I need a car. Well, no, I don’t need a car. What I need is a way to travel locally, farther and faster than I can walk, while carrying passengers and goods.
I can unpack that even more: I need goods (like groceries) that I choose, stockpiled in small quantities in my home, with the stockpile refreshed regularly. That doesn’t require me to physically travel to make my choices; the “drive to the store” process is just how I’m habituated — to the extent that it feels like a need. But it’s not the need itself; that’s an illusion. Nowadays it’s completely possible and easy to make my selections and refresh my stockpiles without leaving home.
How about passengers? Five or more times per week I bring my granddaughter, who is too young to drive herself, to her after-school activities. These are mostly right in our town, but too far to walk. As Steven Wright says, every place is walking distance if you’ve got the time. But we really don’t have the time. So that’s a legitimate need that also seems to involve a car.
It at least involves a means of transportation, and while that could be a cargo bike (with a passenger seat), I live in New England, where it can be quite cold 4-5 months out of the year, and during those cold months the roads can be icy and quite dangerous on a bike. More danger than I find acceptable. Uber and Lyft and traditional taxicabs (we have those in our city) are viable alternatives to owning a car. There is a cost in time and convenience, not to mention the direct cost of each ride. But there are direct costs to owning a car, too.
Trying to address the cost/benefit situation of a car versus alternatives gets complicated. There are local ride services, but I also occasionally travel farther, though still basically locally. Once in a while I visit a town about 80 miles away. The alternative there would probably be to rent a car for the day. But I also make other local trips that are unplanned or minimally planned. The planning is a key; owning a car has habituated me to minimal planning in many situations.
And there’s the crux of it, and more: I, and I think quite a few other people in this society, are habituated to minimal planning. We’re habituated in large part because we’ve been convinced; marketed to; propagandized. What is one of the chief marketing messages in the US over the past century? Convenience. Easiness.
Planning can be difficult, and takes deliberate thought and action. We are dissuaded from deliberation. Deliberately. I think this is turning out to be a bad idea.
