Accounts From Car Addicts

How about people list some stories of their CarAddictions, and perhaps even how they kicked them?

I'm working on mine to post. -- Joshua D. Boyd

"Hi, I'm Jeff, and ''I'm a CarAddict?!'" (And, I have no intention of repenting. I love my Cougar. ;-)

"Fast Car" by Tracy Chapman at http://www.afn.org/~afn30091/songs/c/chapman-fast.txt

"Cars" by Gary Numan at http://www.afn.org/~afn30091/songs/n/numan-cars.txt -- "Here in my car I feel safest of all I can lock all my doors It's the only way to live In cars ..."

Safety Discussion

Does anyone else find it disturbing that a person can't feel safe without 2 tons of heavy metal armour?

Should we give up our liberty to drive to feel a little bit safer? -- RyanDoupe

Being Able To Interact With People

Is the feeling of attachment worth losing the freedom to travel beyond the reach of your muscle power?

When I ride my motorcycle, I'm both able to travel far beyond the reach of my muscle power and remain intimately connected to the scene I am within. Furthermore, I deliberately place myself in an exposed, perilous position in order to gain the advantage of mobility and then rely upon my own skill, not side impact bars, airbags and crumple zones, to keep me safe. I can go anywhere a car can, and many places it can't. I get every thrill available to the car driver, and some more besides, all from a mechanism that makes me be more engaged with my surroundings than I am when on foot. -- KeithBraithwaite

Hello Keith - been reading ZenAndTheArtOfMotorcycleMaintenance have you? ;-)

Hi. No, I haven't been reading it, not for a long while. What I've been doing is actually maintaining my motorcycle. Not yet with parts I made myself, but I've fitted new parts, and made numerous changes to please myself (I can do that, because MyMotorcycleIsEmacs) And after it's maintained I go and ride it around the mountains and valleys all day, and when I get home I find that all my emotional and spiritual needs have been met, for a while at least. Scary but true. -- Keith

A good friend of mine works as a bike messenger, and his bike of choice is a fixed-gear bike with no brakes. (A fixed-gear bike has no freewheel, so you can slow down your wheels by slowing down the movement of the pedals.) I've asked him: "Isn't in unsafe? Don't you want those brakes to rely on?" His response: "Safety isn't about stopping in front of obstacles; safety is about moving around them."

Quite right. Sometimes the correct response to an obstacle is to go faster, accelerate past it. For bikes (pedal or petrol) that is. The tin box driver doesn't usually have that option.

Personal Experiences

A propensity to CarAddiction is largely related to where you live, and whether the spaces around you are designed for humans, or cars. Example: I once lived in a house in a residential area, and I would regularly walk to the corner store for a bottle of Coke. The corner store was about ten blocks away.

After a few years, I moved to a different neighborhood, located close to a large highway. To get to the nearest corner store, I'd get in the car and drive there. One day my roommate pointed out that, in terms of physical distance, the new corner store was actually closer to my new apartment than the old corner store was to my old house. That is, I was choosing to drive a shorter distance than I had once chosen to walk.

The reason turned out to be that the six-block distance between the new apartment and new corner store was entirely inhospitable to humans: Two blocks in residential streets, then two-blocks worth over a highway bridge, then the corner store, which was actually this huge truck-stop with a massive parking lot. It was a lot less pleasant to walk, surrounded by concrete and the hum of cars.

(This was in Minneapolis, where the city planners have been repeatedly criticized for laying new highways through healthy neighborhoods, and effectively splitting them in two. It is not physically difficult to cross a highway bridge, but a highway creates a strong psychic barrier that may be much worse.)

After a year in that apartment, we moved to a new apartment in a much more human-friendly neighborhood. I found myself walking everywhere; to the corner store, to local restaurants, to bars on the corner. It's a lot more fun to get drunk when you're in stumbling distance of your bed.

On this note, Guadalajara, Mexico is an interesting example. The city is essentially divided in two by the Independence Drive, an avenue that goes all the way from north to south. But since the sixties, the Independence Drive also doubled as the cultural border between the poor Eastside and the rich Westside.

And, of course, since rich people can buy and drive more cars, the Westside has much, much more avenues and thoroughfares. As a result, the residential and commercial parts of the Eastside are much more pedestrian friendly: it's a gray and gritty environment, but you look at the map and you see a huge, tight grid of little streets where everything is within walking distance, where you can walk pretty much everywhere (except for the industrial southeast, where cargo trucks need a lot of highways). On the other hand, the Westside is pretty much made for cars. You see four-lane boulevards with medians separating the inner and outer lanes, underpasses, tunnels, bridges, roundabouts and viaducts everywhere. And the only reason why the whole westside is not criss-crossed by highways is because highways never quite caught on here, and because most Mexican cities are at least 300 years old and building a highway would be difficult.

The result? Those who live in the Eastside pretty much don't need a car to move around -- maybe a bus to reach the southwestern factories -- but those who live in the Westside are pretty much compelled to drive a car. And let's not talk about those who live in the outskirts... since most of them are built around the outer city highways, driving a car is more about safety than convenience!

It took me quite a bit of effort to ride the bus to my job, and even then, I live 7 km away from the nearest one, so I actually have to drive to the bus.

-- DaNuke?

I grew up in a small town, where a kid could walk to school, the village pool, or 'downtown' safely. I've tried to live in 'neighborhoods' ever since. The one year when I lived in Suburban Hell was the worst year of my life: Driving 10 mph to get to work 5 miles away, feeling like you have to drive to the strip mall right across the highway (because there are no sidewalks or crossing lights).

I've lived in Chicago for the last 8 years, and despite it being a very big city, I've been remarkably happy living in neighborhoods where you don't need a car. In fact, if my office wasn't in Terra Incognita on the mass transit map, I wouldn't need a car at all. -- SeanOleary

It used to be easy to do without a car in the UK, about 20 years ago many people used public transport and there was a fairly good, cheap and reliable service. Up to 15 years ago I didn't have a car and did fine. Then the bus companies were privatised and became so unreliable that I had to get one to get to work on time! Once you have a car, so much of the costs are fixed that it becomes cheaper to use it for other trips that you would have used public transport for, shopping, visiting relatives etc.

It is too bad the government did not privatize the road system at the same time. A private solution competing with a heavily government subsidized solution generally has trouble staying in business and providing good service.