Cars, Lifestye & Planning 4 the Future

Cars only give an impression of speed. The ads always portray them on deserted and picturesque country roads full of limitless kinetic pleasures for the driver who wants it all. Inevitably, peak time, stop start, long bumper-to-bumper queues in and out of cities at overall bicycle speed is their fate for the bulk of their journeys.

But that is not what really kills the average speed of vehicles. It is the time it takes to earn the after tax money to capitalize, depreciate, service, parts replace and repair, insure, fuel, wash and garage it (or the extra depreciation if it is left in the weather). Add that to the actual traveling time and divide into the kilometres traveled and you get roughly a walking pace.

Mechanized Travel time has much more to it than just its journeying component. However, such understandings get buried into the modern lifestyle infrastructure, well away from critical auditing pressures. These would reveal that modern industrial workers travel at infinitely greater cost compared to their walking medieval peasant counterparts, but no faster.

Of course, if the unaccounted for environmental ‘expenses’ (ecological costs that are 'externalized' from the accounting system) were included in our calculations, the real transport costs would be much greater again and the car would be barely moving at all.

Externalizing ecological costs doesn't make them go away.  They just get stored up into problems like global warming, that are so expensive to fix, by the time anyone gets round to doing anything, it is easier to just let the whole system keep going until it crashes and burns.  That will make us, our throw away economy and the life support infrastructure that keeps us from being dead, the ultimate throw away products.

Unfortunately, because of their strategically central position in the economy as suppliers of capital and jobs, the hydrocarbon industrial lobbies have a stranglehold on transport policy.  Their agenda is not only ‘softwared’ into the culture, but over time, the domination of their products have ‘hard wired’ modern cities to depend on them. The progressive marginalization of public transport has not just been in the denial of resources, but in the very design of evolving urban concentrations.

In my local capital city of Melbourne Australia,  all major public transport infrastructure investment virtually stopped in the later 1920s, when the effects of the depression started to hit government budgets.  By the time it and the subsequent war were over, the car and its road system became the focus of all transport policy and urban building started to occur out of practical walking or cycling range of the old public transport system, almost straight away.

Very sensibly, politicians anywhere near the prospect of power go ideologically limp whenever someone suggests public transport should be the central rather than a marginal player in the transport mix. They simply cannot resist the temptation to grab a cliche wipe, dab it at the subject and then throw it into the too hard basket. Even if they remembered, let alone agreed with their Town Planning Principles 1 lecturer, the fact is that change is out of the question and getting involved in the debate can only have omni-directional downsides.

Even now, with peak oil and real concerns about CO2 pollution, the auto and hydro-carbon lobbies still hold all the aces.  Governments are still building freeways.  Nobody is talking about replacing cars, no matter how inefficient and slow they are as a mass transit device or how hideously expensive and energy intensive they and their infrastructure are to build and run. 

It just doesn't matter how insane this is.  Marketing, public relations, private lobbying, advertising propaganda, hydrocarbon friendly newspaper and media proprietors, and strategically positioned journalistic stooges and media jocks can smooth it all over even more convincingly than any party controlled centralized state information  organs could possibly ever do.

The hydro-carbon lifestyle and the reality massaging system that keeps it going have such enormous momentum that reasonable debate or rational assessment of the sanity of the project just isn't possible.  Despite the democratic rights and institutions that give the impression of some popular input into these matter, we live under a privatized system of governance that in some ways is more totalitarian and absolutist in its claims on policy, us and the planet, than any other regime ever developed.

Our sustainable carbon ration per head globally is around one ton per head per year.  Bangladeshis are managing slightly better than that, but Australians use sixteen and Americans are on twenty.  the average small car or hybrid produces a ton every six months.  There is simply no way that this intensity of prodigal resource use can continue for long without eventual catastrophe bringing it to halt. And now that the Chinese and the Indians have got the idea and the bit between their teeth, the end of the line is screaming towards us earlier than was ever thought possible, even five years ago.


Bicycle Victoria is one of Australia’s most successful public interest groups. Its membership, resources and influence are constantly growing. Their slogan is, ‘More People Riding More Often’. Under this banner, they have positioned themselves to intensively tap into the tourist and lifestyle markets. Under its aegis, the bicycle infrastructure within the whole state is being rapidly upgraded and expanded, bicycle and ancillary equipment sales are burgeoning and special events multiplying. This happy state of affairs has been made possible by marginalizing anti-car killjoys and concentrating on the marketable fun to be had out of healthy exercise and mutual interest togetherness.

