There are large pieces of metal hurtling around at high speed in residential areas. They are such a menace to life and limb that every journey made by any other means is chiefly spent dodging these monstrous objects. They are the single biggest cause of atmospheric pollution and global warming. They are the largest market for the warmongering oil industry. Their noise is the noise of the city. These cars are so central to the organisation of this society, especially the organisation of work, that an illusion has to be maintained that nobody sees anything wrong with the ever increasing number of cars.
In fact many people do see something wrong with this situation. But most of them are not drivers. Those people who lack the widespread privilege of a car (about 30% of all households) generally lack the rarer privilege of a voice that may be heard. Most of us just mutter darkly about the subject on the top of busses and wave our arms impotently at zebra crossings. But some go further...
In India the cow is supposedly a sacred animal to which motorists must give way. Nowhere in the world is the human being similarly sacred. Perhaps we should not ask: how does society tolerate the annual slaughter of 3,500 people a year in Britain, of a million people globally? Perhaps we should ask: how would a society of motorists tolerate anything else? A single death in a rail-crash is headline news, whilst the most horrific of motorway pile-ups is hardly worth a mention in the press.
The Necessity of Driving
In a way though, driving has been forced on you. Life for many people is now
impossible without a car. In order to either earn or spend money, the car has
become a necessity. What is this doing to people? Advertisements claim that
driving is a form of freedom, a kind of power. As a driver you have power over
pedestrians and passengers and urban space; so the car represents its own reality:
motor power. The powers that be prefer roads to streets because a busy highway
is just a prison with mobile cells. A driver can leave the road but can no more
influence others to do likewise than a corpse can start an insurrection in a
cemetery. A car is an accident looking for somewhere to happen and the more
people have cars the more similar everywhere becomes, so the less meaningful
is your “freedom of movement”.
The Transformation of the Planet
And as if this is not bad enough, it is getting worse. This traffic system can
only exist in a state of perpetual expansion. It increases the distances over
which goods and people must be transported. Then, ingeniously, it offers a solution
to this problem: the car and the truck.
It creates unsafe, empty, hateful streets, then offers the car as a form of
safety. It creates a rich world greedy for status lifestyles and endless raw
materials, then offers itself as an index of the degree of “development”
of the poor world. Just as it is transforming the city it is transforming the
rest of the planet. From the mining of ores for raw materials to the plantations
that grow rubber, to the refineries, the forges and the crippling foundries
- the car is wreaking havoc.
As if that isn’t enough, cars need petrol which pollutes at its points
of production and consumption and at every point in between: the supertanker,
the filling station and the engine of your car. The fumes from burning petrol
are the largest artificial source of atmospheric carbon in the world.
A Dream Of Life Beyond The Windscreen
Without traffic cities could come alive. Gigantic roundabouts in city centres
would become the public forums once more, planted with trees and gurgling with
fountains. The broad highways that slice our cities into fragments would become
the genuine thoroughfares, linking communities rather than dispersing them.
Instead of roads we would have streets to walk down. Perhaps some would have
canals cut along their centres with decorative footbridges and beautiful plumed
birds stepping gingerly across lily pads. People would be brought into daily
contact with one another. Streets would not be deserted, so street crime would
become virtually impossible, making trust between diverse individuals and communities
a realistic goal rather than empty liberal rhetoric. Maybe this would make feasible
the idea of municipal democracy, the idea of small local areas being directly
governed by their inhabitants?
No longer bound by the rationalities of traffic, of daily repetition, of time, economy and above all safety; no longer taking place through ravaged lifeless, empty ugliness, all journeys could become pleasurable, even frivolous. All movement could be joyriding.
We hate cars because we are sick of seeing our world around us torn apart, a world where we have no control over anything we do. We are sick of watching ourselves do the necessary. We could be participating in the enjoyable.
Luckily though there are many car haters who’ve turned their hatred into successful, collective, playful transgressions of the law of the motor car, from protest camps to office occupations, reclaim the streets to critical masses...
“Things all got too much for author Kudno Mojesic. He was arrested in the
street outside his Belgrade home attacking cars with an axe, yelling ‘Away
with all cars, they are the devil’s work!’”
Excerpted from a reprinted version available at www.eco-action.org/dt/awaycars.html
or come & pick up a copy and start resisting, at the monthly Riotous Assembly
(see contacts page)
For organising future ecological direct action, contact Manchester Earth First!
(see contacts page)
For organising critical masses in Manchester, radicalbikes@yahoo.co.uk or read
the Loombreaker for next dates (see contacts page), or see www.CriticalMassHub.com