Sometimes I find myself taken by useless questions such as “what was the worst traffic jam of all time?” or “does anyone actually like sprawl?”
Of course, these questions are related. They are the sort of ideas that pop into your head when you’re stuck in some suburban car sprawl nightmare; aching to be released from 8-lane stroads and endless interstate exits that extinguish any idea of trying to cross them by foot.
It is these moments, stuck in the dizzying monstrosity of it all, that I find that my mind needs an outlet.
That’s where I’m at: you either ponder the big questions, or you blame everyone else for the traffic.
When cars work well, they can be quite nice. There really is nothing like cruising down the 101 with the wind in your hair and your song on the radio. Give me Don Henley and crisp California summer day anytime.
Cars, in fact, could have been a useful tool, but instead have been allowed to take up room once reserved for humans. Hell, there are quite a few drives where I’ve really enjoyed myself.
At the same time, you’re liable to curse your luck when you merge into a deadlock on the Interstate and find that you’re going to be there for a while.
The other day I picked up a coffee table book at the thrift store called Autogeddon, which is actually an epic poem by Heathcote Williams about the destructive power of the car (It’s also a 1994 album by Julian Cope, based on the Heathcote Williams book).
I felt the term describes well that feeling of sitting stalled in a 16-lane wide interstate, your mind spiraling into the disastrous pickle of modern society and car sprawl.
As you’re sitting in traffic, a few things inevitably start going through your mind:
There are the tens of millions of deaths that cars have caused. There are also the communities that have been decimated by interstates and asphalt wastelands; lastly, the mind-numbing image of infinite suburban streets and cul-de-sacs from the vantage of an airplane flashes through your brain, making you wonder just how insane all this car-centric sprawl is.
The idea “too much of a good thing” comes to mind. Cars, such a useful tool, have been allowed to take over our cities. We worship them as idols, symbols of the stubborn individualism that has taken the world by storm.
It’s all a fever dream, I tell myself. A love affair with cars that has veered dangerously over the edge.
We used to want to live together. But that was before carmageddon (my preferred term) came; Separated, strung out, isolated in a million cars as we drive to our next destination. But soon we’ll be back in the car to do it all again, to throw thousands of dollars away every year in a desperate race for something more.
As the book says, “Streets, once the open forum of daily life, are now the open sewers of the car cult.”
It seems we have all been inducted into the cult, our sense of freedom and agency mystically interwoven with the image of the car. People seem to want to defend them, to the death, even as they have done more damage than can be adequately described.
Will carmageddon take us to the end? Is the electric car revolution just the next evolution of it towards the blinding light at the edge of the proverbial tunnel?
It’s hard to say. It seems we would destroy any sense of community, any walkable place or friendly street, any relatively safe transportation, in the name of the almighty automobile, whether electric or not. 46,000 dead every year in the United States only backs up this case.
I’ll leave you with a line from Autogeddon:
Were an Alien Visitor
To hover a few hundred yards above the plantet
It could be forgiven for thinking
That car were the dominant life-form,
And that human beings were a kind of ambulatory fuel cell,
Injected when the car wished to move off,
And ejected when they were spent.