THE BAN THE CAR SITE - By Justin Moore
Complete text file, last update: 2006-09-11 11:59

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION. Introduction to the Ban The Car Site
BAN THE CAR IN CITIES: SUMMARY. 

PROBLEMS:
COLLISIONS. Collisions, The Everyday Violence of the Car Culture made Manifest.
POLLUTION. The Pollution Caused by Car Culture Prevalence.
FISCAL BLACK HOLE. The Fiscal Costs of Car Habituation and Car Culture.
FUEL CRISIS ECONOMICS. The Impact on the Global Economy of Declining Oil Production.
GLOBAL DANGERS. The contribution of the Car Culture to Global Environmental Danger.
LANDSPACE ISSUES. Landspace Issues Associated with Car Dominance.
LANDSPACE ECONOMICS. The Economic Quantification of Landspace Appropriated by the Car Culture.
CARS AND SECURITY.  Some Security Issues Solved, and Some Created, by the Car Culture.
TERRORISM AND CARS. Car Culture's Role in Global Terrorism.

CAUSES:
THE CAR CULTURE. The Nature And Principle Vested Interests of the Car Culture.
CARS AND SEXUALITY.  Analysis of the Car As Overt Sex Symbol, Their Practical Use in Sexuality And
					"Sex Sells" Commercial Cultural Attempts to Fuse Cars and Sexuality. 
MOBILITY CULTURE. The Negative Psycho-Social Effects of Mobility Culture.
FREEDOM OF THE ROAD. A Refutation of the "Right to Drive".
CONSUMERISM. The Car as Flagship and Multiplier of Consumerism.
SOCIAL EFFECTS. Social Effects of Car Habituation.
TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS. The Tragedy of the Commons as it Applies to the Car.
BOGUS ALTERNATIVES. Unrealistic and Unworkable Alternatives to the Car Culture.

SOLUTIONS:
NATURE OF THE BAN. The Nature of any Effective Ban on Urban Cars.
STRATEGY OF BAN. The Strategy Required to Implement a Ban on Urban Cars.
REAL ALTERNATIVES. Transportation Systems that Offer Real Alternatives to the Car System.
TRANSIT SYSTEMS TO DISPLACE CARS. The Kind of Transit Systems Required to Displace Car Transport in
							Cities.
OPTIMAL BUS DESIGN. A Bus Designed to Displace, Rather than Complement, the Car System.
TRANSPORT DISPLACEMENT. Means To Satisfy Economic and Social Needs Without Resort to Current Levels
							of Transportation
REACTION TO A BAN. Some Forseeable Reactions to a Ban on Urban Cars.
ECO-CRITICAL (ECOLOGICAL AND ECONOMIC) PUBLIC INVESTMENT. The Critical Economic and Ecological
							Public Infrastructure Ignored Because of Car Infrastructure Spending.
	 
APPENDICES.
1. MORE.  Additional Exposition of content for the Ban The Car Site.
2. NOTES.  Notes and Links for the Ban The Car Site
3. GLOSSARY.  Glossary for Ban The Car Site
4. AUTHOR AND COPYRIGHT INFO.  Justin Moore  - Author of Ban The Car Site


BAN THE CAR
ARGUMENT FILES
Ban The Car: Summary
Textfile - Entire Text of Argument
Problems
Collisions
Car Pollution
Fiscal Black
Hole
Oil Crisis
Economics
Global Dangers
Space Issues
Landspace
Economics
Cars and Security
Terrorism and Cars
CAUSES
Car Culture
Cars and Sexuality
Mobility Culture
Freedom of the
Road
Consumerism
Social Effects
Tragedy of the Commons
Bogus Alternatives
SOLUTIONS
Nature Of Ban
Strategy Of Ban
Real Alternative
Transport
Transit Systems to
Displace Cars
Optimal Bus Design
Transport
Displacement
Reaction to a Ban
Eco Critical Public Investment
ACCESSORY FILES
Introduction
Author
More - Expositions of
Argument
Glossary
Notes

INTRODUCTION. -Introduction to the Ban The Car Site

Welcome to the Ban the Car page.  Where you'll find a forthright argument for banning the car in
cities, a non-trivial and convincing one I hope.  It argues for a ban as the only effective system
of solving the danger the car poses, and against any lesser measures.  It argues that the removal of
urban cars should be treated as the touchstone of environmental survival, the major solution to the
critical world environmental, social, administrative and economic problems of today and the next
centuries; while other measures, in the absence of cities without cars, will ultimately be futile,
overwhelmed by ecologically catastrophic normative behaviours that ensure disaster in the 21st
century.

Motive of this page. Obviously to try to get the world to ban cars. More humbly to attempt to
formulate the argument in a coherent and comprehensive way, that is amenable to expansion,
augmentation and amendment. I'm an individual not a research institute or activist group so the
argument is necessarily heavily concept and logic based, rather than study or statistic or focal
point based, I think it's more comprehensive and disinterested for that.  In simply addressing my
own organic needs and those of all the people I see, know of or logically rely upon it becomes more
multidimensional than any "qualified" academic study.  The site isn't academically rigorous and any
idea or fact source that proved too elusive to easily trace I haven't cited. There are many sites
regarding some aspect of the car's impact, that deal better with one aspect or another and I've made
some links to these; but I've attempted to bring all the issues together into a logical whole, and
propound a systemic solution that accounts, not only for the car's problems, but for foreseeable
problems with the solution.  The analysis of the current car crisis is more heavily weighted towards
those aspects that are not represented elsewhere, such as the space demands of cars, their societal
impacts and the opportunity cost of supporting the car culture; but pollution, collisions, fuel
crisis and other aspects are not ignored.

Crucially, this is not an attempt to influence drivers' emotions, I'm indifferent to how drivers
feel, guilty or triumphal, and will neither promote nor accept blame or responsibility for any
halfway measures (to leap the proverbial canyon between the status quo and a sustainable regime)
which they impute to environmental concern. I promote neither fuel taxes nor new "green" or "smart"
cars or "Intelligent Traffic Systems"; I want cars banned from cities.  I'm not trying to make
drivers feel guilty, how they deal with truth is their own emotional issue, if it moves them to
redoubled symbolic gestures such as walking more or whatever I do not regret this, if they redouble
their efforts to discredit the opposing voices or overthrow the few pitiful restraints and taxes
currently imposed on them I do not celebrate this.

Once the problems have been outlined and a solution is being propounded this is unashamedly an
argument for state regulation and systems, even the current car dominance is regarded as a system,
and a poor one, - Adam Smith had some nasty criticisms of men and works of systems -

[The man of system] seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society
with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board; he does not consider
that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand
impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a
principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislator might choose to
impress upon it. Adam Smith - The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part VI Section II Chapter 2

In effect he thought all societal systematizers were megalomaniacs, which is about as true as saying
all capitalists are blind with avarice, i.e. a common weakness of the group but not their essence.
But as an alternative to central authority he posited "the market" which he believed was governed by
an invisible hand that represented the gestalt of human practicality.  But this quasi deity couldn't
deliver all that is required of an organizational principle, and ended defending its claim to
omnipotence ostrich fashion, relegating all pressing concerns it couldn't handle to the realm of
"externalities".  Particularly it couldn't solve any tragedy of the commons. Smith failed to
recognize that systemic thought other than his own often reflects abstractions in a descriptive
rather than prescriptive way so that one can notice that all these "pieces" each following their own
unique "principle of motion" all wind up doing the same thing anyway, such as in peak hour traffic,
so their uniqueness is somewhat overstated.  They can be treated as a mass (and indeed cannot be
otherwise treated, as even road authorities would acknowledge) and mass means can be arranged to
effectuate the ends and reduce the damage and cost of such behaviour.  That is, economics can be
practiced; and things can be done economically (costs, even "externalities" reduced in attaining
ends)<a class="note" target="right" href="Notes.html#intro1"> note 1 instead of having this key
human capacity sacrificed at the altar of third rate mysticism.  He also failed to acknowledge that,
even if only a small percentage are beneficial, systems, even coercive systems, work and are
essential, even intrinsic, to human enterprise, even his own. His mind was formed by men of systems
before him: -  a systems person had divided the circle, by counting in 60s, in ancient Sumer, this
had been imposed upon unwilling peoples as a standard by conquerors and from that system he counted
the minutes and hours of the day -  a system had imposed, probably much against their will, the
English language on his forebears by which communication system he accessed his income stream and
audience, -  how he counted the revenues had been an Arabic system, and how his purchases were
ordered and delivered in a system of weights and measures likewise imposed by the will of a
governing man.

