It seems to me that Jim H. and others seriously misunderstand what's bound up in the anti-car critique. In essence, it is not an attack on the auto per se, i.e. on a particular technological manifestation, but on the social structure of which it is a part. Sure, the car can mean freedom and mobility. But it can also mean slavery (to car payments, fuel expenditures, etc.), immobility (as when you're stuck for hours on end in a traffic jam on the LIE), isolation, and claustrophobia. For pedestrians and other car-less souls, it can mean noise, air pollution, and highway accidents. (In 1995, the World Health Org., for ex., estimated the global higway toll at 885,000 per year, the equivalent of one Balkans war ever 3-4 months or two jumbo jet crashes per day.) For everyone, it can (and does) mean global warming, congestion, unsightly suburban sprawl, and huge sums for infrastructure that could be more profitably (from a social point of view) be invested elsewhere. The more motorists accept responsibility thru the internalization of such costs, the more transport efficiency is maximized and socio-environmental disruption reduced.
Besides, the issue is not whether or not driving is fun. I think it can be pleasurable on some occasions, although the more traffic reaches the saturation point and sprawl covers the landscape, those occasions grow rarer and rarer. But driving should be like vintage French champagne: if you like it so much, you should be prepared to pay the full cost -- which I and others would estimate at this point at the equivalent of somewhere around $10-12 / gal. At that price, you should be free to drive all you wish, with society's blessings, and be able to enjoy it guilt-free.
Louis Proyect's notion of a global planning board rationing the use of motor vehicles meanwhile strikes me as utter madness. I understand why socialists are reluctant to make use of the pricing mechanism. Yet it is far and away the most efficient method. Correctly pricing motor vehicles, not to mention electric cars, mass transit, and even bikes decentralizes decision-making. It allows each and every user to decide what is the most cost-effective way to go from A to B without having to await instructions from command central. It encourages "the praxis of everyday life" in which people, individually or collectively, are free to develop solution to a myriad of mundane problems. This strikes me as far more democratic and creative.
Finally, as to the problem of what to do with all those country folk who have no alternative but to drive, it should be kept in mind that population distribution is always in flux. Social-cost accounting would encourage rural people to reorient their lives, either to relocate to more densely populated towns, villages, or cities or alongside train or trolley lines. A few people who place a special premium of geographical isolation would still live deep in the woulds, but most others would adjust to the new economic-geographic matrix just as they adjusted to old one created by postwar suburbanization and motorization. Change happens. Marxists should struggle to see insure that equality is strengthened and that the benefit accrue ultimately to the working class, but the last thing we can do is to try to freeze things in place. Personally, I want to change everything.
Dan Lazare.