My war on cars

I don't drive.

For much of my adult life this has been something of a point of shame with me.

The first thing you should know is that I'm not very good at it. I struggled in driver's ed, but probably could gotten through if the complications in my family life at the time hadn't interfered with whatever was needed to get that taken care of.

I've tried off and on to finish gaining that skill and the dictates of some relationships made it so it was occasionally difficult and perhaps even unreasonable of me not to have done so.

But here's the thing I realized. I'm temperamentally incapable of being good enough at driving for my own comfort. I can't hold the right level of attention to do it regularly.

When I tell people that, I only rarely acknowledge that I don't actually think that puts me in some tiny percentage of adults in the world. I'd guess I'm somewhere in the middle, if I had to guess. Perhaps a little below the median, but not massively. I simply don't think most people are safe controlling a motor vehicle, at least on a regular basis.

I also think most routine driving makes people worse human beings. I don't mean that as a bit of rhetoric. I think our brains are not evolved to understand the morality of controlling a giant iron machine that travels 10-100 times faster than our body can and that, while doing it, literally everyone loses some degree of their essential morality.

That's probably considerably less true on awesome road trips on long stretches of scenic highway, where the entire experience is freeing and not especially demanding.

But everyone is stupider and angrier while doing day to day commuting and driving about.

I was just reading, Owning a Car Will Soon Be as Quaint as Owning a Horse by Kara Swisher, because I heard her on the War of Cars podcast. I agree with most of her points here.

Here's the thing, I know that most people think driving is essential to their life, but I'm not someone who has ever lived in some community that's friendly to non-driving. I've lived mostly in Seattle and Austin, sprawl and cars, among other people who are largely confused by my lack of driving.

But, as I live longer, I find I'm even more confused by everyone else's commitment to driving. It's a perspective thing. They see it as freedom, I see it as slavery.

Because, while I haven't driven, I've lived in households where cars were an important part. Where we made payments on a car, paid insurance and licensing, gas and maintenance. Honestly, for people who aren't specifically fans of them, who enjoy the care and feeding, I can't imagine what makes people take part.

The degree I'll go is to say, I suspect private car ownership is going to go the way of cigarette smoking as a cultural artifact.

There will continue to be mystique of James Dean or Burt Reynolds driving like there is of Humphrey Bogart or Lee Marvin smoking. But, increasingly, you, as a member of the general public, doing it became more frowned upon.

It creates foul smells, makes the air worse for the people around you, endangers their health, and, as mentioned, has a negative impact on your personality. Thinking of the real life act becomes more difficult to view as innocent the more you consider the overall effect.

It's not a new comparison for me. For years, I justified my own smoking by saying at least I evened out my poisoning of the environment by not driving. But I quit even that a couple of years ago.

To age myself, I've gone from a world where most non-smokers I knew kept an ashtray in their house for when smokers came over to one in which most smokers I know don't even smoke in their own house anymore because it increases the health risk and makes their smoke smell even more noticeable when they go out. I think there will be a similar shift from those of us who don't drive being seen as being troublesome and burdens on the drivers around them to people who insist on having their own cars being seen as burdens on the rest of us, our roads and our air.

Honestly, I think as more people give them up, more work will be done finding solutions to the problems we use cars to solve now. I'm not among the self-driving car converted, although I do believe they could, at some point, be a part of a larger group of things we all incorporate into our solutions. I think the things a post-car ownership world would be aiming for would not all be addressed if we all mostly going about the same lives we do now in self-driving cars instead of driving, aside from the problem of people being assholes when they drive.

I know my bias on this is based on a series of coincidences that make my life. All of our biases on everything are. We just forget that most of the time. I think as more people's experience changes, I agree that people will move in this direction, though, and the world will be better on a vast number of levels for it.

Honestly, we're all just in that world, but our predecessors building a society around the needs of private car ownership and driving was at best foolish and more likely utterly contemptible. We should do better.