The car parks were full
What I’m saying. Letters to the Guardian:
The results of this survey are sad but unsurprising (Few willing to change lifestyle to save the planet, climate survey finds, 7 November). At the weekend, I took my 12-year-old son by bus across west London to his football match. While the world discusses how to address climate change, everyone in west London is out driving a 4×4.
The vast majority of children going to play football and rugby on the pitches where we spent the morning were driven there. The roads were gridlocked, the car parks were full, and tempers were fraying. Yet the parents will make the same choices next weekend – and no doubt what I saw is reflected up and down the country. In London in particular there really is no excuse: the city has a comprehensive public transport system, with free buses for children. When will people wake up to the fact that they themselves are the traffic, the congestion and the pollution?
Never. The cruise ships go in and out (the season ended a couple of weeks ago but will resume in the spring), the planes fly overhead, the cars choke all the streets and sit with their engines running on every block.
Years ago when I was living in Somerville, MA, and working in Kenmore Sq., I’d often get off the Red Line at Kendall and walk across the river. I was always amazed at the number of people driving alone in large vehicles (this was before SUVs became popular, but lots of minivans, pickups, and large sedans). Quite aside from all the pollution they were spewing, what struck me was how much space one person was claiming.
Part of the issue, of course, is that people normally have at most two cars, so they tend to buy what fits their maximum (perceived) need. It’s as if you’re limited to one coat, so you buy the one that’s certified to 40 below and wear it year round.
My son and I took a trip to see the redwoods in Sausalito a couple of years ago. The sign at the opening to the park (the road led uphill) said the car park was full, please take the bus. Which we intended to do anyway, because who can enjoy scenery while driving? During the trip, we were surrounded by people in individual cars, ignoring the sign and driving up. At the top, in the car park, they drove around and around and around to get a parking space because the car park was full, as the sign said. Then inside the park, it sounded like WalMart on Christmas Eve (I only know because my sister dragged me there once on that particular day; I still cringe thinking about it).
I watch people at the local grocery store, and they drive in those enormous pickups. The lot will be half full, but they will not accept a parking space any walking distance (and our house is walking distance for us) from the front door so they drive around and around and around until someone pulls out. When we have to take the car, it feels like our little compact is surrounded by SUVs and monster trucks. In fact, my husband has a joke that we’re not parked legally unless we are between two enormous vehicles.
Which is ridiculous, because it is cheaper to rent a truck the one time you need it than to maintain a large vehicle every day. Of course, for most people it isn’t about how many things they have to carry; that’s just the excuse. I even saw it in my environmental science program, driving enormous vehicles and claiming it was because they had to carry so much stuff. Someone who carries only a purse and two textbooks as their largest load in their vehicle does not need an SUV. And having lots of kids doesn’t need that, either. My mother never even had a van, and she had six kids. She figured out how to make do, and we survived.
We had one car most of the time when I was a kid–an old Plymouth station wagon. Drove across the country in it, with five kids (aged 8-15 at the start of the trip–I don’t know how my parents managed) and all the stuff piled on top, including a large tent. My father mostly took public transportation to work, and when my mother had weekend shifts at the hospital he’d drop her off and pick her up. When they finally could afford a second car, they bought a Rabbit, which for the most part my mother drove (she wasn’t a very confident driver, and preferred a small car).
We have just two kids, and have alternated between one or two cars, but one was a Passat sedan (diesel, which made sense at the time) and the others have been either hand-me-downs or Priuses. We also do a lot of walking, and when I was working outside the house I’d usually take Metro (my wife has usually worked in places that are difficult at best to reach on public transport, but she’s always been able to work from home at least once a week). These days the car doesn’t see much action during the week. Somehow we manage.
I’ll never understand the mindset of people who commute in traffic 90 minutes or more each way just so they can have a large house with a yard that takes up most of their weekend in maintenance. There’s a lot of that around here.
Station wagons are large vehicles. In bygone days, before seat belts, there were common ways of fitting kits into vehicles that are not legitimate now. I don’t think pointing to station wagons or cars crammed full of kids is a valid way of pointing at an alternative manner of transporting a crowd.
My preferred solution for how to deal with a family with six kids is not to have a family with six kids, but that’s also not a valid path forward.
I understand about renting a large vehicle, and that’s a useful option for some, but it’s not always easy to find large vehicle rentals, or to schedule when a large vehicle is needed. Yeah, “easy” is the operative word here. I wish the infrastructure were such that there were lots of rental companies providing inexpensive short-term rentals of large vehicles with little notice. It is probably cheap to buy an old truck, but the maintenance and gas costs, if it is mostly used for driving rather than hauling, are prohibitive. Infrastructure includes large vehicle convenient rental almost as much as it includes electric car charging.
A family member with a wife and four (sometimes five) kids has a van, and that works out well. They do use it a lot at close to full capacity.
I’m somewhat sympathetic to at least some of the large-ish vehicle owners because it really does require a significant change to how they go about managing their lives. For many people, switching to a smaller vehicle or an electric vehicle is a minor change, but others no.
I know these adjustments are important and necessary. I think it is worthwhile to recognize that they are also difficult.
Sackbut, most of the SUV drivers I know don’t have five or six kids; they have one or two. It is possible (even relatively easy) to put two children in a small car, but they have convinced themselves they need a large one. Yes, it is far from ideal to cram five or six kids into a Suburu like my mother did, but when you have one or two children, the needing the SUV argument becomes ridiculous. I know some people cart around the soccer team occasionally, but that could not possibly account for all the monster vehicles on the road.
