Addiction to the Car
Author Tim Falconer’s new book Drive exposes how the car has shaped our cities and our lives
“If intelligent life forms on a distant planet ever bothered to study your civilization, they would surly conclude that the vehicles were the dominate creature,” says author Tim Falconer, author of Drive: A Road Trip Through Our Complicated Affair with the Automobile.
“The humans,” he continues, “who built roads, provide warm, dry spots to park, and do the cleaning and fixing, were the servants.”
Falconer’s extended analogy is not too far off the mark: according to him, there are now more vehicles than drivers in the United States, for example. “This proliferation has shaped where and why we live,” he says.
“As such, we can’t live with the car, and we can’t live without it.”
But why can’t we live without the car? In Europe, for example, many people can go their entire lives without ever owning a car. In North American that would be impossible for most.
Falconer says the reason is that, “most North American urban centers are designed for cars,” and that, “we have economies built on cars.”
But people don’t have cars just because the way cities are built – it is the “car culture” itself which seems to bind us to our cars.
Average commutes of an hour - once unthinkable - are now common place. Some spend more time in their cars than with their families. Hollywood is rife with references to cars; entire movies, such as American Graffiti, and Flashpoint, are based around cars. The show Knight Rider even had car as a central character. Music too, seems unable to escape the vortex that is car culture, with songs like Low Rider, by War and Little Red Corvette, by Prince, prominent in music history.
However, as Falconer points out, cars generally don’t contribute to our wellbeing. They create health issues, such as back problems, and contribute to obesity – not to mention the thousands of hospital beds which at any point in time are occupied by crash victims – and then are those who are less fortunate. “1.2 million people die on the world’s roads each year,” says Falconer.
Pollution is a problem too, both in the immediate and long term futures. Smog contributes to lung problems, or leads to cancer. Carbon emissions from cars as well, are a leading factor in global warming.
And then there is there are the hassles and frustrations inherent with driving a car; from fighting for a parking space to giving up all hope in a traffic jam, the daily trials and tribulations of driving a car are probably central sources of stress in people’s lives.
Falconer put it best when saying, “Humans fret about their tailpipe toxins, lament the lost hours spent stuck in traffic and click at the urban sprawl that makes no economic, environmental or aesthetic sense.”
So why would most people only allow someone to take their ride away from their cold, dead hands as they gripped the steering wheel?
Why can’t we seem to curb our addiction to cars?
Beatrice Olivastri, C.E.O. of Friends of Earth, an environmental advocacy organization, has a few ideas. “We’ve lived in a very affluent period where people have lived with the convenience of the car,” she says.
Olivastri described how our addiction to the comfort of cars led to “the design of our cities” being based on the car; urban sprawl resulted. This creates a necessity for car ownership, which then leads to further urban sprawl – a vicious cycle.
Dave Marshall, the Climate Change Policy Analyst at the David Suziku Foundation, agrees.
“There are places which have refused to have highways through urban areas,” he explains. Three major North American examples are New York, Vancouver, and Chicago – and all have thriving, dense urban communities in which not owning a car is often advisable.
But in cities such as Toronto, which have large systems of highway passing by them, “not surprisingly you get a lot of cars,” Marshall says.
All these cars create major congestion, and too often the solution is to simply build more highways.
The problem is that, “the rule for highway construction is basically, you build it and they will come,” Marshall explains. This means more highways invariably invite more cars – and the problem snowballs. “You can’t just build your way out of congestion.”
Ironically, Marshall says the “solution to alleviate city congestion is to actually create congestion.” As counter-intuitive as it sounds, it links back to what Olivastri said about how we’ve lived in an “affluent period” of convenience and comfort thanks to the car.
The logic therefore goes that the best way to get people out of their cars is, essentially, to make them miserable in their cars – take away the convenience and comfort, and people will begin to abandon their cars.
With the climb in gas prices as well as increasing public awareness of global climate change, Olivastri says there is a growing shift away from the car already. “I believe people are reassessing the single occupancy cars.” In the near future, “I can see us building much more dense urban communities and better public transportation,” she predicted.
One thing is for certain however: it will not be an easy transition. As Falconer said, “Americans, who represent just 5 percent of the global population, own 200 million of the more than 520 million cars in the world.” Unwitting slaves to our car addiction, we are.
Willingly or not though, the transition will be made. When oil reserves peak and prices skyrocket to exorbitant levels, the combustion engine will quickly become a thing of the past.
As Falconer said, “the glory days of the automobile, extended beyond all good sense by twenty-five years of cheap gasoline, are finally over.”
But the way cars have shaped our cities, our lives and even our identities is sure to remain a lingering reminder of the “love hate relationship,” as Falconer put it, that we’ve experienced with the automobile.