Systems like anything else, are trial and error, and more than 99 percent of them, like 99% of ideas
or species adaptations, aren't survival based and vanish, as could this one; but many contribute
something to the system which is ultimately conceived by that individual whose system is ultimately
accepted.  Something I do believe however is that any organized system relies on one organic entity
for its origin, for the central idea which makes it workable; where various streams of behaviour
must be integrated into a logically coherent nexus by being simultaneously held and balanced in one
mind (the human mind is still the best general computer). This only applies to its origin, any
development of the system can be collective or corporate.  The solution system propounded here
emerges from the act of banning cars in cities, which is its central idea, and is workable and can
be developed from that core. This is obviously not an original idea of mine; but the system to make
it workable is more so and, like all integrated systems must be presented in a form that corporate
minded humanity regards as egoist or megalomaniacal.  If one despises this fact, and insists that
all worthwhile activity has corporate, collective or market origins, then by what right does one
rely on a medium conceived and made workable by Tim Burners Lee, perhaps one should desist in using
the World Wide Web.

Any comment on the site can be sent to jjustinmor@yahoo.com.

BAN THE CAR IN CITIES: SUMMARY

The car's current technology pollutes air, land and water ; but its space effects , problems
inherent in its concept , are more serious and intractable: its  right-of-way and parking inflate
exchange space and cities beyond sustainable levels,  collisions are inevitable and spark an "arms
race" for bigger "safer" cars that consume more space and resources. The Urban Sprawl generated
devours the river valleys with Earth's most fertile climates and arable land, disproportionately
damaging agricultural and freshwater resources.

The car system's resource appropriation is a black hole.  It consumes an enormous amount of energy,
labour and material in space monopolisation, collision remediation, the doughnut effect , inflated
infrastructure costs etc. This is cross subsidised by generally raising prices and taxation.  It
takes an increasing proportion of world oil production, threatening to turn the immanent decline in
oil production into a massive crisis.  It diverts resources needed for eco-critical infrastructure
and has negative <a class="essay" href="Social.html" target="left">social consequences: depriving
other services of public funding, increasing the cost of living, stripping wage-earners and
governments of their capital, increasing asset inequality and indebtedness and promoting mercenary
behaviour by individuals and whole nations.

Car traffic increases the distance and time of walked journeys, the danger, toxins, turbulence,
noise, and tarmac make outdoor life stressful, thus inhibiting walking. This brings a range of bad
effects from an overwhelmingly indoor lifestyle: indoor pollutants increase illness, suppressed
casual house-front interaction removes a whole dimension of social and economic life and reduces
security, inadequate exercise causes obesity, bigger houses increase energy consumption. Cars are
symbolic flagships of consumerism , and because they atomise human habitations and society, they
also functionally multiply consumption and its consequent ecological and health evils.

The violence and resource demand of car culture repress real alternative transport ; while its
preferred subtle or technological "fixes" are bogus alternatives ; they haven't and can't reduce car
traffic or space demand or reverse the deterioration in environmental indicators. In short, of all
the environmetally dangerous behaviours in a capitalist lifestyle, the car habit is the worst.  A
car ban is the one action that would address, at a meaningful scale and profundity of systemic
effects, the  Global Dangers : the environmental, economic and social damage generated by the
civilization.  It is, more than anything else, the touchstone of environmental survival, with it a
sustainable human civilization is achievable; without it other actions probably won't be enough.

Only a ban neutralises the comparative advantage otherwise accruing to car users, defuses
competitive emulation, empowers car non-use and defeats the hegemony and tragedy of the commons we
are now experiencing.  Good alternatives are available; but only to displace ; not complement, the
car system.  A good public transport and product delivery system is expensive, half as much as the
car system; but for the resources, space and safety to be available, cars' threat and resource black
hole must be removed.  Ban the personal car in cities.

COLLISIONS: The Everyday Violence of the Car Culture made Manifest.

Collisions are the realised violence of the car system whose avoidance generates car's excessive
space demand like the wide deference circle round a thug.  They are inevitable as cars are
autonomous, nothing prevents the simultaneous decision of 2 drivers to occupy the same space, and
cars are faster, heavier and more inert than animals and such decisions cannot be as effectively
amended, collisions are minimizable by reducing autonomy via rules and streams; but inevitable
without overriding autonomy (more 1). Minimizing collisions of autonomous vehicles is simply a
matter of reducing the number of vehicles.

Collisions have high social, economic, physical & psychological costs: repair, replacement,
relocation or disposal of vehicles; repair of damaged property; trauma and protracted
hospitalization or welfare of casualties.  The para-olympic games' massed amputees and paraplegics
gives a better image than the road toll of the carnage's scale, and many countries have collision
compensation systems costing up to 3% of GDP, the pay-outs often invested in new cars in a vicious
circle of cost.

Indirect costs are even greater; human death and injury are economically incalculable but minimizing
collisions incurs huge spending on road maintenance, traffic lights and signage, policing and
management systems. The danger discourages and inhibits walking, running and cycling, (more 2)
leading to illnesses from inadequate exercise and obesity (more 3) which have overtaken smoking
related illness as the developed world's major morbidity group, hence most expensive in
hospitalization and productivity losses.

The changeover from horse to automobile wasn't natural and the same rights and behavioural mores
shouldn't apply, carriages had horse intelligence and self preservation instincts to minimize
problems, in cars momentary driver inattention can explode as fatal consequence. Car driving is an
extreme situation, that's it's excitement attraction; but made common it ceases to be recognized as
extreme and currently the danger a driver poses is a matter of denial, the system is psychologically
desensitised to these dangers and any responsibilities imposed upon drivers are disproportionately
light, leading to too lenient penalties for injurious and fatal collisions and consequent erosion of
legitimacy of legal institutions. Large numbers of current drivers are actually unfit to drive, even
by current lenient standards, factors which contribute to this are: alcohol; recent research (note
1) has revealed that most tranquillizers are almost as bad as alcohol in impairing response-ability,
also some strains of "poly-pharmacy" that western people of advancing years increasingly exist under
can be expected to deliver some incompetents.  Widespread unreasonable weighting of rights and
responsibilities even warps good instincts into harmful forms, some adopt crude self discipline to
prevent fatal consequences, resulting in stress, and the widely disregarded sense of life and death
pressure is sublimated and then displaced into adrenalin heightened extremisms in other behaviours,
family violence, road rage, or general unreasonableness.

In every time honoured civilised activity such life endangering roles are only given to trained
professionals on duty, so one would expect that current driving conditions will not be "time
honoured" by civilization, that the car culture will prove a barbaric interlude and future people
regard our road conditions the way we regard the open sewers and cesspits of the last centuries,
disgusting and unhealthy, but because of noise, turbulence and physical threat, not odour and
bacteria. Urban driving need become a restricted profession, and motor vehicle numbers be
accordingly reduced.



POLLUTION: The Pollution Caused by Car Culture Prevalence.

Car pollution isn't just fuel, that's a fraction of the whole story; the biggest pollutants are
turbulence and tarmac.  They cause air, water, land and radiant pollution. Cars pollute the air by:
releasing by-products of internal combustion - tiny particulates that damage lungs and acid
precursive, toxic and global warming gases; releasing products of friction - minute particles or
oxides from many surfaces, cladding, engine, tyres, brake pads, enhanced lubricants (teflon etc.);
all vehicles, petrol driven or not, require these materials for resistance to speed & weather,
because this is their function they cannot be biodegradable; but therefore they are not well
processed by the human body when breathed in (reducing this pollution requires a reduction in
friction, e.g. rail, and/or a reduction in vehicle numbers, e.g. car ban); causing constant
turbulence by constantly and randomly disturbing the ground level air, thus, particularly in dry
conditions, keeping particulates and ordinary dust aloft as air pollution; demanding constant
production/replacement activity from a large separately air polluting industrial base (e.g. spray-
painting and enamelling).

They pollute water through:
 industrial process demand (more 1); runoff from city streets (usually into biologically crucial
 littoral and riparian zones adjacent to cities) of particulates and acidic/toxic solutions of the
 air emissions, particularly nitrous oxide (brown smog) which forms nitric acid rain; through their
 current fuel supply, oil, which is one of the most dramatic and serious water polluters through
 oilslicks and tanker sinkings.

They pollute the land by:
 their space demand, the tarmac desert; industrial waste; disposal of car bodies and non
 biodegradable or toxic elements (vynal PVC, sump oil, tyres are a major problem, they are
 unrecyclable and pile up in huge dumps that release toxic metals and other pollutants and burn,
 polluting the air , for months if they catch fire, etc.); denaturing of soils though aluminium and
 other mineral mobilisation because of acid rain, thus polluting water catchments.

They also cause radiant, noise and heat, pollution:
 Traffic creates constant noise pollution, much of it background, as much from airflow and wheel
 rumble as from engine noise. Most human constructions trap heat, whereas greenery and trees
 disperse heat, converting some to matter and releasing some in transpiration. In car based cities
 the built area is larger, there is more tarmac than greenery, so there is up to a 10 degree Celsius
 increase in heat between the city centre and distant countryside, and heat relief is less as
 breezes warm up over the city, sometimes rain-clouds are diverted sideways by the heat column.
 This is only a problem in hot conditions but it too discourages walking and increases car use, and
 triggers greater use of air conditioning, thus energy, industry and their associated pollutants, a
 problem set to worsen in the expected heatwaves of global warming.  Garages somewhat increase the
 built environment, trapping more heat and blocking breezes.

FISCAL BLACK HOLE: The Fiscal Costs of Car Habituation and Car Culture.

Financial costs of the car system include:
vehicles and replacement parts from normal wear, fuel,
collision remediation in, vehicle repair or disposal, property repair, compensation and litigation,
health impacts: trauma and permanent invalid medical treatment of collision casualties, treatment of
lung conditions from air pollution, treatment of conditions caused by indoor lifestyle, exposure to
indoor pollutants, (paints, construction glues, radon from plasterboard etc.),
lifestyle health impacts: principally obesity because of reduced exercise in transit and reduced
outdoor activity because of the space monopolization, noise and danger of cars.  As well as all the
well known heart and circulatory system diseases obesity increases incidence of: breast and colon
cancer (obesity ranks with smoking as biggest preventable cause of cancer); skeletal problems,
arthritis particularly of hips and knees etc; "type two" or "adult onset" diabetes; and diseases of
the gall bladder,
workplace effects of health effects, lost productivity through illness and psychological effects
within death & casualty acquaintance network, training persons to fill workplace role of casualties,
productivity effects of traffic and collisions: slowing of short walked journeys, slowness and
unpredictability of delivery times, slowing of commuter journey, power blackouts caused by cars
colliding with power infrastructure,
Space inefficiency of car system causes Urban Sprawl, inflates: size of road and all infrastructure
networks, infrastructure capital material costs and maintenance costs, pump energy for water and
gas, booster energy for telephone and power transmission, wastage from unnoticed leaks in pipe
network,
The cost of replicated infrastructure in areas where traffic has depopulated the original locale,
The capital value of land under roads and car parks, the biggest uncounted cost,
Reduced casual "front porch" interactions causing decline of local informal borrow swap and hand-on
redistribution economy leading to increased new consumption by individuals and inflating storage,
waste and waste disposal costs,
Ecological and ultimate economic costs of car generated pollution include: oilslicks from tanker
sinkings, reduced fish breeding in acidic littoral and riparian zones, water table pollution, lost
crops from acid degraded soil, site remediation costs of heavily oil and chemical polluted land,
plus all the pollution effects of increased consumption/production/distribution of components and
fuel.

Estimates that don't even count all the above costs figure cars cost about 20%GDP, one day's work in
5. Unlike trains and trams the car system's costs aren't concentrated into one organization's
accounts, but dispersed over many payers, most are cross subsidised through a generally high cost of
living, the price and tax structure making non users pay as much as users.  Until all car costs are
tallied no exact comparison can be made between them and transit systems; but even in concept they
reveal the lie in the car system's claim of being overtaxed; whatever truth it has in country areas;
most cars are in cities.

The car also has benefits of course; the non-economic benefits still seem to be esteemed higher than
the costs, convenience and independence are stressed; but these would have less appeal if they were
being directly paid for rather than cross subsidised, particularly the space demand and damage
caused by cars, 8 times the space of train travellers and 100 times the injuries.  Energy crisis
could change the cost benefit balance, as fuel is an internalized cost. The car culture still tries
to claim economic benefits; but studies including only a portion of the above costs, still show
transit investment leveraging 2-4 times as much economic gain as road and car investment in urban
areas (note 1).

FUEL CRISIS ECONOMICS: The Impact on the Global Economy of Declining Oil Production.

Inexorable oil price rises probably commence in this millennium's first decade (more 1). Fuel cell,
electric or hydrogen cars will be more expensive for some time, especially opportunistically in a
replacement rush, and the oil crisis victims of 2010 will possess the legacy petrol vehicles
currently being produced and planned; which beginning with poorest users will progressively become
unusable through expense, alleviated by gas conversion until demand increases gas prices.

Oil supplies 95% of global transport & 40% of global energy, thus it moves almost everything and
does almost half the work in the world, and 20thC economic growth has been built on this cheap
energy. Alternative energy sources haven't grown quickly enough, or developed large enough net
energy profit ratios, (note 1), for even exponential growth to avert an economic crisis (more 2).
Shortsighted governments will have bowed to political pressure from the car culture to subsidise
oil, artificially holding prices down until the "dam bursts", so economic crisis could strike
suddenly as a genuine crash and depression. Price rises will damage globalized, "old economy", or
the ecologically delinquent but financially opportunistic "just-in-time", transport intensive,
corporations, whose collapse will drag down banks (more 3).

So simultaneous with transport price rises will be recession and income decline, suffering and
discord in suddenly immobile suburban outlands will move public transport provision, and support for
car bans will be moved by the oldest political message, "returning prosperity".  Some oil uses:
fertilisers, agricultural production, aviation, shipping and rural transport can't be practically
substituted and can't survive huge price rises and governments will move to reduce petrol demand and
arrest the slide into a modern dark age, this could mean rationing, it could mean some dismal safety
net to mass manage the large numbers knocked out of transport by prices, or it could bring overall
restructure, where a car ban would be central.  Personal urban cars are the biggest gratuitous oil
demand, 25% of total oil production in 2000, growing from 17% in 1975 so are prime targets for
regulation.

However public sector poverty will hamper remediation measures. The greatest danger is that all the
resources required to cope with the ecological crises like water supply and global warming, will
have been wasted in the profligate last years of the car culture and a return to prosperity will be
delayed by a succession of serious environmental crises requiring resource allocation.  Thus
provision of eco-critical infrastructure will then come at the cost of other government services
leading to public disorder and possibly civilization collapse. Under current car hegemony this
scenario seems inevitable; but early government action could mitigate it and a widespread car ban
early in the crisis era, perhaps 2010, largely obviate it.

GLOBAL DANGERS: The contribution of the Car Culture to Global Environmental Danger.

