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Bullshit, I’ve observed, travels along particular routes: it’s easier to say “the moon is made of cheese” than it is to set out the facts as to what it’s made of – most people have lost interest by then . So it goes with the development of cars.
I tried to set out the range of deceit,denial and self-deceit you have to perform to argue in favour of more cars – the piece fails because those that do have got too good at it and too numerous. But anyway…
You have to be able to ignore, or explain away, the daily litany of deaths and injuries – they keep on coming; you also have to be able normalise the constant fear and the near misses. You have sever any connection between driving and climate change.
You don’t question the idea that it’s “too dangerous” to walk or cycle to school. Somehow you manage the conjuring trick of arguing for personal freedom (to drive) yet Children pay the price with theirs – until they are old enough to join the club.
You have to maintain the fiction that driving is for everyone – not so if you don’t have the health or wealth to sustain it. If you don’t have the wealth, you’re out in the cold. The driver narrative is of course silent on what happens to those people. Anyone disagreeing is painted as anti-car.
Somehow the person in the £15000 van is a working class hero doing necessary things, the one on the £1500 bike is middle class and entitled. Perhaps the most cynical aspect of this is that being allowed to drive everywhere somehow helps people with disabilities. And of course every driver is a nurse returning home after a 12 hour shift, fridge in hand or a devoted son/daughter son visiting a sick relative.
Although there is a reasonably comprehensive set of laws and regulations to control drivers, these are loudly resented and trivialised, and even attacked; offending is on an industrial scale, yet enforcement remains manual and labour-intensive, which again is just the way the cookie crumbles and isn’t deliberate. (The E-scooters bring home just how much on-board regulation there could be – if we chose to have it.)
You have a shared narrative that turns things on their head: drivers always the victims of a range of evils. Taxation, charges, petrol companies profiteering, incompetent and lazy traffic engineers: all out to do innocent drivers down. And drivers are always innocent – every bloody month “killer driver walks free”.
Any restrictions can’t possibly be installed because they would confuse drivers.
You take for granted and portray the huge investment over decades in roads and all that goes with them and the associated revenue costs as history taking its natural course. And of course, if only “they” would see it and build another by-pass.
Part of the narrative is “others should be made to do x” or “they should be banned from doing y.” The windshield bias that sets in means that other road users are always the problem. You park on the pavement, idle your engine and abuse anyone who queries this. You elect a government that has “rules are for losers” exuding from every pore.
You hide the many costs of driving, while believing that you are paying out for everything – health, the environment, the facilitation of nuisance and serious crime. Somehow, public transport is expensive. When there’s disruption to the fuel supply you panic, you queue, you even get violent.
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