The planet is threatned by climate change. The solution? Electric cars. That is the idea we are being sold. An idea where all we have to do to fight climate change is to buy electic cars. No need to change our lifestyles in any way, just buy a new product because buying things is always the answer. Obviously the answer to the climate crisis is to buy products that require a large amount of resources to produce and the mining of rare Earth materials that will emit a ton of CO2 to utilize. Just buy a new product, problem solved. No, that's just reductively greenwashing our options simply down to consumer choices.
This electric solution does not address the REAL issue, and that issue is car use itself and its impact on nature and human life. It is our use of cars that must be questioned, not the fuel that they burn or how "efficient" they are. Electric cars only make the effects of a BAD habit less destructive; it is not enough to minimize destruction, we must ELIMINATE it. Anyone that is actually concerned about climate and the environment wouldn't want people driving cars at all. The cars have become mobile metal prisons that people don't to be liberated from. They don't want to be free of their cars because they have grown attached their own improsonment and they wish to cling to it. They have been blinded by the illusion that cars = freedom, but it is deception.
Take a walk outside and have a look at the road and take a minute to just look at the cars pass by. Sometimes it's calm, sometimes it's busy. Listen to the roar and hum of the car engines and the sound of the tires on the road pass by. It's disgusting. The peace and serenity you find outdoors have been taken away by big, loud, ugly metal machines polluting the air with their disgusting black smoke that will knock you down if you... no, THEY get too close. They endanger the life of kids for just naturally wanting to play outdoors and increasing the rate of asthma of the population. They choke the kids to death with their smoke, they knock them down and break their bones (sorry kids, you can't play outside, it's too dangerous, I'm afraid you'll just have to stay indoors where you can bounce off the walls, watch TV and play video games where it's safe. No fresh air for you, the world is for cars now, and for people with jobs to go to). The natural landscape, ruined by the amount of cars in your sight, ruining the trees and nice architecture of the buildings and interuppting the peaceful sounds of wildlife. They infringe upon our senses and infringe upon our proximity and personal space. They threaten us with the danger of their speed and the sturdiness of their bodies.
Cars are an excellent tool for transportation, but good tools can easily be misused, just like how they are being used right now, in a very inefficient and unsustainible way. Everyone has a car now, why? Because our lives revolve around road travel. The cities are all built around car use which pressures people into buying them without them even having to think about it. "Oh I need to get a car", this is the default thinking process of considering something as big as owning a car. Where do most people live nowadays? Inside big massive cities. Cars are of course a necesity when travelling outside cities or long distances, it was that sort of thing that automobiles and horse carts were made for, but outside of that they are an awful nightmare with how much they dominate the world around us. The UK is very densely populated and that will mean our roads will be very densely populated with many cars passing every second. This point in time, a time with this abundance of cars is surreal but people do not realize it because they not known anything else, we have become desensitized to the madness. If you take a walk through the city everywhere you look there’s CARS CARS CARS and they are EVERYWHERE. Even cul-de-sacs that should be calm have regular driving activity all day.
They are everywhere and take up so much space that you can't miss them, they can get in your way if they're parked on the pavement which forces you to move to the road on the side to pass it. They take up space even when they're not in our sight because so much space is used for parking areas for vehicles. Our space, space that should belong to us.
They are absolute eyesores and they should not be around. Think about what has been sacrificed since the common use of cars. They started off as a luxury and optional for daily life that only some people needed but transformed into a necessity by having the world built for them. Not being able to drive puts you in a major disadvantage, it is the norm which means it is an expection for the average person to drive. Even if you don't drive, you would still need to use a motor vehicle for daily life like a bus or taxi.
You need to spend money to travel to places because everywhere has been built kilometers away from other places. You do not have the option to opt out, you either put up with buses filled with annoying strangers, or you spend heaps of money on driving lessons, tests, insurance and tax with the rest of everyone on the road and more people mean more potential for accidents. What a disaster this has been. A bad situation that we have inflicted upon ourselves. Something that was meant to give us freedom is now caging us in putting us on shackles to be chained to the system. Our daily lives now a complicated and stressful mess. Whoops!
The amount of traffic on roads has taken the life out of driving. The enjoyment we imagined when we became drivers have been sucked out by the unremarkable reality. The fun was squeezed out because of how many people you need to be careful of as with more people, there is more traffic and with that, more idiots. How many idiots are there? George Carin said it best. Think of how stupid the average person is, then realize that half are even stupider than that. Would you trust an idiot to keep you safe? Would you trust an idiot with your life?
The people that need cars the most are people travelling with others (like families), couriers and tradesmen with the ideal use case being for traveling long distances (like commuting outside of cities), it should be discouraged otherwise, and it is certainly not a good idea for almost every single person to have their own automobile. The average houshold should only need one car per houshold. Something as resource heavy as an automobile must be a shared resource if it is to be sustainible, something to use when there's a good reason to, not something for people to vapidly use as a personal acessory for their egocentrism.
If roads were much quieter, driving would not only be calmer but safer too, and there would be less need for many speed limits; less people also means less idiots. What does fun driving look like? Perhaps it would look like an action movie. The reason those movies were exciting is because of the high speed chases. Why can't real driving be exciting? We all want to race down really fast like we seen on high speed action movies like Mad Max and Fast and Furious, but anything that is potentially fun will eventually get blunted for safety. Anything too fun is too dangerous for the public. The trade off for this is the limiting of the freedom of pedestrians to safely walk places without fearing cars heading towards them or being forced to come to a halt to safely walk across the land. It is a shitty compromise where no one wins.The land must built for legs to walk on, not for dangerously high speed wheels, the high speed wheels we must accomodate for by having us pay for the maintinence of that land. What we need is something to free people from their over-reliance on cars. The car must be made reduntant and worthless. They must become unecessary.
