Stop Sign
Sun Herald
Sunday January 30, 2000
We pay a high price, and not just in monetary terms, for our cars. Maybe it's time to think of other ways of getting around. By Jonathan Hawley.
It can be difficult to argue convincingly that the world would be a better place without the automobile. To do so, you have to forget about how useful (or even fun) they can be; and ignore that fact that, as much as housing and agriculture, they dominate any human-influenced landscape. And yet think of the benefits if cars were to not just disappear - like the dinosaurs - but never have existed in the first place.
Surely the environmental advantages would be huge: vastly reduced emissions of greenhouse gases, no piles of used tyres, none of the waste associated with manufacturing, fewer oil spills and an altogether quieter world.
The hundreds of thousands of people killed and maimed in car accidents would still be walking around (or have died a natural death); instead of freeways there would be trees, parks and the odd railway line.
On the personal level, there would be no registration fees or parking fines to pay, no traffic jams to endure and, better still, no Toyota ads to interrupt the cricket on TV.
Wonderful stuff, and yet of course it's a patently false scenario. Modern cars have evolved from the wheel, chariots and horse carts just as surely as humanity was due to climb out of the trees a couple of million years ago. It wasn't that the car was invented; mechanised personal transport (rather than walking) is such a good idea that it was inevitable.
But cars, and the roads, parking lots, oil refineries, factories and showrooms that support them, are ugly. Think of the most beautiful places on earth and there's not a Lada, Datsun 120Y or Humber Super Snipe to be seen. No matter how desirable a Ferrari 360 Modena or Falcon GT may appear, it doesn't really belong against a background like Yosemite, Uluru or Antarctica.
Few modern cities are without pedestrian precincts, but does blocking off the odd street go far enough? Some European cities, such as Florence, ban casual drivers from the city centre in a bid to relieve congestion, but this is not a new idea. In ancient Rome all commercial traffic had to be out of major towns before the start of the working day, meaning an early start for delivery runs but a safer environment for pedestrians.
Reducing traffic in urban areas is all very well if there's an alternative: other than walking or cycling, that normally means public transport. People like Vaughan Williams, of Victoria's Public Transport Users' Association, are dedicated to convincing governments to shift funding from building more roads into improving mass-transit systems. Williams says that the association is not "anti-car", but it does want to encourage people not to head straight from the breakfast table to the Commodore and off to work.
"Our main objective is to shift a small but very significant minority of trips, mainly long-distance trips focused on the central city, from car to either walking, cycling or public transport," he says.
"Cars are here to stay. It's only convenient to drive them because so much money is spent on road infrastructure. Once you widen any road or freeway you get induced traffic - people who were previously using public transport or were not making that trip - because you spent all that money making it easier to travel by car."
According to the association, part of the reason Australians are reliant on cars and prejudiced against public transport is that, particularly since the Second World War, the rail system has been downgraded to such an extent that it is barely an alternative for most travellers.
If efficient urban public transport was available, as it is in many European cities - the London Underground and the Paris Metro spring to mind - more people would use it. And even the benefits of reducing, not banning, car use would be enormous.
"We don't propose the complete elimination of the car," says Vaughan. "That's both unlikely and unnecessary but reduced car use brings you a number of advantages.
"It means you need overall less road space, you can have more land for parks and housing, it saves money on widening roads and building freeways. It also means people have more disposable income because it means people spend less on buying cars and keeping them on the road. It reduces air pollution, it reduces road accidents, there's all sort of problems that arise out of excessive car use."
The road toll is one example of the cost of cars to the community. Last year, 1761 drivers and pedestrians were killed in Australia, or to put it another way, were killed by cars. Admittedly that's far fewer than the 2800 who lost their lives in 1989, but still an awful lot compared with the direct consequences of any other human invention with the exception of the cigarette.
It is easy to say that the car itself is not dangerous, it's the person responsible for driving it - much as a gun is harmless until someone pulls the trigger. But is that true? Safety is a big issue, whether it be a last-resort device like an airbag or a multi-million dollar campaign against drink driving, but the stark reality is that 1.5 tonnes of metal travelling at 100kmh can cause a lot of damage.
Sean Hogan from Victoria's Transport Accident Commission says that road deaths are not inevitable. The TAC's graphic television ads, which show the consequences of speeding, drink-driving, fatigue and not wearing seatbelts, have been credited with greatly reducing the road toll in Victoria and have been shown in other states. Hogan says it is the job of organisations such as the TAC to educate drivers, rather than blaming the cars themselves.
"We haven't seen the ads as a means to promote people looking at the safety aspects of their cars," he says, "but I think that's something that will happen through working with vehicle manufacturers as much as anything else.
"At the end of the day it is an individual and financial choice for car buyers to choose whether their car is safe or not."
That's not to say that legislation can't have a huge role in lessening the impact vehicles have on road deaths - and not just by setting crash safety standards. Speed and alcohol are the biggest killers on the roads, but there are devices that can prevent people from driving too fast or while drunk.
"I think that technology is an area that will get a lot more attention in the next five to 10 years from a road safety perspective," Hogan says. "Things like alcohol interlocks and speed limiters could have a big impact."
© 2000 Sun Herald
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