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Al Quaeda is a paper tiger. Al Quaeda is a minor threat. There is an organisation -- a way of organising society -- that kills more than a million people per year worldwide. Let's call it Al Careda: motorised private transport. The car.
Let's not even look at the way the car contributes to global warming and pollution or causes wars in parts of the world with oil, or how the car turns vital, lively public space into dead, armoured, private space, or how cars make their drivers aggressive, fat or unfit. Let's just look at how many people cars physically kill and maim by hitting them, crushing them, mangling them, and throwing them to the ground.
According to the BBC, the World Health Organisation and the World Bank, 1.2 million people are killed in road traffic accidents around the world each year. Another 50 million people are injured. Traffic accidents, not terrorism, are the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 35. And things are getting worse. People are buying more and more cars. On current trends, by 2020 road traffic accidents will have risen by 60%, outstripping stroke and HIV as the main causes of preventable death.
Politicians are not decrying the car as 'evil'. There is little talk of danger, of 'Al Careda' or 'Carmageddon', and even less of measures to be taken. Politicians have not declared a 'War on Carism'. They have not invaded Munich or Detroit, or sent occupying armies to Nagoya. The WHO report contains a few mealy-mouthed and vague comments from Bush and Blair. But no politicians are curbing our civil liberties to fight Al Careda, despite the fact that you and I are thousands of times more likely to die prematurely due to cars than due to Islamist terrorism.
In fact, the spread of the car is an example of the spinelessness of politicians and the toothlessness of democracy. A machine is invented and introduced without much foresight or political debate. It seems like a good idea at the time. It seems to be about technology, not politics, health or morality. Some states require men with red flags to walk in front of cars when they're first introduced, but by and large everyone is excited about the machine. No elections are fought on the question 'Whether or not we should have cars'. The 'democratic' angle on cars is not how to get rid of them, but how to make them affordable to the common man. Carless places -- Venice, the island of Sark, Alicudi -- are that way for topographic rather than moral reasons. Very few voices against carism are raised. Even now, when the true cost of cars to the planet can to be calculated, radical political solutions don't seem to be proposed, because they don't seem to be possible.
'The WHO-World Bank joint report sets out specific measures aimed at reducing deaths from road traffic accidents,' the BBC reports. 'These include providing affordable public transportation and safe crossings and paths for pedestrians. It also suggests that communities should be planned so that residents do not have to travel far to go to work, school or local shops. In addition, it says more could be done to separate different road users, like lorry drivers or those doing the school run.'
These are pathetically small and unimaginative solutions. In a democracy, attitude matters. We can start the long march towards a car-free world by changing the prevalent attitude to cars. We should create an aura of unacceptability around cars, a car taboo. We need to draw people's attention to the toxicity of cars. We need to counter all the careless car-love, all the slick advertising, and make the idea that cars are toxic thinkable and sayable.
I'll say it right here. Cars are ugly. I hate them. I hate the look of them, the politics of them, the noise they make, their smell. I'd be delighted to see more cars in cities getting scratched, defaced, daubed with slogans, burned out. Cars deserve public vituperation much more than terrorists do. Cars are an idea that has had its time. They're past their sell-by date and they're damaging the world and the things I love.
A car cannot be cool. The world would be better off without cars. I will vote for people who are anti-car (unless they're Nader and my vote just helps an oil president). I want politicians to be proposing car-free cities, car-free days and car-free weeks, and eventually car-free nations and car-free years. I want to see Barcelona ban the carrida the way it has just banned the corrida. I want car bans to expand at the rate that smoking bans are currently expanding. I want to hear rhetoric about cars that matches rhetoric about terrorists. I want to see a big statue of Henry Ford toppled, to massive applause from freedom-loving people all over the world.
I want to hear about the complete separation of cars from cities. I want to see proposals from architecture students to put cars in underground tubes and tunnels. I want car drivers to be troglodytes. I want to see car drivers paying the actual price their cars cost the world, not just the cost of the metal and the gas. I want computers to take over all the functions of driving, not just parking, and I want cars to evolve into public spaces. For instance, when cars are snarled in tailbacks, I want little doors between their noses and tails to open automatically, turning the rows of private cars into a trainlike public space with a corridor. I want to see people getting up from their car seats, stretching, and walking up and down that corridor, looking at other people, buying a cup of green tea from a trolley.
I want to hear some acknowledgement from politicians that it's the things that everyone does, the things that pass for normal, that are the truly toxic and 'evil' things in the world today, not a few marginal guerilla movements or rogue states. If you want to see an 'evil' person, a person likely to wreak havoc and cause death, take a photo of yourself as you walk towards your car.
