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 Three)

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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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.