No global dangers short of celestial disasters or nuclear war threaten complete human extinction,
and they're currently improbable; but a severe anthropogenic environmental affliction is now
probable (and this could make nuclear war more probable in an ecologically destabilized biosphere as
the political elites of the wealthier nations of the world seek scapegoats for declining living
standards). At worst environmental crisis involves famines, wars and the collapse of states and
economies, all triggered by simultaneous deterioration in pollution, land productivity, water and
food availability, exhaustion of resources that have propped up unsustainable lifestyles (eg oil),
climatic disruption and plagues, diseases, pestilence through loss of biodiversity, with human
response paralysed by the weakness of the nation-state (more 1) and racial and religious conflict.
No civilization that has ever existed or been imagined could survive this. It's reasonable to
extrapolate from current environmental destruction to a catastrophe in the mid-late decades of this
century, perhaps resulting in 80% of the human race dying off in the space of 20 years, the
"overshoot and collapse" idea (more 2).

The car contributes in many Anthropogenic Global Dangers: Water & Food, Land Degradation - pollutes
water and air, hence degrades land, consumes best arable land in sprawl, demanding larger land
clearing to yield the same food as the fertile river valleys overrun by cities, this hastens
desertification and salination in the outer margin of habitation, while reducing the biosphere
services rendered by these lands and triggering a self perpetuating cycle of collapse. Climatic
Disruption - After fossil fuel electricity production, cars are the biggest anthropogenic  emitters
of CO2. Extinctions, Biological Destabilisation - Sprawl destroys immediate habitat and spreads
recreational traffic roadkill, it forces larger areas of land, previously left fallow or as forest,
into production, destroying habitat. War - Wars over resources are endemic to humanity in conditions
of shortfall.  Famine conditions generate a "nothing to lose" dynamic, which fuels conflicts with
willing soldiers, currently seen in Africa. Poverty devalues human life easing the road to war. One
must acknowledge that the inflated resource demand generated by the car culture requires
exploitation to support it, creating misery and other war precursors. Nuclear Meltdowns - car
systems inflate the need for industrial and indirectly domestic energy; while consuming the main
non-nuclear energy source, thus reducing alternatives. Overpopulation - A problem if there isn't
space or resources for the people.  Cars consume a lot of both. Pollution -  Directly, cars pollute
air land and water, indirectly they inflate industrial pollution, as multipliers of consumerism they
inflate it further, as mobility culture they encourage evasion. State Collapse - Before global
government eventuates mobility culture will decimate the state through: offshore tax havens, flight
of fraudsters, weapons and people smuggling, social justice and environmental legislation undermined
by mobile capital moving elsewhere.  The car does this on a lower level, draining government
capital, granting criminals better getaway options and contributing to the cult of "limited
liability" private escape.

At a single stroke a Car Ban would improve the problems in all these areas. The problems we face are
systemic, they are not the result of criminal aberrations but of the normal and normative behaviours
of our civilization; whereas almost all "environmental" measures taken so far have been localized or
isolated, hence ineffectual.  A car ban; on the other hand, has systemic effects.  That's why a car
ban is the touchstone of environmental survival, it helps reverse the deterioration of conditions in
all these different areas of danger, and perpetuating car-culture prevents the reversal of most of
them, regardless of other preventative action.

LANDSPACE ISSUES: Landspace Issues Associated with Car Dominance

Space is the main problem with cars, as it is inherent in the concept of the car, independent of the
technology of its application. The space required by a vehicle is it's actual size, and the space in
front of it that is required to be vacant to prevent collision, its right of way (ROW).  For any
static object a single car's ROW is the stopping distance times the width of the car, at 100 kph
approximately 60 metres times 3, 180 m^2, this is the "space" an individual car requires. This fact
alone is why a car system is so space inefficient compared with transit, and why car based cities
are so much more expensive and less sustainable, each car adds one small house-plot of space to the
city area, or deprives someone of that house-plot in places like Indonesia and China.  This is
literally reflected in new suburban development in the USA and Australia, 50% of the area is road or
carpark.

Of course cars moving in convoy, in each other's slipstream, reduce their per capita ROW. Systems
called "intelligent traffic systems" do this by lining them up either with remote control or an
artful manipulation of traffic lights, at their best they can reduce the space demand by cars to be
about as space efficient as unmanaged bicycles, and not as efficient as buses, trams or particularly
trains. Also they remove the autonomy of the vehicle, at least temporarily, thus removing the only
real advantage of cars over public transport.  One can experience the inefficiency simply trying to
walk across a highway at peak-hour, by the time a thousand people have passed one may have waited 10
minutes, alternately one may wait for a train, carrying 1000 people, to pass and be on one's way
within a minute. Multiply this by all the roads and all the waits to recognise both the inefficiency
and the impost on non-drivers. The space demanded by car transport has natural, social, economic and
administrative disadvantages.

Practically the car reduces living space by even more than it directly appropriates in ROW, there is
an ambit space appropriation, the noise and general unpleasantness of cars drive people out of their
front yards and balconies.  Many urban parks, visually idyllic with trees and lawns, have become
little more than median strips, constant streams of traffic prevent easy pedestrian access or egress
from the space and make it noisy and unpleasant to recline in.  All the space near roads is
increasingly developed for its visual appeal to drivers, not for human habitability.  Habitable
space is increasingly restricted to indoors and dedicated recreation space.

For space to be usable it must be accessible so interspace  (the paths between spaces), is essential
in any economy, however the traversal costs energy, and given that interspace is crossed often and
often several interspaces must be crossed in each journey, a small increase in interspace radically
increases the movement required. Thus the energy factor of a city is a case of classical time and
motion study, whichever has the narrowest interspaces, provided they are adequate to allow movement,
will be the most efficient, and the widest interspaces will be the least efficient and consume the
most energy in traversal of interspace. Choosing an inefficient transport modality like the car
inflates the distance of all "interspace" journeys within the urban area hence it inflates the time
and energy expended in interaction.

According to the world's leading (or only) ecological accountant, Mathis Wakernagle, highly productive agricultural land yields 8 to 10 times the produce of average land.  Because humans initially settle highly productive areas this is where cities are and they usually expand onto highly productive agricultural land in river valleys.  In order to maintain agricultural producion land is cleared at the other margin, the marginal, low productive land.  This land yields produce at a rate about 1/10 of an average hectare or 1/100 of what the now urban hectares used to produce.  Each urban car in Australia increases the urban area by approximately 100 square metres (see Landspace Economics) over and above what would be necessary in a non-car system.  Thus one hundred square metres of urban expansion produces the clearance of 10,000 square metres of marginal land, the principle habitat of the world's remaining wildlife.  This allows for an easily remembered equation.  One urban car in Australia causes the clearance of one hectare of forest or scrubland, an area the size of 10 suburban houseplots.  Because the urban car fleet is about 8 million this means they have cleared 8 million hectares of habitat.

LANDSPACE ECONOMICS: The Economic Quantification of Landspace Appropriated by the Car Culture.

It has been estimated in Britain that the amount cars pay in licence fees, sales and fuel taxes
covers the cost of road infrastructure, collisions, congestion and ambient environmental impacts.
(note 1).  Even accepting this dubious assertion, it underrates cars' cost by discounting the
capital value and opportunity cost of all the land under road and car parks. This is a larger area
for the car system than for any other transport configuration so the difference should be accounted
as a car culture cost.  In the first world it's highly developed, valuable, well infrastructured
landspace, worth billions of dollars in annual lease value in any fair sized city. This is the
reason cars don't pay for themselves.

The following algorithm estimates the cost of cars' landspace use in Australia over and above the
landspace of an optimised urban transport system.  Some data were available but a number of
assumptions were still necessary, these are identified in the following table.

