In today's Opinion column..
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/03/15/do150
2.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2005/03/15/ixopinion.html
Free yourself from the tyranny of the car
(Filed: 15/03/2005) Christopher Howse
There is a choice. You don't have to drive. But, as the nation tomorrow
celebrates the 70th anniversary of Mr J Beene's success at the first driving
test, thousands of 17-year-olds will have yet another burden added to the
grind of AS-levels and the obligations of safe sex - trying to gain a
licence.
Failure is likely, for the pass rate is 43 per cent. Even if they succeed,
the pleasure is momentary and the expense damnable. The lessons, the test,
and then the insurance! And for what? Not for the open road - [censored], [censored]! -
as the days of wind-in-the-hair, sightseeing motoring are gone.
No, if the car speeds, it is along dull grey ribbons between dull green
embankments. Otherwise it creeps, in motorway tailbacks or among fumiferous
streets packed with sweaty boxes on wheels jostling for position.
I have been not driving for 30 years now and have never been happier. At my
first lesson, I ended up in a rosebed, having penetrated a privet hedge by
determined application of the accelerator.
I got back on the horse, as it were, but stopped soon after. Otherwise I
would have killed several people by now. But not only those like me with
despicably ataxic hand-eye orientation should stop driving. Practically
everyone should.
The trouble with cars is that they are the masters. When you are travelling,
you can't do anything useful or pleasurable like reading the obituaries or
having a proper drink. Like supermarkets, cars seem to be at our service,
but in reality they get you working for them.
I am glad not to drive. All right, I am not at the stage where I have to
ferry children to school. But then, who invented that obligation? Not so
long ago, children were not driven to school, and they did not have to eat
Turkey Twizzlers. Cities where children can't go to school without being
killed, or worse, are the kinds of cities that are dominated by the car -
nasty, noisy, inhuman cities where people are isolated strangers and
enemies. Hell.
If more people did not drive, the delights would be even more rewarding. The
streets would not give you a headache with noise and exhaust. Buses would
move. Cyclists keep to the road. Look at the City of London. A rare blessing
the IRA gave us is the "ring of steel" around the City, leaving a civilised
and humane reserve in those streets not overshadowed by giant glass
gherkins.
Public transport is not the only answer, for the London Underground is a
disgrace and the wicked Alistair Darling is still trotting out the mantra
that he used last year of not being in the business of "transporting fresh
air" on the railways. He is determined to pursue a vicious circle of
run-down services and diminishing use. So much for Labour's integrated
transport policy.
If you need to, get a taxi. In London, it is cheaper than a car, which is
impossible to park.
Those who live in the country band together to get a taxi to the shops. If
they are going out to dinner, as Auberon Waugh pointed out, the law already
prohibits them from driving home, if drink is taken. The saddest scene at a
dinner party is a wife (why so often the wife?) making herself a martyr by
not having another glass of wine because she has to drive home.
Even if it were not so expensive to run a car, the liberation of not driving
would be worth paying for. The car is a drug, an addictive habit that is bad
for people's characters. It is a mobile unit of solitary confinement
ensuring the driver is left alone with his worst instincts. Having the
children tied down in the back and your husband or wife in the passenger
seat is not much better. They are frustrated.
She is left with a monosyllabic, grunting, aggressive partner who won't ask
for directions. The driver, if he is a man, sits not next to his dear-heart,
soulmate and companion for life, but next to what seems like a wilfully
incompetent navigator who simultaneously insists on bringing up subjects of
family business that require the full attention that he cannot give while
cursing the filthy driving of the car in front.
Divorce and car-ownership statistics have risen in parallel. For the sake
of your future happiness, give up the car.
Nowhere is the fallacy of the useful car more damaging than on trips abroad.
The travellers, shut in a tiny tinny world of their own, are cut off from
the very people among whom they have notionally come to spend time.
The family is thrown unpleasantly back on its own resources. Put some music
on the machine and it will be whatever happens to be lying among the
sweet-wrappers, muddy road atlases and inexplicable broken foodstuffs on the
floor. Straight from car to hotel the travellers go, like Lenin in a sealed
train.
If it weren't for the uncomfortably hot sun through the car window you
might as well have stayed in Britain.
When I go happily abroad I sit with the people, politely, democratically
and humbly in a nice train that shows me the scenery as I go by, comfortably
eating and drinking, visiting the lavatory at will, reading, snoozing or
practising a conversation in a funny foreign tongue. Trains are an engine of
"social cohesion", as the Home Office likes to call it, or common civility
as we used to know it.
"It has yet to be proved that tests of this sort serve any useful purpose,"
The Telegraph opined 70 years ago. Road deaths, at 7,202 in 1932, actually
rose after the compulsory test. They came down because of new attitudes,
including less drunkenness.
The Telegraph did not quite foresee the servile horror that motoring would
become. Tomorrow is no day for celebration. It should be a day of public
fasting and humiliation. We are slaves to the car, and the shameful thing is
that we hardly admit it.