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They serve as mobile disco,
*loud electro music*
or attention machine,
*car revs*
they're lots of fun,
*neeowww*
and are simply beautiful.
*twinkle*
Cars take you to every place that has roads,
and that often much quicker than other forms of transport could.
Alas, they destroy everything.
*Without cars*, places have a certain balance.
Center: Good access to stuff, but expensive,
periphery: worse access to stuff, but cheap.
Depending on how much you've got to spend,
you find yourself a living distance from the center that makes sense for you.
Since nobody's game for a two-day hike to the baker's, though,
you can't just move out indefinitely.
The border is where places for everyday activities
can't be reached in a reasonable time by public transport, bike, or walking.
*With cars*, things are very different.
All of a sudden you can get a residence on cheapest land on the outskirts,
and for work, shopping or tuba practice,
*farty-sounding tuba*
simply drive into town.
That way, you're living on the cheap, but still have access to all the things you need.
Even better, shops can do the same.
Instead of paying steep rents in the center,
they can move to huge, cheap plots of land on a former field.
It's no longer shops moving to where customers are,
it's customers driving to where shops are.
What once had to stay compact, now has a financial incentive to spread out.
As long as there's a road to your place,
location doesn't matter.
Since the distances to different points of interest are now much bigger,
walking gets you nowhere,
public transport with proper intervals makes no sense,
and cycling - empowered by a bit of white paint on asphalt sold as "infrastructure" -
is an activity reserved for idealists and the suicidal.
In areas with good access to stuff, you *can* drive a car.
In sprawling areas with bad access to stuff, you *have* to drive a car.
And now take a guess which of the two we keep building more of.
Car traffic is really inefficient,
blows lots of particulate matter into the air, is a constant source of noise pollution
*honks*
and eats *so much* public space.
Places where kids used to play and people gossiped about that weird smelling neighbor
are now reserved for driving and parking.
Plus, three syllables:
You know: Climate catastrophe, atmosphere turns into an oven, and so on.
If I could choose, I wouldn't order "baked globe with green salad".
Here's the thing, though:
Maybe you can't afford to live in the land where milk and public transport flow.
Maybe your workplace is somewhere out in the boonies.
The fact that we build badly isn't your car's fault.
*kisses car*
Every time shortsighted spatial planning allows a town with many little shops
to chuck a huge mall onto some field, bleeding its center dry,
or real estate developers to sell single family homes in the middle
of nowehere for crazy profit because of the great road connection,
we force people into car-dependency.
How and what we build dictates how we live for decades.
So, what shall it be?
Dependency, or the freedom to choose?