Car Culture

Car Culture

We are a car culture. Americans rely on their automobiles to carry out any task not within sight of their homes, but is this necessary? Our world has been separated into cities, towns, and areas that create unnecessary transport demands. The environment has been victimized as a result of this addiction of separation.

We are currently trying to avoid further problems with this by moving to efficient “green” vehicles and with better road planning but this is just prolonging and allowing the problem to continue. This can fall under the common environmental critique of treating the symptoms and not attacking the root causes. The problem that needs to be addressed is how to move away from this failing car culture into development of mass transit, better city planning, community development, and true freedom. There are alternatives to our current system of highways, traffic, individual car use, and waste and Individuals and groups have noticed this problem. But society in general continues with business as usual, and business as usual means cars. We as a nation need to realize that we need to change and we need to do it fast.

The problem of cars is not just a result of their pollution. Cars are responsible for damages in their production because of the high energy required and the resources that are necessary to create the multi ton machines that carry us around inefficiently. Cars create problems from their demand for roads, bridges, fueling infrastructures, and maintenance sources. A final grouping of the problems that cars cause is the wastes they allow. These wastes include frivolity, excessive actions, and just plain old resource waste as a result of the so called convenience and freedom that we have fallen in love with

Freedom is no longer an applicable term, because of in certain areas of our nation (see Los Angeles or D.C) traffic has become a hindrance. We are limited by the environment that we have created and the machines that we rely on.

People used to live in cities together, near their places of work, their stores, and their families. People did not need cars; there was public transport, railways, and of course walking and biking opportunities. The term alternative transportation, which we ridiculously have labeled walking and biking today, was nonexistent. We need a major shift back to this lifestyle, and I would rather this be voluntary and proactive instead of necessary and reactive as a result of environmental disaster.