powered by our ancestors
Since my freshman arrival at Virginia Tech, I have progressively moved away from cars. Middle school and high school years impressed upon me the important social buffer that an automobile affords, able to compensate not only for insecurity issues but also for brains. Have you realized that the expectation that “someone owns a sportscar equals someone who understands cars” is no longer relevant, at all? Cars are a social symbol today, equivalent to indoor plumbing.
Yet, college life has taught me to slowly remove myself from the ton of metal and plastic. Approaching the finale of my fourth year at VT, I not only have no desire to ever own a car (or live somewhere where cars are necessity) but I fully lost my driving lust, the grin you get when an engine races you along. What I see when driving cars are the millions of years of practically static natural processes turning plant matter into oil, the ridiculous materialistic attachments auto-owners parade about, and the decentralizing effects that transportation systems have had on local communities. Granted, I may personally support, in moral and word, that last segment, but it is a painful regimentation for a small town to experience when interstates want their way and the local government promises enormous financial returns. Those promises always come true (for a time), though - chains always return financially, but they further the assimilation of American consumer culture that happens to not well buffer local cultures.
America is a geographically-huge nation demanding quick and cheap transportation, primarily for the many products (Made in China) being sold all over. Since low-altitude mono-hover-rails never caught on, the country ended up on relying on big truck transit. Now, with oil prices rising and demands for greater security in the big-transit industry coming about, the advantages of truck transportation are becoming limited. But what are the other options? Rail would be the closest thing, but it is primarily an industrial-only service, quickly inhibited by the road transit system itself considering how slow trains must travel around towns (railroad crossings, specifically). Nothing other than rail would really solve the transit issue here.
I was thinking about this quandary during the Christmastime. Knowing that trying to break up road transportation entirely would be an absurd waste of time and money, there must be a way to incorporate the highway systems into a new transportation method that would work in tandem with present-day traffic. Think of two types of vehicles running alongside each other, just one being greatly more efficient than the other, one producing far less exhaust than the other. Not a new car, not a new fuel, but a new way of getting around. Be inventive.
And all this from just hating cars. Imagine that.
January 4th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
Totally. The biggest drag about moving from Boston to LA was no longer have a public transit system that could take me everywhere I wanted to go. LA’s public transit is mostly bus-based. The buses are “clean energy”, whatever that means. Still, LA’s sprawl is too vast to be an efficient transit system.
Why not just improve cars to run on air or water?