George Monbiot’s thought-provoking piece:
“It was a mistake –
a monumental, world-class mistake. Cars for everyone was one of the most stupid
promises politicians ever made. Cars are meant to meet a simple need: quick and
efficient mobility. Observe an urban artery during the school run, or a trunk
road on a bank holiday weekend, and ask yourself whether the current system
meets that need. The vast expanse of road space, the massive investment in metal
and fossil fuel, has delivered the freedom to sit fuming in a toxic cloud as
your life ticks by.
The primary aim has
become snarled up with other, implicit objectives: the sense of autonomy, the
desire for self-expression through the configuration of metal and plastic you
drive, and the demand for profit by car manufacturers and fossil fuel producers
whose lobbying keeps us on the road rather than moving along it.
Step back from this
mess and ask yourself this. If you controlled the billions that are spent every
year – privately and publicly – on the transport system, and your aim was to
smooth the passage of those who use it, is this what you would do? Only if your
imagination had been surgically excised.”
If transportation need was analyzed as an optimization
problem, automobiles for everybody would probably be the worst possible
solution that one can imagine.