Road Rent Costings
Category No	Name 							value 				unit 		Notes
Statistics
1 			Urban Arterial Road Length 		12,441,000 			m 			note 2
2 			Urban Local Road Length 		84,834,000 			m 			note 3
3 			Area of car parking space 		23.4 				m2			note 4
4 			Total Tax on cars 				14,000,000,000.00 	$A 			note 5
5 			Aust GDP 						$620,963,000,000.00	$A 			note 6

Assumptions / estimates
6 			Arterial Road Width 			16 					m 			note 7
7 			Local Road Width 				9 					m 			note 8
8 			Ratio of cross subsidized parking spaces to cars
											2.5 				spaces 		note 9
9 			Urban car fleet 				7,695,098 			cars 		note 10
10 			Rent per m2 pa					50.04 				$A 			note 11

Assertion
11 			optimal urban road carriageway width
											6 					m 			note 12

Calculations
12 			Arterial Urban Road Area 		199,056,000 		m^2			note 13
13			Local Urban Road Area 			763,506,000 		m2			note 14
14			Total Urban Road Area 			962,562,000 		m2			note 15
15 			Optimal Urban Road Area 		583,650,000 		m2			note 16
16 			cross subsidized road area		378,912,000			m2			note 17
17			cross subsidized car park area	450,163,247			m2			note 18
18 			car culture appropriation		829,075,247 		m2			note 19
19 			space appropriation per car		107.7				m2			note 20
20 			Annual rent due (annual space subsidy of car culture) 
											41,489,291,744.20	$A 			note 21
21 			Space subsidy as proportion of GDP 
											7 					%			note 22
23 			Total car taxes as a proportion of space subsidy 
											34 					% 			note 23
24 			Annual rent due per urban car	5,391.65			$A			note 24
25 			Annual cross subsidy per person	2,183.65 			$A			note 25
26 			Annual unpaid rent from urban car drivers
											3,208.01			$A			note 26

This setup concludes each urban car user should be paying an annual lease value of some thousands of
dollars in extra space appropriation costs. Those with better access to figures or who dispute
values or assumptions might plug them into the algorithm for results they'd credit; I defy them to
find the amount insubstantial. You  may download the zipped spreadsheet by clicking  here (MS Excel
97 format).

This is a profound and serious inequity, the extra space afforded drivers costs time, money and
efforts of non car-users, from a trade off they neither chose nor benefit from.  If a tax,
calculated via an algorithm like the above, were imposed it would have the beauty of increasing the
tax on remaining car users as others gave up the practice, with relief from rising tax only arising
from reductions in road and car park area; but a ban would be more equitable.

CARS AND SECURITY: Cars and Security

The car changes security for people as individuals, for society and for civilization; whether for
the better or worse depends upon perspective.

WOMEN AND DAILY HARASSMENT.  Women mostly are less secure than men on the streets or public
transport; they encounter less harassment driving a car and value the metal or glass armour between
them and would be assailants.  But the car culture reduces everyones, but women's and children's
particularly, security against serious assault when they are not in a car because there are fewer
people on the streets, and their assailants are often car-bourne.  Society, not vehicles, ultimately
secures travel, and the car helps to break this down; but for car users the car does give an
individual some empowerment by diminishing nuisance value harassment and some vulnerability when
moving around on their own.

HOOLIGANS, LOUTS, OFFENDERS OF OPPORTUNITY OR IMPUNITY.  A minority of car drivers and passengers
display all the evils of "mobility culture" in random assaults upon pedestrians, these include vocal
attempts to shock, verbal abuse in passing, throwing water, food, cartons or even potentially lethal
metallic objects from moving vehicles.  Pedestrians see many more cars than drivers do during a trip
so even a small percentage driver delinquency results in a near certain harassment for the isolated
pedestrian.  At night in warmer months the harrassment rate is so high one should walk on the side
toward oncoming traffic rather than letting them approach unseen from behind, thus reducing their
time and surprise factors.  A smaller minority are on a near homocidal power trip and force
pedestrians to run by accellerating or swerving towards any who cross the road in front of them;
instead of maintaining speed or slowing.  It is the getting away with it, the car's main "security",
that brings out the delinquent tendencies in many otherwise restrained people, this group display
the sense of diminished reality and responsibility that motivates most hit and run drivers (more 1).

GANGSTERS AND ORGANIZED CRIME.  Obsessive car culture is now a consistent theme of all the world's
criminal classes, gangsters were the earliest adopters of automobile technology, and the attractions
of the car for criminals are obvious; it affords a quick getaway from a robbery, bashing, killing or
any other crime, exemplified in the drive-by shooting.  The car offers criminals a much greater
carrying capacity than pedestrian activity, if the crime is murder it hides the body, if sexslave
trading or other kidnapping it conceals the coercion being applied, if robbery it hides the loot, if
armed robbery it hides the weapons until needed, and stolen cars are used in ram raids to smash
through security grills, reinforced windows, gates, barbed wire fences or other "security" measures.
Of course cars are also very useful to terrorists.

THE PRIVATE ARMS RACE.  Cars are frankly dangerous because of collisions; but being chary of the
danger will get one sneered at by those most scared even while their fear drives them to seek safety
in bigger and bigger cars.  Their kind of unilateral security, the "volvo effect"(more 2), makes
others less secure around them, so the danger causes a private arms race that dominates the roads.
Those on bikes switch to motorbikes to escape life threatening near misses as they are overtaken,
those on motorbikes switch to cars after alarming cutoff episodes, smaller cars switch to sedans,
those in sedans switch to SUVs or an increasing number are discretely converted into armoured cars.
The only limit on this knock on effect up the scale of violence and ecological destruction so far
has been the cost of fuel, without which one might already have seen turretless tanks as "safe",
"family cars".  Like all wars this armour race is expensive, not just of money; human carnage is
quickly cleaned up, chronic injuries vanish into quadriplegic and brain damage wards, animal corpses
only litter the streets for the first generation of full scale car culture until they're all killed
off or locked up; but the excessive consumption of resources costs the biosphere itself.

GLOBAL DANGERS - The car leads consumerism's assault on the biosphere and this assault is
increasingly degrading the basis of our biological existence, the biosphere's viability, at least to
support human life, it contributes to all major dangers, resource shortage, water shortage, land
degradation, overconsumption etc.  Despite the "think globally act locally" mantra, people largely
don't know how; strategic aggregated levels of thinking only ever intrude upon a minority of
consciousness' in an everyday way, and in even fewer do they inform their actions (see Tragedy of
the Commons). But this sizable minority know that the car is eliminating our future, the thing which
gives security meaning and purpose; and that there is ultimately no greater insecurity.

CARS AND TERRORISM: Car Culture's Role in Global Terrorism.

TERRORISM USING CARS -   Terrorists have found that they get a bigger explosion if they hide a huge
amount of explosive in a car than if they strap it to a suicide bomber.  Anti Jihadist measures have
included banning the drape-like hijab that the more orthodox Muslim women wear and forcing more form
fitting clothing to prevent bombs and weapons being concealed; this is sensible but only after cars,
with their much larger concealed spaces, have been banned from the area or searched.  In the west a
forgotten suitcase can cause a police alert, but a row of parked cars raises no suspicion; looking
suspiciously into a car is more likely to get one arrested than the car searched.  One can
appropriate and conceal the content of a huge amount of public space with a parked car, this
projection of private property onto public space is something the car culture protects because the
car is the vanguard of privatisation and this aggressive expropriation is used as a bulwark to
extend privatized power; but it is also a path for terrorism.

TERRORISM PROMOTING CARS -    Attacks on aircraft in the 1970's yielded the PLO some political
success because aircraft were largly the habitua of the wealthy and influential; but planes then
became a hard target and most modern terrorists favourite target is now public transport and the
political impact has declined because the rich and influential in the West use cars.  The Arabian
oil origin of many of the jihadists probably means that their own intimate experience inclines them
to more readily dehumanise public transport users than car drivers, to the point where they are
actively working to promote car culture by making public transport dangerous; but I don't totally
disregard that elements of this may be a conscious campaign, it's consistent with GM President
Sloan's intitiative(note 1) of selling cars by destroying public transport.  The small vehicle
transit system advocated on this site is less vulnerable to this form of terrorism than the massive
vehicle transit systems now deployed.