I am not sympathetic to the argument that it is difficult. Of course it’s difficult. Or not, if you’re like me and went to a small vehicle the moment you could afford something that didn’t come from the junkyard. And if you are using the vehicle to full capacity most of the time, it’s different at least somewhat.
I live on a street where I had three other people from my office within walking distance. None of them would consider a car pool. They all had convenient excuses. The large car/van/SUV/monster truck drivers also all have convenient excuses.
How much are those excuses worth when the temperature increases begin to be felt by everyone? How much are those excuses worth when we run out of time?
Difficult does not equal impossible. It equals “I don’t wanna”.
I have much less sympathy for those who have options and choose not to use them. The potential carpool you mentioned is a good example.
I agree that a sizable portion of the humongous vehicle set is unnecessary. I have much less sympathy for people who rationalize having these vehicles. I have no sympathy at all for those who flaunt them in a “don’t tell me what to do”, “stick it to the liberals” way.
The point I’m trying to make, I think, is that some of this comes down to infrastructure of some sort, not just to the individual actions of individual drivers. Renting large vehicles, my earlier example, requires that there be some way to rent large vehicles. Not everybody can carpool. Public transportation is very limited or nonexistent in some places. Sure, people can possibly figure something out. Sure, it’s possible that rental businesses will spring up if people are forced into needing them. But those who do need them have a burden that is not the same as those of us who do not, and I’m sympathetic to that. Not excusing anyone, just recognizing that it’s a bit harder in that case. And wondering what can be done to help people move off of these vehicles other than (or in addition to) chastising them for being selfish or uncaring.
I don’t drive at all, and never have, and it’s great for me…but I’ve made life choices that make that possible. I spend a lot of money on rent to live somewhere where I can walk everywhere I need to go (or occasionally take a bus somewhere I might go once in a while). I’m reasonably fit and healthy, so walking 1/2 hour to an hour in a day on a regular basis is usually not a problem, and I don’t have accessibility issues that make active travel or using public transport unduly challenging. I take advantage of all the delivery services that became available before and during the pandemic. I do a lot of stuff online. I’m single with no kids (maybe not specifically a lifestyle choice resulting from not driving, but it definitely facilitates my not having to drive). I live somewhere where public transport is relatively good, and although our local taxi service is atrocious I can at least get a taxi once in a while when I’m tired or have a lot of stuff to carry. I wouldn’t be able to live a ‘normal’ life without driving if all of these things weren’t true. Most of the time most people will choose what’s cheapest, quickest and most convenient; it’s up to local governments to make this choice active travel or public transport, or even some kind of shared vehicle arrangement, rather than driving oneself.
It’s a vicious circle. We build to accommodate cars, and then people get used to using cars and think they can’t live without them, and so we demand better infrastructure for our cars. Of course it’s all a chimera; we’ve known for a long time that building new and wider roads doesn’t reduce congestion, it just moves it farther out*, but still we demand those roads.
Still, there are exceptions. Back in the sixties, before the DC area Metro was built, Arlington County, Virginia, was mostly a collection of single-family homes and car lots. The initial idea behind Metro was essentially to create a commuter rail, running down the median of the interstate, with stations about a mile apart surrounded by ample parking lots. And once you get beyond Arlington (and Alexandria), that’s pretty much what it is today. But Arlington insisted that Metro should run underground, along the main corridors, with stations about a half mile apart, and then created zoning rules that concentrated high-density buildings within a short radius of Metro stations. Which is why today Arlington continues to build relatively high rising apartment and office complexes clustered around Metro stops, and why Arlington has the highest level of transit users in the area outside of DC. It’s not the most aesthetically pleasing place, but it’s more environmentally responsible than most suburbs.
Anthony Downs, the economist who first described the phenomenon, died recently.
Believe me, Sackbut, I understand all that. I live in an area where there is no mass transportation. My place of work has no place to live within walking distance, since it is outside of town and the only things around are farm fields and biodiesel factories. I live in an area where the average person is a white Trump voter and where they will not consider public transportation. I hate it, and plan to be out in a couple more years.
None of what you said changes this: (Sorry for quoting myself)
It’s not a problem until their own home is actually on fire. The rest of us just have a more expansive view of “our own home” that encompasses more than the personal property we happen to occupy at the moment.
We are so atomized and disconnected that we can’t see that we are dependent upon the health of the rest of the planet. Too many of us are suffering from the delusion that we are a self-made species that pulled itself up by its own bootstraps, without the help of any other beings whatsoever. All those other beings can be safely backgrounded and considered as nothing more than resources for us to dispose of or consume as we see fit.
Our perception of time fills a very small window, which has been further skewed and compressed by the inflated importance of election cycles and quarterly reports. What is considered the “distant” future is a lot closer than it used to be, and it’s still disregarded. Unfortunately, events that had been previously modelled as happening much farther off in time are now arriving on our doorstep, demanding our attention, prior modelling be damned. The unwelcome, misbegotten offspring of our lust for more, and better, and faster, have come to demand acknowledgement of our careless, offhand paternity, accompanied by the ghosts of billions of Passenger Pigeons coming home to roost.
A little OT, but I just learned that if I want to update the navigation in my GM car, I have to let it idle, in park, for up to 50 minutes. These instructions are for 2016 and newer (looks like most) GM cars, SUV’s and trucks. That’s a lot of idling vehicles, and I won’t be doing it. Mostly because it will kill my fuel mileage, but the emissions are also a concern. They do advise to update in a well ventilated area to avoid carbon monoxide poisoning though, and as most disclaimers it assumes stupidity. :P