Bicycle Victoria doesn’t threaten the hydrocarbon lobby because it is playing the game. BV is expanding the bicycle niche potential for more intensive and safer use of the road system for bikes and creating additional manufacture and marketing opportunities. They all add to the overall consumption of goods and services. Car use isn’t being slowed down and in fact one can see lots of cars going off on weekend with full bicycle racks, to places of scenic interest that are too far away to easily bicycle to.

If a group were now able to take over BV who argued for replacing cars in the transport mix, at least in part with bicycles, it would be institutional suicide. It would lose its market focus, its sponsors, government sympathy and its following faster than you could say Public Relations Disaster. It would have become ‘too political’ for anybody’s comfort. It would become identified with humorlessly earnest left-of-center-do-gooding intellectual meddling. Worse, it would be seen as creating a negative win/lose, them/us conflict model of public lobbying.

Would the overwhelmingly cogent arguments for their position ever be canvassed in the public media sufficiently to capture attention and hold it long enough so that it might alter public consciousness and behavior even in the smallest degree? One would have to be the most doggedly determined optimist to believe that.

Not even I would vote for such a change when the existing BV platform has delivered such significant benefits for bicyclist, albeit crumbs from the table of the transport giants. I know its and my place in the available marketing mix. In the end we all have to be realists, for who in their right mind would want to be seen as anti-fun and togetherness?


Nothing is going to be allowed to interfere with the consumer lifestyle paradigm and the automobile is its most profound expression.  If it really comes to the crunch, the lifestyle that the consumer society delivers is more important than its impacts.  If the choice has to be made as to whether consumer freedom or people and allied life forms have to be sacrificed, it will be the latter that will go.

The car and its reproductive apparatus will survive most of its drivers.

It would be extremely surprising if think tanks like the Rand Corporation (which did the nuclear holocaust calculations during the Cold War) haven't crunched the numbers on a 'sustainable' version of the consumer society for around five to six hundred million people, supported by a a similar number of subsistence level 'indentured contractors'.  Even a severely depleted biosphere could probably withstand that in the long term. 

Necessary population 'adjustments' could be made by just allowing nature to 'take its course'.  No one would to blame.  It would be just a terribly unfortunate and sad situation.  Everyone did what they could to avert it, but to no avail.  As much aid as was possible was sent.  So Sorry; billions of people dead; will send flowers and body bags.

Simultaneous failure of major food bowl areas could remove a fairly hefty percentage of the world population inside a year.  Protract that for two or three years and we're down to 'sustainable' population levels.  The price of food would go through the roof, but the affluent and their security apparatus would eat.  The starving would just have to be 'let go'.

There would be plenty of fuel for the cars still moving and the hundred percent automated factories would just keep popping them out at the end of the remaining production lines; three to four cars a family and all the goodies, guaranteed forever.

Sustainability.  Don't you just love it?


Nobody can predict the future and this all sounds too bizarre to be taken seriously.  There are almost infinite future scenarios, but this one could be just a default if the denialist and do nothing options are left in place.  And it is a 'solution' of sorts; laissez-faire; these-things-look-after-themselves.  They do, one way or another. 

As a policy, allowing global populations to reduce 'naturally' to make room for 'sustainable' consumerism, is the next level 'down' on the road to mass murder.  Joseph Stalin and his regime stripped the Ukraine of virtually all its grain in 1932-33 and left the locals to starve, which they did, in millions.  The Nazis did similar things and would have continued their extermination policies aimed at 'surplus' Slav populations in the East if they had won the war.  The Khmer Rouge emptied Phnom Penh and murdered and starved a substantial portion of the population of Cambodia.  Rawanda was as much an overcrowded land clearing operation as an ethnic cleansing one. 

Such policy is not new, but now it can now be done without appearing to be too 'awful.  We still have a dominant master race/class/clique, but without those nasty swastikas or lurid black uniforms.


In the depopulated areas, the forests would return, nature would start to stabilize.  Much of the world's bio resources would be allowed to recover.  The atmosphere would start to clear.  The carbon count would slowly go down.  Nature would be so grateful. History would tell of a mighty vision and the courage to carry it through.

Human elites would have given themselves and the long suffering globe the best of both worlds; fabulous luxury for the human inheritors of the earth and a plausible ecological recovery program.

And I'll have a turbo diesel Landcruiser with that,,,,,,,,,,,,,