CAR SYSTEM VULNERABILITY TO TERRORISM -   In rational military terms one tries to destroy one's
enemy's transport system; no terrorist bombing campaign has yet been this rational for against
western culture this would mean blowing up petrol stations and petrol tankers.  If any terrorism
emerges without links to the oil industry and adopts a rational military strategy, the car culture
will be far from a source of security, it is militarily the weakest point of the whole western
lifestyle.  The car means a transport infrastructure based on distributed highly explosive and
flammable fuel and offers a series of ready made bombs and fires to a terrorist using concealed
charges, just as the 9-11 terrorists used the aircraft's fueltanks as their ordnance to bring down
the World Trade Centre in 2000.  Electric vehicles would remove this volatility but changing over to
either of the main candidates to replace petrol, LPG or later hydrogen, just increases the systems
vulnerability to sabotage.  The public transport system advocated here is less vunerable than the
car system to being disrupted by terrorism or being used for terrorist purposes because it's fuel
needs can be more readily controlled and legitimate vehicles identified.

CAUSES

THE CAR CULTURE: The Nature And Principle Vested Interests of the Car Culture

The car culture is both a state and a state of mind.  It currently physically dominates the urban
landscape (more 1), and has hegemonic control over popular culture and government economic and
transport policies. It has determined that a car ban is unthinkable, marginalizing and impoverishing
all environmentalists who suggest it until they return, with their logic dealing with "sprawl"  and
consumerism erased, spouting "green car"  sophistry.

Much car culture is the enthusiasm of private individuals: but plane and train enthusiasts don't
result in a mass ownership or dominance of the culture.  Most of the political activism comes from
vested interests, chiefly car manufacturers and any downstream clients thereof like the advertising
industry, also land speculators (more 2), (note 1), and latterly government roads departments.

Its state of mind has some real elements stressing convenience and security expressing true human
desires, and also the practical necessity of some such vehicle for activity in rural and remote
locations.  But illusional elements dominate; these are articles of faith, distortions of history,
obfuscation and denial of ecological facts and blinkered interpretations of financial reality. The
worst illusional effect is the irresponsibility of "Mobility Culture". The principal article of
faith is expressed as "The Freedom to Drive" and involves distortions of history.  The cry of the
car culture to be overtaxed, and that they more than pay their way, is resolutely untruthful,
refusing to look at the true "Fiscal Black Hole".

The state of mind is supported by an active propaganda operation, the elements of which are
Hollywood (more 3), spontaneous or corrupt intellectual charlatans (more 4) and overt saturation
advertising and marketing.  Motorsport keeps the industry profile high but isn't a major element.
(more 5).

Of more concern are the sinister underhand propaganda elements; conscious conspiracies, whose
magnitude can only be guessed, to degrade public transport and influence governments to structure
space to necessitate the car; thus depriving populations of transport options by putting them "out
of sight - out of mind". One early conspiracy was discovered in blatant form in the USA (note 2);
it's not credible that such activity subsequently vanished; it must merely have become more
sophisticated and politically protected (more 6). Indicative of this is that only countries without
a car industry, such as Denmark, have done anything to counteract car culture.

In countries with a car culture repressive desublimation of alternatives is commonplace, ex-
politicians, who are probably still complicit with the car industry from past mutual favours, use
their status and influence to infiltrate and subvert any anti-car sentiment emerging in
organizations like public transport users associations. (more 7). Various, often industry funded,
"consumer groups" such as the American Highway Users Association, the British Automobile
Association, run orchestrated pressure campaigns on media to repress any negative opinion or
information concerning cars (more 8).

CARS AND SEXUALITY: Analysis of the car as overt sex symbol, their practical use in sexuality and
					"sex sells" commercial cultural attempts to fuse cars and sexuality. 

Even if car advocates are defeated in "above the belt" arguments; they invariably dismiss the
argument through belief that cars are associated with sex and opposition to them reflects badly upon
one's sexuality; there are observations to make about this cars/sex complex.

Early sexual experiences deeply affect the psyche, so things associated with them, smells, music,
facial features etc. imbue the older psyche with a (usually) pleasurable and youthful ambience. They
can trigger fetishes, like the male fetish of female school uniforms, reviving powerful, often
ungratified, youthful desires. The car/sex complex is largely a fetish of those who enacted their
early sex life in cars, and probably most common in the US, where driving is legal at 16, and
driving has become a "rite of passage" to adulthood; in countries where the legal driving age is
higher the fetish is weaker, as more desires are gratified before cars enter life. If the driving
age were increased beyond the average age of first sexual activity, perhaps to 21 (probably halving
the road toll in passing), a smaller portion of the population would develop this fetish.

Cars can practically be associated with sexuality, they allow comfortable movement to where private
intimacy can be assured; but except where population density makes privacy scarce (e.g. China) human
cultural constructs create the conditions that require this escape; heavily patriarchal conditions,
where home must somehow be evaded to have a sexlife and "get away with it", and the tendency for
young adults to stay with their parents until marriage, do; but cultural conditions tolerant of
early domestic independence or sexuality don't. Cars' speed can affect the nervous system and bring
a sexual response; this is a biological after-effect of all danger, intimations of individual
mortality trigger the urge to reproduce: plants must sometimes be water stressed in order to flower
or fruit, observe the baby boom after every war, the popularity (and sexuality) of horror films, and
the low birthrates and older age of new mothers in "safe" societies.

Genetic sexual thinking suggests the car is a sexual attractor inasmuch as it indicates some
survival advantage: wealth, power, status etc., which vehicles historically have done. In the early
20th century the richest man was Rockerfeller (oil magnate) and the richest class the car culture,
so cars still connote wealth and power for most people alive today; but in reality they now run
second to Bill Gates and the computer. The fictional "free open road" of the car commercials
suggests the car indicates an independent survival capacity that might, for instance, enable
emergency escape from a city about to suffer some catastrophe; but really attempting to evacuate a
city by car would reveal a "tragedy of the commons", an horrendous traffic jam.  The car-free city
would be more effectively escapable. For rushing an injured person or pregnant woman to hospital it
has some truth; but more in country areas.

But, equally cars are antisexual.  Firstly cars reduce the number of potentially intimate human
encounters, because they increase the stress in interaction environments and reduce the number of
outdoor (approachable, exposed) nodes for interaction, so there are fewer people to interact with.
Extant relationships may be enhanced by this isolation, but it reduces opportunities for those
without extant relationships. The number of single people in the west testifies that an increasing
number fall foul of this Catch 22.  Secondly a vital well exercised body is generally sexually
preferable to a flaccid one, (the true essence of sexual attractiveness probably isn't mere
"physical fitness", but even a transcendent quality requires a usable vessel).  Thus enlightenment
reveals that those who drive the most tend toward fat, flabbiness and unattractiveness.

But to deal with the central insinuation from the car hegemony, that being anti car means being anti
sex or asexual, in the only terms it deserves ... Humanity did a lot of fucking before it even
learnt to ride a horse!  The car's got nothing to do with sex, except in ad-men's wet-dreams.  The
human libido will survive the decline of the age of the car.

MOBILITY CULTURE: The Negative Psycho-Social Effects of Mobility Culture.

The sense of "just passing through" desensitises a human being and can facilitate the most callous
of behaviour. The essence of this desensitisation is one of dissociation, feeling that what happens
doesn't matter as it will soon be left behind and have no consequences.

Hit and run pedestrian slaying is a salient modern example, but history is replete with examples.
Cultures that adopted mobile forces became some of the worst terrorist states on record.  Ancient
Assyria, with war chariots, slaughtered whole populations, the Vikings with their longboats are
legend for brutality, the Mongol horse archers of Ghengis Khan settled nowhere and slaughtered as
they went, they almost formally adopted the policy of complete depopulation of the lands they held
(perhaps half the world population of the time) to free up pasture for their horses, but were
dissuaded by economic arguments.  This has a correlate in the car culture spreading roadspace and
car based suburbs on the land of third world subsistence farmers. Hitler and his panzers hardly need
description.  The US fell into the same behaviour with its Vietnam helicopter cavalry, the Mei Li
massacre being infamous, but also in herbicide use.  Recently depleted uranium has been shot around
by their passing planes with reckless abandon. Genocidal brutality isn't exclusive to mobility
culture, Stalinism was a quasi-genocidal terror system; but mobility culture seems to ensure it.

