(personal underlines)
The end of the car is now
A better alternative is already here – if we’re brave enough
I love driving. When I say ‘driving’, I obviously don’t mean crawling along the North Circular at 2.7 miles per hour, in a state of zombified inertia, mutinously wondering why Keir Starmer’s voice is so weirdly soul-sapping. And when I say I love driving, I don’t want to claim I’m any kind of petrolhead. I have no idea what a carburettor is, and the same goes for crankshaft, torque, drift, and understeer. In fact, I’m not totally sure what a petrolhead is.
No, when I say I love driving, I mean what I am doing now: speeding across majestic British Columbia in a massive great motor, eating up the North American miles on a proper North American road trip. The automobile may have been born in Germany, nursed in France, Italy and Britain, but its spiritual home is here, in the New World, particularly anywhere west of Chicago.
All of which makes it quite odd that I am about to tell you why the car, any car – your car – is doomed. But it is. To understand why car driving is doomed, you have to examine the reasons North American road trips are such fun. It is because the entire landscape and lifestyle are in subservience to the desires of you, the motorist. If you’re in a car, the world is thine. The roads are vast, every destination has ample parking, and you’re never too far from a gas station or drive-thru pharmacy. Which is great – as long as you are in a car.
As soon as you finally park and get out, you notice the problem. The car-centred world is inhuman. As Martin Amis observed of the roads in LA, they are so wide, to get to the other side, ‘you have to be born there’. These insanely wide roads make any kind of urban life near-impossible.
An hour ago, here in British Columbia, I saw a couple having a delicate breakfast at a café table, next to a six-lane urban motorway. They were probably consuming more carbon monoxide than croissant. Unless you bury every car park underground – which makes life feel like a nerve-wracked Eva Braun in her final days – urban man and automobile do not mix nicely.
A year ago, some lovely travel PR people in the Deep South wanted to show me their European-style ‘walkable town’, recently finished. It was indeed pretty and looked vaguely Italian. But the only way to get to it was to drive there and park in the vast car lot alongside the walkable town. Then you walked to the walkable town, walked around it, walked back to your car, and drove back to your car-centred life in the car-centric suburbs.
Of course, that drive will take you past dozens of strip malls blighting the landscape. The endless Dairy Queens and Seven Elevens which surround every North American town like a besieging army. They have these here in BC as well, only with added Tim Hortons. They have them in the most beautiful corners of this beautiful province – the Okanagan Lakes, the Sea to Sky Highway – great big swathes of automobiliac hell, with a Taco Bell.
All this gets worse when the car is allowed to dominate a city built before the car. In Britain, we look at Glasgow and Birmingham, and wince. But America has even sadder examples: Cincinnati was once known as the Queen of the West, a dense urban fabric, handsome and Victorian.
Then they brutally flattened much of the great Ohio River frontage to build ginormous freeways, and Cincinnati became a desolate city. The paradox is that to make a city workable for cars, so people can drive there, you have to level much of the city for lots and roads, making it ugly, so that no one wants to drive there. Looking at you, Charleston, West Virginia.
Now imagine a world where you could take away everything car-centred. No more garages, no more tyre shops, no more car washes, no more on-street parking. No more car accidents, no more drink-driving, no more motorway pile-ups, none of it. Every car park could become a park, every tarmacked drive could be given over to trees and children. Cities will be reborn. Birmingham and Cincinnati will rise from the dead and their hideous freeways will be turned into orchards.
I submit that this is so urgently and evidently desirable that as soon as it becomes technologically feasible, we will seek it out. We will give up the great freedom of the personal car. But how? Where is this feasible technology? Self-driving cars, which Elon Musk keeps telling us are arriving next year, are still in painfully slow development. China is probably further ahead than the USA, but even in China they are only just nervously introducing a few self-driving buses.
However, I wonder if we are overlooking a much smarter solution, which can be found in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. In Phnom Penh, as in many Asian cities, tuk-tuks are ubiquitous. Small, light, immensely mobile three-wheeled minicabs. They are called tuk-tuks because it onomatopoeically captures the sound of their typical two-stroke engines, though these days a lot of tuk-tuks are electric. Moreover, in Phnom Penh, it is no longer a case of waiting for an empty tuk-tuk to chuff into view, you can summon them by an app, and they appear in seconds, take you to your destination speedily (because they’re small and mobile), then you jump out, and the small fee is debited from your bank automatically.
It is a phenomenally efficient way of getting around cities – much superior to cars. All you have to do, then, is make the tuk-tuk self-driving. This is easier than with cars as tuk-tuks are so light and tiny, and less dangerous if they collide with each other. In my imagined future, at night all these dinky, self-driving e-tuk-tuks will roost, like fruit bats, in some special dungeon. At dawn, they will emerge onto the car-less streets again, little robot e-cars ready to do your bidding in your beautiful garden city.
It is an appealing vision. No one likes driving in trafficky conurbations. Once we have replaced the urban car with its noise, mess and ugliness, it will be such a welcome change, we will surely replace cars altogether; or perhaps they will become like horses or steam engines now, a hobby for wealthy and eccentric people. All of which will mean the end of the great North American road trip. Which will be a genuinely sad thing. So I’d better enjoy it, while I still can, as I hop in my splendid metal chariot and light out for Kamloops.
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