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DUMPED - page two July 05 2000 Our collective and individual love of the car is as much the cause of the problem as our Government's attitude to the oil industry. We should relegate the car in our minds as a less valuable part of society and an intrinsically wasteful and damaging mode of transport. Having done so we should lobby for public alternatives that are almost 100% subsidised by the Government, designed not to run at a profit but to serve the population as efficiently as possible. Boycott-the-Pumps.com eloquently and perhaps unwittingly illustrates my point: "Take the Netherlands for example. The Haagsche Tramweg Maatshapij are now operating a free transport scheme. Every three years you either get £500 to buy a new bicycle, or a three year free transport pass to use in the city centres. The only way to get a proper public transport infrastructure is to re-nationalise the rail networks and combine the bus companies to bring them under council control again. For as long as public transport is operated for shareholder profit, it's not a public service." Such schemes make a great deal of sense, but I am not convinced that we would take them to heart as long as a pro-car mentality prevails in the UK. "Boycott the Pumps" again: "They need to provide us with an integrated public transport infrastructure first." Motorists are for the most part unwilling to take the responsibility for our country's transport problems and all too keen to continue driving about instead of looking to the future and seeing the potential disaster ahead. Meanwhile I have heard all the reasons why people need their cars. Some live in rural areas, with no public transport to get them to their place of work, miles away. Others have a family and need a car to transport the vast amounts of groceries they buy from an out-of-town shopping centre. Some find that a car is the speediest way to nip around the corner to a friend's house- and as Boycott-the-Pumps.com comment: "..for convenience, the car will win every time." LowerFuelTax.co.uk takes this argument to a most bizarre conclusion, requesting that readers fax their MPs to complain about speed cameras and lower speed limits: "I am writing in regards to the continuing persecution of the motorist by today's Government... I would say that it is very misleading to state that speed kills." Persecution is a strong word, playing on images of the Holocaust and racial discrimination. But reducing our so-called 'right' to use the car is not by any means in this league of crimes against humanity. One person's convenience is another's inconvenience, and there is little that causes greater inconvenience than congested streets, road deaths, pollution and so on. These kinds of people cause accidents and park in bus lanes, both of which contribute to the gridlock. And then they have the temerity to complain about our public transport! People are growing up with the impression that driving a car is a right. Learning to drive has also become a rite of passage, used to mark the transformation from childhood to adulthood. Advertising surrounding the motor industry is, like most advertising, based upon spurious notions of sexuality, virility, power, freedom and so on. We are taught to treat the automobile as an idol; it must be kept clean and we should aspire to owning bigger and faster models. Surely we can see past this and realise that any individual freedom granted by the car is negated by the huge amount of freedom it takes away from our society as a whole...? Let's stop thinking about ourselves for once and look at the bigger picture. It is a tragedy that we can rarely rally together over more important issues than money. Over the past year we've seen ordinary members of the public battling increased charges on ATM cash withdrawal transactions, but what about homelessness? Cancer? Racism? What about the invasion of our privacy through the RIP bill? What about Ruth Wyner and John Brock, the "Cambridge Two" homelessness counsellors imprisoned for four and five years, because some of the people they were helping were secretly exchanging drugs in their shelter? These are the true injustices that we should be fighting, matters of human rights that count far more than our ability to zoom from one place to another at high speed. Let's look further than our pockets. Slow down. comment on this article e-mail this to a friend start a discussion 
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