This desensitisation is being generalized in modern society through the car culture; in the act of
motion itself and the armoured shell in which it encases people, luring the senses to attribute no
more reality to a view through a windscreen than through a television set. An irresponsible
subliminal platform for behaviour and attitude is set, a psychopathic attitude within a car's
armoured impunity, balanced by a timorous and delicate lack of robustness in glazed insensate
"reasonableness" in other human interaction; fleeing from difficulty and dismissively assuming all
negative consequence can be left behind.  Car culture psyches typically fluctuate between
"preciousness" and violence and deal evasively with the intermediate interactions, stand up
arguments etc., wherein humanity has historically resolved most of its conflicts.  This attitude is
having its worse effect on the environment, modern behavioural norms hold the definite implicit
expectation that when Earth is trashed humanity will just move elsewhere.

The car is the icon, but desensitisation is the product of mobility and is deliberately used,
capitalism's managerial class is highly mobile, flitting from job to job, country to country for no
other real reason than to allow callous exploitation to be practiced without affecting their
sentiments, they move on before forming attachments to their workforce or environment.

Happily no mobility culture has been sustainable, all fell apart or merged into the background in
very short historical times; Assyria, the Vikings and Mongols only lasted a couple of centuries
each, the Third Reich collapsed and the US lost Vietnam within 12 years of beginning.  Mobility
cultures are also ephemeral cultures, by implication the car culture should fall this century.

FREEDOM OF THE ROAD: A Refutation of the "Right to Drive".

The right, without negotiation or permission, to unimpeded personal movement where, when, and how
one pleases over open roads, is the car culture's vision of nature and is presumed to be natural and
taken for granted.  Even the more advanced statements of this civilization accept this hegemonic
belief; the Copenhagen Declaration of the Car Free Cities Alliance affirms it. (note 1) This "right"
is a car hegemony article-of-faith; but in fact it has never existed.

Animals move warily, migrate in predated herds, Mesolithic hunter-gatherer humanity walked in groups
around one delineated area repeatedly, and straying from it would die from want of water or food or
conflict with other groups. The earliest roads were "free" but equally free for waylaying which
provided many a band's livelihood.  Most early civilizations didn't use roads except within their
own towns, trade and cartage was consigned to the rivers where the water provided some security, and
any raiders would need boats that could be located and sunk by punitive expeditions.  The only
places where land transport was used over any distance were waterless regions like Arabia, and that
mostly in post-Roman times and subject to special religious truce and protection arrangements.

The modern idea of undisturbed travel was created when Imperial Rome started overseeing the roads
just before the time of Christ (more 1) , 2000 years ago during the Pax Romana, and far from being
natural is one of the highest artificial conditions of civilization; and far from being an innate
freedom, it took, and takes, the supervision and resources of the most ubiquitous, wealthy and
powerful states to maintain.  It is a product of the extent, strength and stability of the state,
not of nature, nor the automotive showroom, nor vehicle speed.  Civilization, not vehicles, ensures
personal mobility (more 2). Rome, the father of road systems, even acknowledged the undesirability
of wheeled vehicles in the cities themselves; Julius Caesar and later Emperors banned wheeled
traffic in Rome during daylight hours.

If the modern nation state fell, roads would be closed within months by predatory activity (more 3).
The democratic state should have, and does have the right to dictate the means one uses to travel
(more 4). Freedom to drive is not an inalienable right; it is subordinate to the state civil
contract, outside this no individual could independently ensure it, achieving it would require force
of numbers, subject to its own group contract, so it is not an individual right either (more 5).

CONSUMERISM: The Car as Flagship and Multiplier of Consumerism.

Consumerism is the societal condition where every individual wants and needs to possess an
individual unit of any object or device that they may want or need to utilize, where these objects
are mass-produced by an economy biased toward new production and against maintenance, reuse or
service.  So goods are made for use and disposal primarily after one owner and durable goods spend
most of their existence inactive or stored. Of course a world with derisory public transport and car
infrastructure individuates transport in archetypical consumerist fashion.

Its symbiotic bondage to consumerism is why capitalism is unlikely to be sustainable or save the
environment. The classic American model of becoming wealthy is explicitly consumerist (more 1). All
production, no matter how "clean and green" will create some pollution in resource acquisition,
production, distribution, use and disposal (more2) and consumerism's whole purpose is to proliferate
production.  So even with the improvements to production processes that can vastly improve the per
unit pollution of production, consumerism maintains pollution levels by producing more of the things
and the world's environmental indicators keep getting worse.  Only a conserver economy, more based
in services than manufacturing to extend the life of each object and minimize garbage, can bring
down pollution, and it requires different distribution to maximise the users of each produced
object. The only hope within capitalism lies in the expanding service and rental base, and these
need to reduce in price for more universal uptake.

Cars generate consumerism by: their own considerable consumption of resources, compounded by their
propensity to crash into things, "Mobility Culture" results in duplicate and surplus purchases by
people caught out of place, producing waste, and promotes the disposability of objects as they can't
all be carted around, (more 3) Cars' spatial fragmentation of society reduces the opportunities for
neighbourhood redistribution and reuse systems.

The more fragmented society becomes into isolated individuals, the more demand exists for consumer
goods (as each person must own their own) (more 4) (more 5). The car is the flagship of consumerism,
it's the biggest single consumer good, if you want to move around as quickly and safely as others
you must consume a tonne of metal, and because roads break up human settlements, increasing all
interspace distances by 50% or more and making local circulation dangerous and unpleasant with
traffic, their hegemony ensures the maintenance and worsening of consumerism.

Banning cars would increase outdoor life and bring increased local human interactions between
dwelling frontages and passing walkers, cyclists etc. This increases opportunities for ordinary
redistribution of surplus goods and services, in the form of borrowing, pooling, swap, private
trade, and handing on objects no longer useful to the owner (more 6). These interactions are one of
the pillars of satisfactory social relationships and community, (more 7) relieving some income and
security stress while also reducing pollution, consumerism, and transport; with major ecological
benefits.

SOCIAL EFFECTS: Social Effects of Car Habituation.

Cars fragment neighbourhoods and reduce human interactions in physical ways (more1) and "Mobility
Culture" has more general effects on the sociability of the culture, noise and pollution and
constant traffic discourage outdoor, front-verandah, balcony or yard lingering, from which much
interaction with passing locals used to occur; but there are yet other effects on the social fabric.

The trauma costs to the social fabric of collisions are incalculable, there is the grief cycle,
there is also the sense of injustice by relatives who have a loved one killed and see the
perpetrator, to their minds' clearly guilty at least of manslaughter, being given a token prison
term and at most a few years of driver's licence suspension, by judges who are members of the middle
class car culture and perhaps drive irresponsibly themselves, and aren't inclined to judge
themselves harshly.  Employers and other holders of power are imputed with a punitive duty of care,
paying out damages of thousands of dollars to litigants who slip on a floor or receive a papercut
reading a magazine; but the power of the car is exempt from any concomitant responsibility for the
brain damage, paraplegics and quadriplegics it causes on a daily basis.  The car culture can, and
does under the all embracing alibi of "accident", get away with murder.  This defines an
iniquitously dominant group and throughout history such disproportion has eroded the legitimacy of
institutions in the eyes of victims, relatives and perpetrators, and therefore the stability of
society.

Cars, in their role of exacerbating consumerism, also contribute to the inequality of wealth and
their proliferation accompanies a growth in wealth disparity.  This is because they are a major
expense, the second largest domestic investment, and consequently transport consumes a large
proportion of people's income.  This means that income they might otherwise be saving, and building
up capital or assets with which they could compete within capitalist production, are drained in
consumption, leaving those already with wealth in capital positions. Any independent venture must
run a race to earn more than the interest it pays on borrowed money, thus paying the rich who,
without being more efficient or taking major risks, remain wealthier than the entrepreneur.  Most
ventures lose this race, even though as self funded ventures many more would be viable.

