"But I need a car to get to work!"
Do you? Do you have to travel to your place of work to work? Could you work from home? Do you have the job you have because of false pricing of transport? If your car cost you 3 times what it does now to run, would you have applied for that job in the first place? or chosen to move to the house you're in currently if you moved after you got the job?
We are going to reach a point very soon where we have to ask some very difficult questions as a society about how we work, how we travel, and how we live. Everyone driving round in metal death boxes powered by exploding dinosaurs is not sustainable, and not healthy. This is not a problem that can be solved with simple tweaking of the fuel tax dial on some control panel somewhere. We need to change the way we live, we need to change the way we work, and we need to change the way we design our streets.
And while we're at it, we could perhaps opt for a public transport system who's purpose is solely to transport the public, not to make a profit. If you didn't have to make a profit, if you gave public transport a blank cheque, it would be a lot easier for people to do away with their car. There is an article in the last week on the BBC about people living in new build developments that are trapped in car owner ship because there is no other option. How on earth did the development get planning permission if it doesn't have any local amenities? if it doesn't at least have a fucking bus stop! If you look at the various garden city plans that do the round occasionally where the government wants to start some new towns/cities. None of them are planned near a railway line. They have car use planned in from the start. This cannot be allowed to continue.
At a conference recently a speaker said:
"We take a job, that can be done from anywhere on the planet, and we pack it all into 8 square miles of real estate, in an earth quake zone"
This was talking about the tech industry and how it's centred in silicon valley. But it holds true of so much. How many of those who commute into London really need to be in the office to work? How many of those offices need to be in London?
Oh, and this is before we start talking about whether the jobs we all do really need to be done[1].
What we have is not sustainable. Things have to change, and the sooner the better.
The revolution will not be motorised.
J
[1] See Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber...