Here in Hawaii it was unions that fought for a mass transit project that would have gotten folks across the island in no time and able to avoid the H-1 Thruway, otherwise known as the H-1 parking lot. The unions lost that battle, and they made a good argument that it would have been the kind of investment project that could have revived, somewhat, the local economy. I don't have to tell you where the opposition came from.
Hawaii has one of the finer public bus systems, btw. Gets you around the whole island of Oahu for 1 dollar. Tourists use it quite a bit as well, especially younger ones.
That doesn't mean that cars have to be entirely fazed out of an economy of course, but giving everyone a car to drive is not *necessarily* going to be embraced by working class folks who know that it aint gonna solve their problem of gettting to work on time.
Steve
On Mon, 20 Sep 1999, Jim heartfield wrote:
> Charles:
>
> I would not describe anti-mass sentiment in such an automatic fashion.
> These are deep and irrational sentiments that are far from being thought
> out. In John Carey's book 'The Intellectuals and the Masses' (?) he
> describes how certain components of working class consumption summed up
> everything that elites despised about the mass. So, for example, many
> intellectuals can be read railing against tinned food - which to them
> seemed to be the very end of civilisation as we know it (today they
> would be talking about plastic wrappers ... or cars).
>
> Similarly, in Geoffrey Pearson's book Hooligan: A History of Respectable
> Fears, Pearson pulls out a whole newspaper panic about cycling clubs in
> the 1890s. The Times newspaper carried editorials about working class
> 'scorchers' tearing around the countryside terrifying respectable folk
> ... on their push bikes.
>
> A child of six could hear the anti-working class meaning of the anti-car
> lobby, in its language, intonations and none-too-subtle hints. Always
> the target is the big gas guzzler, never the little foreign car; or the
> sin of sins a 'Recreational Vehicle' (twenty years ago it would have
> been a 'pick-up truck' that signified ugly prole who should not be
> allowed on the roads); in Britain, it is 'Essex Man' in his Ford Cortina
> who is the loathed target of petit bourgeois hostility.
>
> The most important statistic that the anti-car lobby in Britain has
> picked up on is the one that says that there are 30 million car users.
> This fact only has to be spoken to provoke hung heads and tut-tutting.
> But why is it so shocking? It is shocking because, in a population of 60
> million, it means that the car is no longer the monopoly of the
> respectable middle classes, but has fallen within the price range of
> working families.
>
> Car emissions have been reduced in noxiousness by more than 90 per cent
> over the last fifteen years, which means that you could have multiplied
> car ownership five times and still reduced pollution. But that fact
> barely registers on the discussion, because in substance this discussion
> is not about the pollution of the atmosphere by lead particles or CO2.
> On the contrary. It is a discussion about the "pollution" of the English
> countryside by honking Essex man in his Ford Cortina.
>
> In message <s7e64f01.048 at mail.ci.detroit.mi.us>, Charles Brown
> <CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> writes
> >
> >>>> Jim heartfield <jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk> 09/20/99 02:09PM >>
> >Isn't it curious that the car has only become widely criticised at the
> >point that it became cheap enough to become a working class consumption
> >good, as opposed to a middle class luxury item?
> >
> >((((((((((
> >
> >Charles: Looking at this one more time, I understand your idea here to be that
> >the ruling class or a section of it is behind this criticism of the car. I'm all
> >for believing in bourgeois machinations against the interest of the working
> >class. But what are you saying ? That one section of the bourgeoisie is trying
> >to undermine another section, the car manufacturers and oil producers ( a pretty
> >powerful section) ? And how does this "environmentalist" section of the
> >bourgeoisie profit from undermining the car/oil industry ?
> >
> >CB
> >
>
> --
> Jim heartfield
>