Cars - the most absurd things ever

A Reading street at 4pm on a Friday.

There are in excess of 20 cars sitting idle. I gave it some thought. The reason for this is “convenience”. The owners of these cars know where the car is and can use it any time they like. I got to thinking would it be more difficult to hire a taxi? The loss is that you need to think 15minutes ahead and it will cost you a lot of money. The gain is that you have a chauffeur (which I assume is a good thing since people with money chose one), you don’t have to worry about the upkeep of the car or the petrol and probably best you can order the car to anywhere that you are so that parking isn’t a problem and returning to the car park after an excursion isn’t a problem. So the only real cost is the money against what are considerable gains.

Combine this with the concept of public transport. People don’t like public transport because of the cost, the crowding and again the inconvenience. You need to get to a bus station or a railway station and then wait for a vehicle. These modes are not ideal for carrying items, say returning from a shopping trip, and they are not really kid friendly. The most common citation for having a car I have noticed is children. One wonders how we ever survived before the advent of the motor vehicle! Basically kids walked and cycled – wonder if cars correlate at all with obesity? Another problem is that it is dangerous for a child to be out – not because of paedophiles but ironically much more likely because of cars accidents! The very cause has become the solution! In fact car accidents are such a major killer (3000/year in UK) that they rank higher than some of the diseases that get millions of pounds of research. Of course this is offset by the perceived benefit of cars; evidently we think the risk is worth it.

The worst part though is the picture above. Look at the inefficiency of this mode of transport. All these vehicles everyday being left idle and no one is allowed to use them. The same with houses and gardens, TVs, Videos, bathrooms, beds; everything that is privately owned. In my mind the real problem lies in the concept of private ownership.

Obviously private ownership is a solution to a very real problem which is “neglect”. People tend to neglect and abuse things. If we opened our garden to the public we can be sure that soon it would be a rubbish dump, with dog faeces everywhere, graffiti, any plants uprooted trodden on and potentially undesirable people making the place a hell on earth. What was a place where we could relax and feel safe and enjoy some peace becomes a place where we are marginalised and unhappy with the behaviour of others.

Now are we sure that we don’t do the same when we leave our place of sanctuary? Say when we send our army to Iraq? I wonder how we would feel if a war was waged on English soil (the last one was the French in 1066) – the French, Spanish and Germans never actually landed (except for that bizarre French invasion in Cornwall where the town’s women captured them). What of our sanctuary then? This I imagine is why we wage wars on other soils to protect our own soil from being invaded and fought over. But, the point is that we don’t care about another land as much as we do our own… and that reinforces the logic that we should protect our own. Like a dog chasing its tail and not recognising our own reflection, the reason for protecting our own land is actually Our (societal) disrespect for the land of others. Now I believe and they are the same thing: private property isn’t a concept that arose from protecting ourselves from injury but is the concept that causes us to injure others and so experience injury ourselves. It is a paradigm in which man is set against man, outside which man lives alongside man. If the Jehovah’s witnesses want a land where everything lives side by side the solution lies in the concept of property.

To be honest we are not going to escape the paradigm that easily. Jesus and Buddha both accept property as a normative condition of worldly living. Only the monks and those preparing for Heaven need abandon ties to worldly possessions. To ask a whole society so deeply steeped in this idea is ridiculous. But that doesn’t make it right, and proper political decisions should be made realising that it is only a custom rather than a truth – like for example drinking the UK. All the evidence points to alcohol being only a force for bad in the country, but because there would be civil war if it was banned the country has to leave it legal. Likewise property which is an even more deeply engrained culture effecting everything.

So recognising that car ownership is the problem what can we do? Well I cannot believe that providing a government subsidy for taxi services is impossible. Then linking this with an improved public transport system would provide the country’s entire needs. Remove the car industry and the saving in resources would be magnificent.

This way we would get a better transport system with the only habit to learn, the thinking ahead by 15 minutes on a journey, and the gain being able to get transport everywhere without the overhead of parking and maintenance. All this for less manpower and less expense…but in our misfiring economic model that is somehow a bad thing! The problem there is the allocation of resources… and that boils down to private property also.

On the PPP thing which is the most beloved of modern political economics in the UK: the principal that the private sector and public sectors can somehow share their good qualities. Of course what really happens is that the public sector’s efficiency is reduced by competition and private sector helps itself to government money. As was noted in the FT, the free market seems to find 3 prices in the PPP scheme of things. First price is the lowest which is what the analysts decide the industry is worth. The government and tax payer gets cheated. The second price is the price that the shares shoot up to in the free market – the highest price. The third price is the price the government buys shares back again after the venture has failed. The only gainers are the city and the tax payer loses. This pattern has been enacted in a grand scale in the recent highway robbery of government treasuries around the world. Cars seem to me to simply fit neatly into the mould of private versus public (which itself fits into the paradigm of private ownership). Industry makes the big money through cars. A huge car lobby make it impossible for politicians to freely administer a public transport system – if they ever did it would end the car industry. The public faced with a failed public transport system then flee into the mouth of the lion and have to sort out their own transport… each and everyone one of them.

Think of it this way. In a private car system we each have to drive for say and hour a day, find parking spots, spend time looking for insurance, getting the car moted, passing our test, getting it off to the garage for repairs, find petrol stations. All this that we do is unpaid – we are effectively wasting time that we could be either making money or enjoying ourselves. In a public health system someone is paid to do all this, and yet the total output for £ is more under the public system than the private. I’ll work it out one day but the effort required to make millions of cars and transport them all over the country and then have millions of people drive them all far exceeds the effort required to just make 1 central transport system that works. So more of the work is paid, but less people are employed. It is a genius solution. But instead we chose the hard way where we individually do most of the work unpaid and have to manage own private transport. The more I live in this society the more Alice In Wonderland it seems. What is up is really down and vice versa. Maybe the failings are just endemic of worldly living.

I notice that Reading Borough Council has been running a "Your Reading" scheme. This is genius but shows up the insanity of our society. They have used the concept of private ownership to refer to public property :-) It works too because you begin to take pride in the public spaces. But why does this pride need to be encouraged by the government? It is because the government owns the public space and we own the private space and so naturally we are conditioned to not care about those things which are nothing to do with us ... i.e. the public space. How utterly insane. The planet will burn and we will be sitting within the tiny boundaries of our private home saying it's not our problem. The litter, dog faeces, grafitti, pollution, cars, noise, ugly industry, wars, violent behaviour all safely outside our private space - doesn't interest us. Multiply this attitude by 7 billion and you have a recipee for mass unhappiness in the world as everyone disregards everyone and the efforts of mankind are fragmented into 7 billion plots of identical tiny space. I make this point again and again in the blog and everytime I look at it is becomes more absurd.

I don’t drive after failing my driving test back in 1994. I decided no point putting good money after bad (why should I pay money to be told whether I can spend more money!). In any case I didn’t need a car as the public transport in London is so good and I was normalised to using it. I have also cycled since a child and that is normalised. Now aged 38 I never have the occasion where I think I need to drive as I have never done so before and I always think in terms of legs, bike, a lift from a friend who drives, or the train. This seems to prove to me that it is paradigmatic. Change the way we think and suddenly cars don’t feature anymore.