I am not sure I am entirely convinced by the term car culture. It’s not really intentional. It’s not an informed choice. It’s a habit. Something we have slipped into. It’s a habit born of convenience. A car is easy. It’s comfortable. It’s a little bud that has mitosed from your living room and driven away. It gives you a wonderful portable sense of hermetically sealed comfort that otherwise you would only appreciate if you never left the house. You don’t need to leave the house. The house goes with you when you climb into that driving seat. In fact, we’re making them better than the house. The driving seat – it’s a chair designed by some kind of angel of ergonomics. You could fall asleep just looking at it. There are entertainment systems: CDs, Ipods, million channel satellite radio, in-seat cinema, GPS and more LEDs than an Airbus flight control panel. You don’t even need to wind the windows – it was too hard, so they made buttons and servos to do the hard work. Not that you would work up a sweat, since the temperature is regulated with ruthless teutonic efficiency. The outside world is gone, shuffled away beyond the tinted glass. You are – in essense – in the Goldilock’s zone of comfort. So sit back and sink into a wonderful dissociative bliss and let the automotive benzodiazepine sugar your mind. How dare people get in your way, insist on speed limits, demand taxes, tell you where not to park? Do they not understand? This is your home away from home. Your better home. Your perfect, vacuum-sealed folly. Your grand tumescent proxy of gleaming metallic status.So we slid. And life slid around us. Shops slipped away into out-of-town sprawls, surrounded by huge floes of car parking. High streets slipped away, local shops shut, and we in turn built cold simulacra of cities and high streets anywhere the planners would let us. Distance stretched as things continued to slide. Cars made the world seem smaller, while all the time everything slewed apart.Of course, now there is often no choice, even if you wanted one, it’s drifted with the spread until it is out of reach. And why choose different, it’s still so convenient is that car. The costs are a hidden variable, and well, you want people to know that you are not economizing. That could adulterate the status symbol. Water it down. No, take it the other way. Make it bigger. A growling, ruthless Panzer for those cruel urban streets. You are going to annex Bromley and no army is going to stand in your way. You are sitting ten feet above the road. In command. Nothing can touch you up there. The roads are yours. It's so safe, so comfortable, so convenient.But your bank account bleeds, your front garden lies buried like a body under cheap tar and concrete, the air is sour and your heart occasionally kicks like a mule, and one of your children is barbed through with all that brilliant metal and left seeping in the cold dark while his friends slink away through the night to a brief court appearance where the road is found guilty of being dangerous. And the only prison that will hold them is parked outside.It’s probably not all bad though.
