I’ve always found the entire concept of a car somewhat peculiar. It’s almost as if society decided to build fully furnished living rooms and then insisted on transporting these entire rooms every time someone needed to go somewhere. A car just feels like an excessive amount of stuff to haul around. Surely, there must be more efficient ways to move ourselves than lugging around a personalized, one-ton container. Ideas spring to mind, like, perhaps, feet? Or maybe a container designed to carry many people, instead of just one or two? Or even a bicycle.
For several years now, I’ve been a dedicated cyclist, but I promise I’m not some kind of bicycle snob. I actually own a car – a charming little 1974 Volkswagen Beetle – though it resides in a different state because parking in my neighborhood is virtually impossible. I only get to drive it maybe twice a year. I’m not unfamiliar with the allure of the open road, that sense of freedom when you hit the highway, the small thrill of accomplishment as you shift gears. I am James Bond. James Bond changes gear. That’s me. A cool person, in a car.
And yet, despite these occasional indulgences, cars remain fundamentally weird. Their strangeness becomes even more pronounced when you consider that transportation is responsible for over a quarter of our greenhouse gas emissions, with passenger vehicles contributing more than half of that share. In a world facing a climate crisis poised to displace hundreds of millions and submerge coastal cities like Miami, cars begin to feel like a form of theft. The well-being of those who don’t drive cars is sacrificed to support a lifestyle where drivers insist on taking their entire living rooms with them wherever they go.
However, let me be clear: I’m not advocating for a Personal Responsibility approach to climate change, where the solution to a global crisis is to encourage individuals to adopt minimalist lifestyles one by one. I’m a proud maximalist myself, and when I have access to my car, I fully intend to embark on long, aimless drives along the coast, thoroughly enjoying them without a shred of guilt.
This isn’t about individual choices; it’s a systemic issue. Anyone who has experienced Los Angeles firsthand understands this. Trying to navigate Los Angeles on foot is a terrifying ordeal. I imagine cycling in LA would be even more so. People don’t spend countless hours stuck on the 405 freeway because they are inherently lazy or selfish. They do so because their city is a monumental failure of urban planning.
If we were designing a city from the ground up, we could virtually eliminate the need for cars. But because capitalism prioritizes price as the measure of value, conveniently overlooking crucial factors like “wasting everyone’s time” and “destroying the entire planet” in its cost-benefit analyses, we end up with places where driving becomes unavoidable. Personally, these car-dependent places depress me. I grew up in one: If you needed to visit any store, any store, driving was mandatory. Even going to a park required at least a ten-minute car journey. It’s not a novel observation that car rides can breed loneliness, isolating you in a world of sealed metal boxes rather than connecting you with people. Now that I cycle daily, I feel like I live in a Richard Scarry book: People wave hello, I see artists painting, musicians playing, I breathe the fresh air, and feel like a part of my neighborhood. I know critiques of suburban sprawl are decades old and perhaps cliché, but clichés often become clichés because they are true. Parking lots, for example, are depressingly sterile spaces that strike me as massive, avoidable errors.
Perhaps we can engineer cars that don’t destroy the planet. The Tesla seems like a step in the right direction, even if its public figurehead can be a bit silly. Still, even electric cars strike me as fundamentally weird – like inventions designed to solve a problem that should never have existed in the first place. The bicycle, to me, represents perfect technology: good for your legs, zero emissions, and capable of taking you all over town with a bit of effort. I’m not a huge fan of buses, as I seem to have near-miss experiences with them daily, and subways give me the creeps due to the tunnels. I’m not entirely sure what kind of public transit my ideal City of Dreams would feature – maybe lazy rivers, or dirigibles?
I subject myself to reading the Wall Street Journal daily, and I recall one of its libertarian writers once arguing that the left loves trains because we are inherently authoritarian, and hates cars because cars represent Individual Freedom. This struck me as a perfect illustration of how shallow and misleading the libertarian concept of freedom can be. Cars offer the freedom to be lonely and stuck in traffic. Trains offer the freedom from having to maintain your own personal transportation container. I think the libertarian is unintentionally correct: if you want a taste of the capitalist future, spend five hours stuck in car traffic, going nowhere.
Every time I find myself in traffic, which I try to avoid as much as possible because life is finite and my time is valuable, the same thought recurs: “How much of the earth did we have to excavate to manufacture these things? Good lord, how many of them are there? Do we really need this many? Is this a reasonable way to live?” My impression is that hardly anyone else is pondering these questions. But I can’t shake the thought: Cars are weird.
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