Down with Cars!

I love reading news from the UK. Despite how "Americanized" many of them say they are, you can always find an interesting perspective from someone fighting pretty hard to deny that claim.

I found this article today in the online version of The Guardian. It's old (almost three years), but still relevant to our class discussions about the effect of Transportation on suburban development and urban decline. The title of the article is (haha): "They Call Themselves Libertarians; I think they're antisocial bastards". The tag line states: "The car is slowly turning us, like the Americans and the Australians, into a nation that recognizes only the freedom to act."

The author rambles on about non-relevant issues for the majority of his rant, but this quote stood out:

It is strange to see how the car has been overlooked as an agent of political change. We know that the breaking of the unions, the dismantling of the welfare state and the sale of council houses that Margaret Thatcher pioneered made us more individualistic. But the way in which the transition from individualism to the next phase of neoliberalism - libertarianism - was assisted by her transport policies has been largely ignored. She knew what she was doing. She spoke of "the great car-owning democracy", and asserted that "a man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure". Her road-building programme was an exercise in both civil and social engineering. "Economics are the method," she told us, "the object is to change the soul." The slowly shifting consciousness of the millions who spend much of their day sitting in traffic makes interventionist government ever harder. The difference between the age of Herbert Morrison and the age of Peter Mandelson can be accounted for, in part, by the motorcar.

Wow... seems as though the US wasn't the only country to have it's political leaders seemingly mandate the need for your own car. In class we talked about how the rise of the automobile effected settlement patterns. Citizens were no longer "constrained" at all by existing public transportation such as streetcars or railroads.

Now, we are at a time when citizens are clamoring for the re-establishment of public transportation. Unfortunately, when you have had past iconic leaders such as Margaret Thatcher publicly lobbying for the opposite, you have quite a mountain to overcome. I think it can be done, but the question now is how long will it take?