I dedicate this blog entry to Mary Hansen of Stereolab, a victim of terrorism.
Let's not even look at the way the car contributes to global warming and pollution or causes wars in parts of the world with oil, or how the car turns vital, lively public space into dead, armoured, private space, or how cars make their drivers aggressive, fat or unfit. Let's just look at how many people cars physically kill and maim by hitting them, crushing them, mangling them, and throwing them to the ground.
According to the BBC, the World Health Organisation and the World Bank, 1.2 million people are killed in road traffic accidents around the world each year. Another 50 million people are injured. Traffic accidents, not terrorism, are the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 35. And things are getting worse. People are buying more and more cars. On current trends, by 2020 road traffic accidents will have risen by 60%, outstripping stroke and HIV as the main causes of preventable death.
Politicians are not decrying the car as 'evil'. There is little talk of danger, of 'Al Careda' or 'Carmageddon', and even less of measures to be taken. Politicians have not declared a 'War on Carism'. They have not invaded Munich or Detroit, or sent occupying armies to Nagoya. The WHO report contains a few mealy-mouthed and vague comments from Bush and Blair. But no politicians are curbing our civil liberties to fight Al Careda, despite the fact that you and I are thousands of times more likely to die prematurely due to cars than due to Islamist terrorism.
In fact, the spread of the car is an example of the spinelessness of politicians and the toothlessness of democracy. A machine is invented and introduced without much foresight or political debate. It seems like a good idea at the time. It seems to be about technology, not politics, health or morality. Some states require men with red flags to walk in front of cars when they're first introduced, but by and large everyone is excited about the machine. No elections are fought on the question 'Whether or not we should have cars'. The 'democratic' angle on cars is not how to get rid of them, but how to make them affordable to the common man. Carless places -- Venice, the island of Sark, Alicudi -- are that way for topographic rather than moral reasons. Very few voices against carism are raised. Even now, when the true cost of cars to the planet can to be calculated, radical political solutions don't seem to be proposed, because they don't seem to be possible.
'The WHO-World Bank joint report sets out specific measures aimed at reducing deaths from road traffic accidents,' the BBC reports. 'These include providing affordable public transportation and safe crossings and paths for pedestrians. It also suggests that communities should be planned so that residents do not have to travel far to go to work, school or local shops. In addition, it says more could be done to separate different road users, like lorry drivers or those doing the school run.'
These are pathetically small and unimaginative solutions. In a democracy, attitude matters. We can start the long march towards a car-free world by changing the prevalent attitude to cars. We should create an aura of unacceptability around cars, a car taboo. We need to draw people's attention to the toxicity of cars. We need to counter all the careless car-love, all the slick advertising, and make the idea that cars are toxic thinkable and sayable.
I'll say it right here. Cars are ugly. I hate them. I hate the look of them, the politics of them, the noise they make, their smell. I'd be delighted to see more cars in cities getting scratched, defaced, daubed with slogans, burned out. Cars deserve public vituperation much more than terrorists do. Cars are an idea that has had its time. They're past their sell-by date and they're damaging the world and the things I love.
A car cannot be cool. The world would be better off without cars. I will vote for people who are anti-car (unless they're Nader and my vote just helps an oil president). I want politicians to be proposing car-free cities, car-free days and car-free weeks, and eventually car-free nations and car-free years. I want to see Barcelona ban the carrida the way it has just banned the corrida. I want car bans to expand at the rate that smoking bans are currently expanding. I want to hear rhetoric about cars that matches rhetoric about terrorists. I want to see a big statue of Henry Ford toppled, to massive applause from freedom-loving people all over the world.
I want to hear about the complete separation of cars from cities. I want to see proposals from architecture students to put cars in underground tubes and tunnels. I want car drivers to be troglodytes. I want to see car drivers paying the actual price their cars cost the world, not just the cost of the metal and the gas. I want computers to take over all the functions of driving, not just parking, and I want cars to evolve into public spaces. For instance, when cars are snarled in tailbacks, I want little doors between their noses and tails to open automatically, turning the rows of private cars into a trainlike public space with a corridor. I want to see people getting up from their car seats, stretching, and walking up and down that corridor, looking at other people, buying a cup of green tea from a trolley.
I want to hear some acknowledgement from politicians that it's the things that everyone does, the things that pass for normal, that are the truly toxic and 'evil' things in the world today, not a few marginal guerilla movements or rogue states. If you want to see an 'evil' person, a person likely to wreak havoc and cause death, take a photo of yourself as you walk towards your car.
I dedicate this blog entry to Mary Hansen of Stereolab, a victim of terrorism.