that can just come along at any time when kids might be about; people, including those on the sex offenders list, living as strangers from one another and not known to the parents and others in the community who are concerned for the children's safety. If neighbourhoods are transformed into communities where people know each other and take on shared responsibility for keeping an eye on the children, and can be trusted because they're known to each other; and if, above all, the car is kept out (vital for communities to feel safe in their environment, to enjoy it, and look after it and each other) - then maybe parents would feel more confident that their children would be safe outdoors. Because they'd feel they owned and were in control of the world beyond the front door. Because this was a human world, a community, as it was when they were children and were safe to roam.

More on the car and the community in the next instalment of this blog series.

Car Culture: Time For a Change? (Part Two)

It was an accident, by the way: the cause of the sudden increase in traffic volume I noticed while writing the last blog entry. In fact, it was on the very road I was talking about – where I'd enjoyed that surprisingly revealing if noisy and smoky walk – probably at the rather dangerous junction where I regularly turn off to go down to my village.

There've been fatal accidents there and at other points on the road nearby before. Indeed, it seems part of the experience of modern driving that if you regularly travel along the same stretch of road – particularly out of town – you become very familiar with the accident black spots, even to the extent of having personal recollections of when such and such an accident took place, usually because it held you up on a journey. These recollections are often prompted by the roadside shrines to accident victims that have become a familiar part of the landscape. One route out from Cambridge I frequently drive along is peppered with such memorials – for one of which I indeed remember seeing the wrecked car being attended by the emergency services – and more and more seem to crop up all the time.

And yet we accept such daily horrors, probably precisely because they are an inevitable by-product of driving, at least with the technology, infrastructure and cultural attitudes that characterise this activity in the present. Driving is an inherently dangerous, potentially lethal activity. Yet we blind ourselves to this fact, possibly because this is the only way we can pluck up the courage to actually get behind the steering wheel. You could call this a benevolent form of blindness – so long as we still bear in mind that we need to be safety-conscious – in that it enables us to perform a useful function for society and ourselves.

But there is another form of blindness to the risks of driving, which consists of the absence of any proper sense of danger at all. At the risk of generalisation, I would say that this is typical of many men, who seem to go through life altogether without believing in the dangers associated with some of their activities. It's this same attitude that leads some men to find the idea of war – at least, in anticipation – exciting rather than terrifying, as if they don't really believe they could be killed. This lack of a sense of danger is typical, too, of another type of driver: the young, particularly the male of the species, who very often also seem to have no concept of their own mortality (bless them). But then it is precisely this sort of driver who is likely to drive most recklessly, not just for the negative reason that they don't believe they'll have an accident (though that helps) but for the 'positive' reason that they're enamoured with the excitement of driving as fast as they can and the thrill of the chase. Allowing kids like this to drive without any form of restraining supervision or technology (such as an accompanying adult or automatic speed limiters) is like putting a loaded gun in the hands of a child, taking off the safety catch and then telling them not to pull the trigger.

It may sound outlandish and reactionary to suggest that tough restrictions should be placed on young persons' freedom to drive, at least that of newly qualified drivers. But then you read news stories such as one that appeared today about a 19-year-old girl who's been sentenced to four years' detention because she crashed into a car while texting on her mobile phone, killing the other driver: a 64-year-old grandmother. She clearly didn't realise how dangerous it is to take one's attention away from driving even for an instant; so perhaps she really wasn't fit to drive.

The leniency of the sentence has been criticised. Far better to have tougher preventive measures in the first place and thereby reduce the number of accidents of this sort. But let's consider the sentence. Along with the majority of people in this country, you could be forgiven for thinking, I'm in favour of a radical overhaul of sentencing for criminal offences. What kind of punishment fits this girl's crime, if such a question makes any sense? I would like to see sentencing be a factor of two main objectives: 1) to make the perpetrator of the crime fully aware of the gravity of what they've done, so as to encourage remorse and a true resolution never to repeat the same mistake; and 2) to satisfy the demands for justice for the victims. On the second criterion, you could say that a proportionate punishment might have been a term of imprisonment so long (e.g. 25 years plus) that the girl in question could never have a family of her own, given that her action has deprived a family of its mother and grandmother. But on the first objective, the term that has been imposed will probably be sufficient to make the driver feel truly remorseful about what she did and determined never to do it again. So perhaps something in between would be appropriate: maybe a sufficiently long time to make the offender have serious concerns about whether she could ever have a family of her own, without necessarily destroying that possibility altogether – enough to take away the so-called best years of her life. Certainly, it would be worth considering a life-time ban from driving, rather than the five years that was imposed.

Sad, though, that one should have to talk in such terms and that two families have been devastated (that of the victim and that of the offender), as one of the police officers involved in the case put it. And this is just an illustration of how awful the human effect of motoring accidents caused not even necessarily by recklessness, but by carelessness or inattention, can be. Perhaps we really do need to give serious consideration to changing the way we assess people's suitability to drive and the punishments we mete out for driving errors to reflect a greater moral consciousness of the gravity of such incidents.

Sometimes it surprises me that there aren't many more accidents than there already are. In a way, driving is a quite bizarre phenomenon: we devolve the responsibility to provide mass transportation to individual amateurs, who are expected to be able to operate potentially lethal equipment (cars) and be capable of making intelligent, informed, split-second life-and-death decisions with a relative absence of training to a truly professional standard such as that which is expected of pilots, train drivers or even coach drivers. Put millions of such drivers onto the overcrowded, low-tech road infrastructure of this country that is supposed to support them, and it is inevitable there will be lots of crashes. Perhaps it's time to up the competency level and reduce the number of drivers.

Car Culture: Time For a Change?

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.