THE MIDDLE LANE
Ignore the doomsayers – cars will still be needed in our utopian future, says TGTV’s Sam Philip
“The worldwide love affair with the car is over ” ran a recent opinion piece in the Guardian newspaper “The car as we know it is fast becoming extinct it is a relic of a former age ”
It’s been gaining more and more traction recently the whole ‘car is dead’ school of thought And as schools of thought go it’s no question a compelling one with just one tiny flaw I fear it’s utter bobbins
To be clear not about to start bashing the Guardian here The article made many valid indisputable points Cars can be polluting Cars can cause terrible accidents Cars are expensive to buy and run Cars take up valuable space in our cities
All of which are excellent reasons for our governments to invest lavishly in spangly public transport systems for our cities and towns and make it safe and pleasant to walk and cycle anywhere it’s faintly realistic to do so
However Even in this glorious utopian actually properly funded future of public transport sometimes some humans are still going to need to get some humans and some stuff to another part of the country And if that other part of the country is in the countryside they’re going to require some sort of wheeled pod with seating for several and a few hundred
“DECLARING THE DEATH OF THE CAR IS LIKE... DECLARING THE DEATH OF THE TOILET”
litres of luggage space A wheeled pod that utilises our existing road network We could call it ‘a car’
I’m from rural Cornwall Trust me unless through some Twitter mishap Elon Musk ends up accidentally bequeathing his entire fortune to Cornwall county council’s transport department you’re never going to construct a public transport network that can get all of rural Cornwall to and from where it needs to go unless rural Cornwall fancies a cheeky fourmile jog home from the bus stop with its weekly shop
Declaring the death of the car is like declaring the death of the toilet because you don’t like what people put down it Sure disapprove all you want but humans are still going to need to do their business in the case of the car that business being ‘actually getting to other places that aren’t London’ so accept reality and figure out how to deal with it as cleanly as possible
Buses bikes legs love ’em Can’t get enough of them Let’s have more But unless you’re planning to forcibly relocate Britain’s population to a single vast megalopolis our future’s still going to require carshaped things too Or y’know personal helicopters Helicopters could work
And yes let’s please make those carshaped things as clean green and safe as possible How our cars are powered how we pay for them how we drive them how many we own as a nation all that should and will change over the coming decades
But they’ll still be cars Rumours of their death have been greatly exaggerated
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