A neat article by George Monbiot in The Guardian about the culture of car driving in England, and his fear that “the car is slowly turning us, like the Americans and the Australians, into a nation that recognises only the freedom to act” and that when you drive “society becomes an obstacle. Pedestrians, bicycles, traffic calming, speed limits, the law: all become a nuisance to be wished away.” He could probably add Canada to his list.
Most interesting is his thoughts on the roots of this culture back in the Iron Lady’s tenure, and how powerful The Car really is (and it has nothing to do with horsepower):
It is strange to see how the car has been overlooked as an agent of political change. We know that the breaking of the unions, the dismantling of the welfare state and the sale of council houses that Margaret Thatcher pioneered made us more individualistic. But the way in which the transition from individualism to the next phase of neoliberalism – libertarianism – was assisted by her transport policies has been largely ignored. She knew what she was doing. She spoke of “the great car-owning democracy,” and asserted that “a man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure.” Her road-building programme was an exercise in both civil and social engineering. “Economics are the method,” she told us, “the object is to change the soul.” The slowly shifting consciousness of the millions who spend much of their day sitting in traffic makes interventionist government ever harder.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Thatcher and Margaret Wente have a similar opinion of public transportation.