The car: freedom on four wheels and its bill

Few inventions have given a person as much freedom as the car: get in and go anywhere, anytime. But this freedom has a bill that does not come at once and is paid by everyone — even those who own no car. A hundred years on, we have finally begun to read it.

We built cities for cars, not for people

A substitution happened unnoticed: first we adapted the city to the car, and then discovered we live in a city where a person without a car is ill at ease. Wide roads instead of squares, parking lots instead of gardens, noise and exhaust instead of quiet. A child has nowhere to play, an old man nowhere to sit, because the best places are given to what moves fast. We wanted the car to serve the human, and it turned out the human serves the car.

One person’s freedom is everyone’s crowding

The car has a treacherous quality: it grants freedom to the one inside at the expense of everyone outside. While cars are few, this is unnoticed; when they are many, freedom turns into its opposite — a traffic jam where no one is going anywhere. A city convenient only by car is in fact inconvenient for everyone, drivers included. The true mark of an advanced city is not that you can drive through it quickly, but that it is pleasant to walk through on foot.

“The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad.”
— Marshall McLuhan

My opinion: I am not against cars — I am against the city belonging to them rather than to people. Freedom of movement is wonderful, as long as it does not take away the freedom to breathe, to stroll, and to let a child out into the yard. The world’s happiest cities are now taking the reverse step: giving the streets back to pedestrians, bicycles, trees, and benches. Progress is not that everyone has a car, but that one is not needed for a happy life.

Cover: Main Street, Keene, New Hampshire, 1910s (public domain), duotone by Shanraq.