The Wrong Side of my Car

The blog that wants to go obsolete

Car brain

Have you ever heard anyone use the term Car Brain?

Maybe someone is pointing out that you obviously can’t get groceries without a car *1. Or, yeah public transport is all good if you just want to go straight home from work but this will obviously never work if you have to go to other places underway. These assertions often attract scorn, and ‘car brain’ is a term to imply that people saying these things are kind of stupid. It is perhaps a bit of a Liberal thing, and liberals aren’t exactly known to be good at making friends.

In basic terms, it refers to people who no longer know how to survive without driving a car. Or even, whether or not this is possible at all. But can you really blame them? Look around in your city. How do the streets work? Where is everything?

(A heads-up: this blog is situated in suburban Auckland. Which is a tautology, Auckland is all suburb and no urb. This post will make absolutely no sense if you live in Amsterdam.)

Teleportation

Last century, cars were the future. Faster than almost anything that came before, and unlike trains or trams it wasn’t constrained by fixed routes and schedules. The one mode of transportation to rule them all. Never again would you have to go somewhere on foot, or wait for a bus. Or get wet in the rain.

You could get into your car and materialise 10 kilometres away within minutes. Within a day you could travel a thousand kilometres in any direction. 150 years ago, not even kings and emperors could dream about having this level of mobility.

However, all this goodness did not come without baggage.

Car-brain

We all learn in school that distances are measured in kilometres or miles. But that is not how people think about how far they are from the school, or supermarket, or the office. People think in minutes and hours. The geometry of the city is expressed in terms of car-minutes. 2 minute drive, 5 minute drive, half an hour drive, you get the gist. Many real estate advertisements tell you how many minutes away from the beach, or from the city centre the flashy new development is.

It is one of the ways our thinking has adapted to this new world of cars.

Our streets have adapted. Driveway crossings on footpaths are flattened to make turning in with a car more convenient. Intersections ballooned out with turning lanes and slip lanes. Zebra crossings are obsolete and get removed. Traffic light cycles are optimised for cars until it was only in theory possible to walk across. Can you still walk to the shop? Yes, but anyone on the street will notice immediately that this is not its intended use anymore.

Chances are your closest supermarket is a kilometre or two away from you. With a car this doesn’t matter, you can easily cover that distance in a few minutes. But on foot this distance quickly adds up to a lot of time. And what are the chances that both your house and your supermarket sit on a convenient bus line? Even if they do, just getting on that bus takes longer than the few minutes it takes to drive all the way. Cycling is mortally dangerous, are you crazy? Ask someone how they would go to the supermarket without a car, and they may genuinely not have a viable answer.

But why is so far away to begin with? Because, with cars, they can. You can serve an area many kilometres across with one supermarket. And they are often in weird locations because they could conveniently build large parking lots for their customers.

Or how would you carry a week worth of groceries on a bicycle? You can’t (unless you have one of those bakfietsen). But it turns out this weekly shopping trip is also an adaptation to cars. We get our entire haul for one week because we can. And also because, while it is a reasonably short drive, the drive and the search for a parking spot are cumbersome enough that you don’t really want to do it every day anymore.

You can mock it as car brain. But it is more of a Cities-as-we’ve-known-them-for-the-last-50-years-brain. But it doesn’t exactly roll of the tongue, does it?

Forgetting how life without cars works is not at all surprising. Do you know how to survive off the land? How can you survive if you don’t know which plants will poison you? We got fridges around the same time as when we first got cars. Can you imagine not having a fridge? Car brain is a funny and catchy term, but what about electricity brain or supermarket brain — did your parents show you how to make candles from animal fat, or how to slaughter a chicken or how to store all those potatoes or kumara for the year? Knowledge goes obsolete and is forgotten all the time.

Roads or streets

Have you ever tried to explain the difference between roads and streets? For most people these are synonyms *2. Even so this difference is still well known, even to almost all suburbanites. In today’s colloquial English, these two concepts are known as streets / roads, and malls.

You know how a mall works. You can walk from one shop to another. You may find a barista serving coffee, or a little playground in the middle. Crossing the mall is not a thing. It is not dangerous, you don’t need to go to school to learn how to do it. You don’t have to watch out, or worry about your kids getting run over. You just… walk to that shop on the other side.

You may have seen a car in a mall before. Maybe some manufacturer is doing a promotion. It would have been in its dormant state. Nonthreatening and still. Imagine how much mayhem would ensue if someone were to actually start this car and drive it around? They certainly did not drive it in on a Saturday afternoon.

Time for a thought experiment. Picture your local mall. What would it take to make it possible to drive cars through that mall? Like, in general. A dozen or so every minute. Say, people with a handicap can park in front of the supermarket. Or a few shops can allow stopping in front for picking up bulky stuff.

Look around. How do they get through at all? You would have to mark a roadway through the middle of a mall, and clear out all the people. Remove the playground and the coffee, and the guy with the key cutter, everything. It would be hugely disruptive.

The problems multiply if you want to drive faster. 50 km/h, aka 30 mph, is fast enough to kill people. It is too fast to react to sudden movements. Shoppers will have to look out for cars so they don’t get dead instead of just shopping around. And it is loud — probably too loud to casually talk to someone.

You can start to appreciate the compromises it takes to actually make driving cars possible, let alone driving fast.

The floor is lava

So, I mentioned streets above. Before 1920 or so, streets functioned a lot like malls function today. Places where you could hang out, talk to your neighbours or generally just mind your own business. Kids could play. Street vendors could just sit down and sell their stuff. We could have fountains or shrines in the middle of intersections, because why not. They’re the focal points of our cities so why not make them nice.