Do you have neibors? Do their cars take up a ridiculous amount of space? Are you surrounded by cars everywhere you look? Regardless, it is a reality many people are forced to face, a miserable reality. If only it could be as simple as having everyone use public transport, get a taxi or get another job that isn’t a long drive away, but people have different reasons for how they live, still, they chose that life, and it is a lifestyle that imposes on others.
We are in a mess, an unsustainible mess full of inneficiency. It is also an unhealthy mess because if you have a job, you would likely need to get up really early, work really hard for hours, then take another long long journey on the road spending a lot of time stationary wishing someone would just run you over leaving barely enough time for leisure time when they get back, then repeat. It’s not ideal and putting up with it will stifle reasons to change things. If you own a car, there's no avoiding soul sucking traffic and worthless idling. Think about how much of your life you are wasting when you count all that time up. Our reliance on cars have made us all miserable! People need to stop being possesive and complacent. It is this greed and complacency that keeps people overly attached to their wasteful metal prisons holding them prisoner to this miserable life.
Most cars can fit 3 other people yet you can find many cars with just one person inside. They could be picking someone up or coming back from dropping someone off but we know that won’t always be the case. They choose the car not because they enjoy driving but because it’s convenient. It’s convenient because city planners made it convenient since it was built FOR cars. It has been made convinient to be wasteful and live an unsustainable lifestyle. There are some places that got it right such as Madrid and the Netherlands but the roads we have in Britain are atrocious. The roads are narrow and the pavement is narrow. It’s is unfriendly to cyclists and there are not enough cycle lanes which means cycling is discouraged from how unattractive, unappealing and less convenient it is whilst cars are the opposite, why would people want to travel in a way that feels unsafe? The automobiles are encouraged and made convenient - people love convenience. Why do people by harmful products they know is bad for the environment? Convenience. Why do people buy such worthless junk such as digital assistants that record their conversations? Because convenience. Bikes and scooters have the advantage of price but for some people, convenience is worth more than money. The government doesn’t even want to change the law on electric scooters which are more convenient and better for the environment than a car, not to mention significantly much cheaper. Due to the tyranny of cars, alternative forms of transport are being held back in order to make way for these metal polluting machines eliminating potential for fewer road deaths. The car-centric system and its adherants are threatened by a disruption of this order and will do everything in their power to prevent progression away from this automocracy.
What makes it even more absurd is that the car users have the audacity to wage war on cyclists. They think they are BETTER! They don't like that they have to share the road with other road users. They want to make things harder for cyclists so they can feel like kings and to never have their power over the roads challenged. "Make cyclists have license plates" they say, have them take away one of the few good things about cyling and make it even more miserable as an experience, make cycling as lame and boring as driving. The cyclists are far more at risk than the people protected in their big metal cages which means there are less things to worry about than a cyclist, I mean an impact that's just a bump to a car can be deadly to a cyclist so it is a bit dramatic of them to act like they're victims. "Oh no, they have to be reminded that they're not the only road users, how bad!". The car users believe they have an entitlement to the road and hate that they have to share.
Cars are only useful in the context of the society we live in, they are not a universal good. Imagine if the world became so polluted, that we were forced to wear special respirators when we go outside. At first, it would be a big adjustment for people, but over time people will get used to this new normal, it would just be a normal thing that no one thought twice about. No one would question why the air got to the state it is in or how to fix it, the dangerous air is just a part of life like the rain. Once they've become normalized there may be thousands of different gas mask designs made from diverse range of mask manufacturers and the mask you wear "says something about you". You rely on the mask a lot which means it becomes part of you. The gas masks and the condition of the air would not be a problem to us because our lives are just fine with the gas masks, they have become comfortable. This is what cars are right now. We are in an unfavorable condition where we must rely on an unatural solution in order to survive in suboptimal world we created. Imagine if people suggested in this society to no longer remove the need for these respirators. "But how would we survive without them?" people would say, the masks have become too embedded into society for people for people to entertain that idea. Would that not be insanity? If our version of society somewhow managed to see how those people reacted to having their respirators made obsolete, we would call them stupid!
Modern society has warped people's minds and erased any sense of natural and healthy lifestyles. Society has raised us to prefer the unhealthy. Unhealthy foods, unhealthy relationships, unhealthy ways of life. Anyone that choose to live according to live in a way that is healthy to them would be looked at with suspicion. People choosing to live healthily together with other people would be even more suspicious, as if they're a cult that is being mind controlled. But the happy people being happy together are not the ones being controlled, no, they're the most free people of all. It's the miserable people forcing themselves to conform to the miserable ways of society and being told that they are happy are the ones who are being controlled. The busy and cluttered life of urbanism trains us to not want health and happiness and trains us to want crap they tell us is healthy. They sell us "healthy" products, not healthy lifestyles.
The cars and roads have encroached on us, they taken away our natural right to walk freely without fear of losing our lives, and they have taken away our time by forcing us to stand and sit idly waiting for traffic signals. They are stealing our space and time! The land must be built and preserved for human travel, for LEGS (and bicycle wheels too), and not just human legs, but for anything that walks, not the car owners who pollute the world with their filth and wasteful lifestyle.
If you were to leave with anything from this, I would want it to leave you asking yourself: What we have gained from all this? What have we GAINED? Because anything from this percieved to be gained can only be an illusion on account of its great cost. A disaster marketed as a luxury. To put it another way, cars are killing us!
Cars are a menace, get rid of the lot and MAKE THEM REDUNDANT!
Pedestrians! RISE UP! Who's streets? OUR STREETS!