IN DEFENCE OF CARS

It is fascinating to watch how a young child so readily takes to playing with cars and all things vehicular. If you’ve ever shopped for a baby boy, you’ll know just how much stuff (clothes, toys, books, etc.) is made to convey the positive presence of cars in our culture. No child is too young for this indoctrination. I too was raised on the things – the countless hours of playing “vroom-vroom” in my own little world…. Later, as an aspiring engineer in high school, I designed my own cars, dreaming of building my very own automobile manufacturing company one day. Needless to say I took a few stray turns along the way, and the closest I ever came to that goal was designing kyotomotors.ca.


Now I work here at Car Free Mile End (as a volunteer) to promote the ideas surrounding car-free culture and communities. It’s pretty easy work, when it comes to compiling the drawbacks of automobiles (cost - external and direct, safety/danger, pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, devastation of the landscape, disruption of public space and land-use, petroleum dependency and foreign wars, lack of exercise, road rage etc. etc.). But when it comes to the emotional side of the debate, it’s hard to get a word in edgewise. People love their cars – they’ve been seduced, and as I’ve suggested, it starts at an early age.


Me I have broken this trance, and will never own a car so long as I can thrive in a walkable community. I’ve come a long way from my adolescent automotive dream, which is something I would like to think of as understandable, if not a bit embarrassing: after all, it was the Reagan era. It was “morning in America” – and allegedly in Canada too. Greed was good, and energy (when adjusted for inflation) was cheaper than it ever had been before. After the weird dream of oil shortages and Jimmy Carter’s efficiency measures that was the seventies, the economic energy-fuelled bonanza was set for 2.0. As with the first hoorah, which began after WWI, and featured the American Interstate Highway project, the second phase of economic growth would feature profligate energy use centered on the car and all of its requisite trappings.


Two Iraq wars later, resting on an flotilla of millions of SUV’s manufactured and sold as the new modus operandi, we emerge from this period better aware than ever that global warming is being accelerated by human industrial and consumer activity. We also know, in great detail (for anyone who cares to look) that the global supply of petroleum is at imminent risk of becoming much more difficult to extract (more expensive) and simply more scarce at the same time.


So a second weird dream is about to begin, featuring again (I hope) efficiency measures and a widespread culture of ecological awareness. Meanwhile, my two year old son is completely enamoured with his toy cars and especially with all things diesel at the local construction sites. And I say, so be it. Cars are for kids. They make good playthings in their hands. Grown-ups on the other hand, can be expected to understand the car's newfound place, now, in the emerging economy.


Maclean