I'd been meaning to write a proper reply to this thread but never got around to it until now.
For most of my life I loved cars. I still do in a way, particularly from an engineering point of view and like to know the technical details. Oddly enough perhaps, I've never been particularly drawn to high performance or large luxury cars. It's small, lightweight cars with intelligent design features which I've always liked.
However, I increasingly hate the things. For the most part I hate driving. It is tedious, tiring and boring and the least desirable means of transport most of the time. I walk the two miles to work each day and every day as I see the endless queues of cars, each large tin box carrying probably just the one person, going in vaguely the same direction whilst cluttering up roadspace and belching out harmful emissions and I ask is this really the best way to get around?
Every day I listen to my work colleagues who endlessly bitch and moan about fuel costs, traffic jams keeping them late for work, having to park too far away from the door and being out of breath after walking across the car park. I feel so lucky I can walk to work and I can predict the time taken for my commute down to the nearest minute because it never changes.
Then I sit and look out the window from the canteen at lunch time (the canteen is on the second floor) and see all the land which is under concrete to provide parking for the thousand odd employees who work here. When I was young and growing up in a farming community, many small farmers supported a family on farms covering less acreage than the company car park. Is this a good use of the land?
So many moan about the cost of motoring or the cost of fuel but how many actually try to do anything about it? People are prepared to buy enormous cars much bigger and more powerful than they need and do the most pointless short journeys in them Why don't they buy a small car and walk or cycle short journeys? No, they'd prefer to moan about the cost of motoring!
I honestly believe life as most people in the west day live it is just not sustainable. We can't keep depleting the world's resources by driving around in Tonka Toy monstrosities of SUVs just to ferry someone a ridiculously short distance to the shop to buy a newspaper. Something has to change. The government needs to work to reduce the reliance on private cars but there is currently no political will to do so.
