'Carmageddon' Beckons - George Monbiot

George Monbiot.

It was a mistake, a monumental, world-class mistake. Cars for everyone was one of the stupidest promises that politicians ever made.

They are meant to meet a simple need: quick and efficient mobility. Observe an urban artery during the school run or a trunk road on a bank holiday weekend and ask yourself whether the current system meets that need. The vast expanse of road space, the massive investment in metal and fossil fuel has delivered the freedom to sit fuming in a toxic cloud as your life ticks by.

The primary aim has been snarled up with other, implicit objectives: the sense of autonomy, the desire for self-expression through the configuration of metal and plastic you drive, and the demand for profit by car manufacturers and fossil fuel producers, whose lobbying keeps us on the road rather than moving along it.

Step back from this mess and ask yourself this. If you controlled the billions that are spent every year, privately and publicly, on the transport system, and your aim was to smooth the passage of those who use it, is this what you would do? Only if your imagination had been surgically excised.

Read the piece by Guardian columnist, George Monbiot - “Carmageddon Beckons.”