I am a park ranger, as the folks here who know me know. But it wasn't how I started out my adult life. I originally went to university to study engineering. While there one of my lecturers was a certain professor who had, or so I thought at the time, bizarre views for an engineer. One of his little ranting topics was the car. He said that if we didn't have cars today, just cycles, busses, trains etc, and someone invented the personal automobile, far from striking it rich they would be derided and told the whole thing was terrible.
Think about it. Imagine a world without the car, and then we explain the idea to a bunch of investors.... You take a 2 ton piece of steel, hurl it around roads at 30 miles per hour, guarantee it will kill dozens of people on a daily basis, and say it will swallow up massive resources and cause huge amounts of pollution. Then explain that everyone will have one, and most people will spend half their lives trying to find somewhere to put the damn thing. Then explain that we will tear up large areas of our cities and towns to provide places to park these devices.
The thing is though we have become heavily reliant on it. Not only that but they have also become embedded in modern culture. A lot of people today think of their car as some kind of status symbol, probably like a knight of yore would think of his armour and so have the codpiece area beaten out. It is also essential in the modern world of crappy government which can't run a decent public transport system (ohh that would be socialist wouldn't it!)
I like the idea of the car, I like the notion that vehicles exist to allow people to get from A-B when they need too and they don't need to rely on Mr Bus and Mr Train. But I don't like the fact that our streets have become rivers of steel, belching lead, sulphur, and carbon monoxide into the air. What do you all think of the bugger?
Think about it. Imagine a world without the car, and then we explain the idea to a bunch of investors.... You take a 2 ton piece of steel, hurl it around roads at 30 miles per hour, guarantee it will kill dozens of people on a daily basis, and say it will swallow up massive resources and cause huge amounts of pollution. Then explain that everyone will have one, and most people will spend half their lives trying to find somewhere to put the damn thing. Then explain that we will tear up large areas of our cities and towns to provide places to park these devices.
The thing is though we have become heavily reliant on it. Not only that but they have also become embedded in modern culture. A lot of people today think of their car as some kind of status symbol, probably like a knight of yore would think of his armour and so have the codpiece area beaten out. It is also essential in the modern world of crappy government which can't run a decent public transport system (ohh that would be socialist wouldn't it!)
I like the idea of the car, I like the notion that vehicles exist to allow people to get from A-B when they need too and they don't need to rely on Mr Bus and Mr Train. But I don't like the fact that our streets have become rivers of steel, belching lead, sulphur, and carbon monoxide into the air. What do you all think of the bugger?
