Jim heartfield wrote:
> Charles:
>
> 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.
Were petroleum supplies to increase to infinity and pollution from autos reduce to zero, cars would still be obnoxious. The automobile is the chief barrier keeping me to get to Chicago (I live 135 miles away) in decent time. The last 20 miles are almost always clogged (and half the time the car overheats from start and go motion), the preceding 80 miles are intermittently clogged by construction, and the fact that most people move by automobile keeps the AMTRAK schedule too infrequent.
Arguing from alleged "working class" preferences is simply silly. Our options are set by capitalism, and one prefers the least obnoxious of the various alternatives. And then one makes the best of it by learning to like the least obnoxious of the various alternatives. There is simply no way to provide the necessary parking spaces, and as a result travel is often slower today than it was 80 years ago. In the 1930s my mother could travel 6 miles to work in 15 minutes. In the 1970s and 1980s it took me 2 hours to travel 2 miles (I had to get there that long before class to get a parking place). In the 1990s they put up a parking structure, but for a fee that few of the clerical staff could afford and I could afford only because we were a two income family. The main objection to the auto is that when it becomes the main mode of transportation it becomes a torture machine like the wheel or the rack -- but unlike the wheel or the rack, we have to fool ourselves into thinking we enjoy it.
Carrol