I’m thinking about cars a lot lately because I’m in them a lot lately.\u00a0 When I’m not in one, I’m dreading the next time I’ll have to be in one.\u00a0 I’m tired of automobiles.\u00a0 The\u00a0affair is over.<\/p>\n
I have a very nice car that takes me places and plays my music and feeds me news, holds my coffee cup, warms or cools me, and does everything else a car can do to help a person get around, but there isn’t a car special enough to make me fall in love with driving again.<\/p>\n
No offense to my perfectly fine vehicle, but I dream of a walking life – some modified version of the olden days when there was a central business district and houses began right there at the edge of town.\u00a0 A person could walk to accomplish most daily errands.\u00a0 For longer trips, there was a family car, but it wasn’t in use all day, every day.<\/p>\n
We keep making more people and more cars, but no more space.\u00a0 We’ve already covered so much of the space we have with highways that saturation is nigh.\u00a0 I’m speaking specifically of my beloved state of California.\u00a0 There’s no way we can keep up with the population and the multiple vehicles each family owns.\u00a0 If we cover any more\u00a0of the earth with highways, there’ll be no place\u00a0left for us to drive to.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
It seemed so natural, the ways in which automobile travel evolved, how new vistas opened the minute we were old enough for a driver’s license, how we defined ourselves by what we drove.\u00a0 Over the past decade or so, something’s changed for me and driving doesn’t resemble freedom in the slightest.\u00a0 What feels free is not<\/em> driving.\u00a0 That feels independent\u00a0and progressive and even adventurous.<\/p>\n Will there come a time soon\u00a0when people will look back at single-person car occupancy as a quaint and uninformed period in our history?\u00a0 Maybe our descendants will laugh at our naivete and wonder at how we ever thought it could work.<\/p>\n Is there on the near horizon a form of mass transportation we haven’t heard about, that can function without creating a new blight on our imperiled landscape?<\/p>\n I expect the future will include mandatory controls about who can drive alone in a car and when.\u00a0 Of course we won’t let go voluntarily, so it will likely be made into law.\u00a0 Giving up the right to drive is such a fraught\u00a0topic, I don’t expect to live to see a practical solution.\u00a0 Maybe my daughter and granddaughter won’t see a solution either, but I do believe one is on the way.\u00a0<\/p>\n