And when cars became more common, those exact problems showed up. Cars going through those streets started killing people. Outrage mounted. Something had to be done. You can’t just willy-nilly do dangerous stuff everywhere. Either you stop doing it or you go somewhere away from people who may get hurt.

But not for car drivers. Somehow *3 they convinced everyone that it was everyone else who has to look out for them. Cities would clear out their streets for cars. After World War II the street was a different place. The next generations of children were taught to look both ways to cross the street, and to give way to cars — an idea that would have been profoundly ridiculous when their grandparents were in school.

Today, the human realm ends at your property line. Once you are on the street, you are in the domain of cars. Where you have to stay out of their way, at pain of getting maimed or killed. For children it is too dangerous to be out their at all.

Our streets turned into a giant game of the floor is lava.

The spaces where you can just hang out and do your thing have receded to safe islands in this sea of lava. Your home, the mall, the school, your office. Don’t touch the ground in between. Like children jumping from a chair to the sofa, you use your car to sail from one island to another.

Terrarium

So, how can children fit in? They can’t have a driver license. This leaves them largely home bound. Going off the property becomes something that is formally arranged. Play dates, piano lessons, sport club. There is a stereotype of the soccer mom, or for us Kiwis, a rugby mum perhaps. ‘Outside’ is no longer going somewhere and be home before the lights come on, ‘outside’ is the backyard.

So at least you will want a nice backyard, right? First the basics. Large is better than small. The quarter-acre is our classic aspiration, although we never developed backyards quite that large in Auckland.

And then, we can get some decorations & accessories for that backyard. You can get a slide and swing set, or a trampoline. Maybe a pair of soccer goals. You can lay down some paths in your garden. Some children will enjoy climbing a tree. There are many options available to imitate a nice and natural habitat for your children.

And so it becomes this little terrarium for our kids. Around us are our neighbours, who build their own little terrariums for their kids.

There is a certain sadness over all of this. There may be children two terrariums over from here. You will never see them. Those children will either safely in their own home, or safely contained in their parents’ car on its way to some other safe island. You may be forgiven for thinking you are the only child on your street. The city, rather than an intricate network of streets and places, becomes a collection of islands, connected by nondescript voyages in the backseat of a car *4. The space outside these islands becomes mysterious and dangerous.

It does explain a few things. Like: is it OK to keep children in an apartment? No it isn’t. Without a terrarium, where are you going to keep your kids? *5 It is like keeping a fish in a glass of water instead of an aquarium. You don’t do it. At this point, urbanists will fire that usual gotcha at you — what about parks? They can go to the park, right? Tut, tut, tut. You forgot about the lava. The constraint is not distance, it is time. Dinner won’t cook itself. Usually. Dishes won’t wash themselves. The house won’t keep itself clean. Parents didn’t magically get more hours in a day to loiter behind their kids while they are playing in the park *6.

And, after teaching kids that the streets out there are dangerous, how are they going to look at the streets when they grow up? Danger. One day they will get their own cars, and guess what, a ute is better at warding off that danger than those old school cars.

Eventually, as we get older, many people cannot or choose not to drive cars anymore. Life comes around in a circle. We have a set of terrariums for these people too. Maybe this is what makes us all so upset about those old people bumbling around in their cars. It is like a vision of the future in a crystal ball, and we don’t like it.

Getting out of the deal

Cars offered this exciting deal. Your personal carriage to bring you everywhere, like a king in the Middle Ages.

But what if it was a deal with the Devil? We could have our cars, however, using them wasn’t an option. From now on it was mandatory. That turned out to be not ideal, to say the least *7. Congestion seems unsolvable. There is never enough space to park all those cars. Children, and other groups of people who can’t drive, lost much of their freedom *8.

And what about that other luxury? The promise of our own private garden? This promise was similarly poisoned. You got the luxury of your own private outdoor space, but that is now the only space you can reach before you impinge into the domain of cars.

Car traffic in cities has many of the same problems as heavy industry. There is pollution from exhausts, brake dust and tyres. The constant noise and danger are suffocating. Separating industry from residential areas was a big deal for these exact reasons. And in the background is the ever louder drum beat of climate change. More and more people really want less cars in cities.

How do we get out of this deal?

The solutions are well-known because some cities have already implemented them. Public transport and bicycle lanes are alternatives to driving. More population density and different settlement patterns make these alternatives more convenient. Maybe you think of it as a jigsaw puzzle. The more pieces we have in place, the closer we are to a solution.

But it is really more like a Rubik’s cube. For a beginner solving a cube with two of the three layers already solved will be as intractable as solving a completely scrambled cube.

If we lay bike lanes, our residential settlement pattern and the location of our shops will prevent most people from using them, because the distances are too long. (The median trip distance in Auckland is just over 6 km *9). And yet they take up space that would otherwise be useful for driving or parking. We get terrible parking problems and congestion around high density housing because the alternatives are not there yet. And if we build a public transport network first it will be empty for lack of residential density in its catchment. Shops and other businesses cannot move to town centres because they cannot provide enough parking, and people also cannot take public transport instead of cars to those shops because they are not clustered in town centres.

Untangling this Gordian knot will be messy and weird. Have you ever watched someone solve a Rubik’s cube? It takes a sequence of intricate and coordinated moves, completely baffling to those unfamiliar. There is no apparent logic or common sense behind it if you don’t know the patterns.

Weaning our city off cars will be equally baffling to our car brains.

---

No comments