The expense of cars gives rise to insecurity, drivers are exposed to risk because they are putting
their investment in the car onto public roads exposed to collision, vandalism, theft, and to legal
suit by richer more expensive car owners with whom they may collide.  This insecurity contributes to
selfish and mercenary behaviour and to violence and road rage (ya toucha my car I breaka ya face),
plus the refined more middle class financial violence that is perpetrated through lawyers and civil
damages suits. All this behaviour undermines social relationships and the general social fabric.
This exposure is obviated and social relationships improved by a public transport culture.

Whilst there are exceptions, in general the car hegemony demotes non-drivers to the status of second
class citizens by physically structuring the city to be inaccessible, and often downright dangerous
and hostile, to them.  This means that the impetus to own and drive a car becomes a priority in
peoples' lives whether they can afford it or not, and this financial pressure leads to a basically
mercenary approach to social interaction.  Attitudes and behaviours previously only common among the
greedy or criminal have entered normative behaviour. (more2) This tendency toward an abnormally high
acceptance of exploitative attitudes not only degrades the social value of the person (s/he can't
not be "on the make" in relationships even if s/he would want to, the behaviour is too ingrained,
creating the notorious "rat-race"),  it also translates into all the affairs of the individuals and
even up to the international relations of the nations that possess a car culture.

TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS: The Tragedy of the Commons as it Applies to the Car.

A key concept in modern sociopolitical thought (note 1). describing the phenomenon in nature and
human society where what is an advantageous behaviour for an individual in isolation becomes a
disaster if it becomes everyone's common behaviour. Probably the simplest example is theft, theft is
rational for the individual because s/he profits without expending effort; but in a culture where
everyone steals from everyone else people lose the incentive to work and eventually there is nothing
left to steal because no-one's doing anything to generate wealth; so everyone is poorer (more 1). A
tragedy of the commons is a state of chaotic, degenerate and self defeating competition that
degrades an essential resource (in the theft instance the resource is peoples' motivation, in
relation to cars the resources are urban life, the economy and the natural environment).  Some have
called the same phenomenon "the paradox of aggregation"; paradoxical because rational becomes
irrational, theft changes from being an action that makes you richer to one that makes you poorer
(more 2).

Tragedies of the Commons (TOCs) are the hardest problems humanity has ever had to solve, because of
the nature of these problems where "a common behaviour is the main problem".  In a TOC all
individuals would benefit from the restraint of all other individuals, but would suffer from their
own individual choice of restraint if the others were not restrained. Those who unilaterally
exercise restraint suffer doubly, they are deprived of the benefit of the resource yet suffer
equally the tragedy wrought by other's lack of restraint, and may be wiped out.  Hardin called this
the "self eliminating" characteristic of conscience.

TOCs threaten survival so one way or another they must be solved, historically one group usually
springs up to appropriate the behaviour as their exclusive privilege by force, reducing the
destructive propagation in an unjust way (more 3). To solve TOCs humanity evolved the centralized
authoritarian state (more 4) ; the only human institution that can effectively solve them;
democracy, markets, education and experience are much less effective (more 5) (more 6). The state
makes and enforces laws that restrict the amount of the activity that takes place through licencing
or quotas, or bans anyone from doing the unbeneficial action by making it a crime.  TOC is the basis
for the old parental chide "what if everyone did that!".  The avoidance of TOCs is the basis for
almost all enduring moral coda and all enduring imposed laws (religions have often reaffirmed some
of them, as in some of the ten commandments, but the coda are older and have outlasted many
religions, mainly because religions pollute the coda with egocentric and often prurient and
unnecessary restrictions on behaviour, leading to their ultimate loss of legitimacy), in fact they
are the principle reason for the existence of laws and of the state per se, of government with
police and courts and officials distinct from "the people" <a class="more" href="More.html#Tragedy7"
target="right">(more 7).

This is the reason this site calls for an enforced statutory ban on the car, and doesn't bother
calling for individual restraint.  If the car is a problem, it is a tragedy of the commons, as it is
an individually rational behaviour and a common behaviour that culminates in collective loss.  Thus
the only effective means of countering it is a ban, not voluntarism and exhortations and not market
mechanisms. The only point of dispute is whether the car represents a serious enough threat to our
mutual well being and survival to justify such drastic measures.  Are it's effects bad enough to
justify calling it's use a crime?  I obviously believe they are, and hope the rest of the site
provides sufficient reason for others to concur with this judgement.

BOGUS ALTERNATIVES: Unrealistic and Unworkable Alternatives to the Car Culture.

Discussion of the means to reduce car's impact is clogged with ineffective options: "greencars" ,
"smart cars" , "intelligent traffic/transport systems (ITS)" , market mechanisms to make car users
pay the full cost of cars through fuel/vehicle taxes, appeals/rewards for voluntary restraint or
car-pooling, exhortations to walk or cycle, "new urbanist" neighbourhood design to minimize car use
or "softly, softly" gradual, often non-advertised changes to urban praxis by city governments to
slowly phase out car dependence.  Some are simply cynical refusals to face the problem, some, such
as  "car sharing/clubs" are relatively sincere.  Some are partially successful, many are both
expensive and almost useless.

ITSs and "smart cars" save a few collisions and improve the utilization of roadspace; but make an
expensive system more so with unimproved walking conditions and only minor traffic improvements not
matching those of transit.
Laws stipulating car tuning, anti-pollution widgets, alternate fuels and "green cars" can reduce
each unit's air pollution and noise; but don't affect friction detritus or turbulence or avert a
proliferation of units.  They yet increase transport & regulation costs and often worsen the effect
on sprawl, social atomization, cost of living, social effects, resource demand and ramified
consumerist pollution.
Car-pooling is the worst of both worlds, as private travel one loses independent routing, as public
transport it only runs once a day.  (more 1)It will simply never be adopted in numbers sufficient to
make an impact on traffic volume.
Conventional cycling is a pain in the bum, literally, and causes groin, testicular and back injury.
In a car ban the much better recumbent cycles would become prevalent.
Car-minimal neighbourhood designs are follies; the car hegemony has a habit of demolishing
inconvenient neighbourhoods for uncluttered roadspace.
Internalizing cars' cost is a laudable goal; but problematic given the ubiquitous cost dispersal in
the car system's financing.  It's hard to imagine a political state, itself imbued with car culture,
acting consistent with the goal and not discrediting it by riddling legislation with loopholes and
loading process with administrative overheads.  Effective cost internalisation measures would
probably be insupportably complex in an accounting sense, particularly if individuated and not
averaged over the culture. Averaging would bring an inequitable impost on the poor and middle class
who have no alternate transport or resources to exploit legal loopholes, and this would imperil a
government's re-election.  It's easy to think this goal is designed to fail; a car ban is more
imaginable.
Some successes have been attained, particularly in Copenhagen, with a non-confrontational softly-
softly approach, over 30 years they've slowly expanded the car free areas and reduced the city
parking spaces; but other first world cities have tried to emulate this approach without success.
Superficially attractive as it allows a "positive" demeanour, advocates can say they are not "anti-
car" but "pro-people"; this quiet revolution won't work elsewhere for two reasons, firstly Denmark
is wealthy enough to afford duplicatecar/transit infrastructure, which isn't the case in the third
world; secondly Denmark doesn't host a car industry, their 30 year gains could be swept away in 6
months were a well funded and agitated lobby group to exist to affect public attitudes and change
council policy &/or personnel. Happily for Denmark no industry funding or industrial labour pressure
is ranged against the Copenhagen policies; in Australia, America or Britain the policy would have
been reversed after a short time, crushed in its infancy, as many attempts by city governments
actually have been.  In these places where the car culture is not merely habit but a cerebral and
self conscious movement only an overt and explicit policy could win out

The only current measures worth affirming and proliferating are those that explicitly ban the car
from areas of the city: compulsory car banned city centres, streets and neighbourhoods, car banned
days, pedestrian malls and dedicated bus and cycling lanes.

Car traffic is a tragedy of the commons; all restraint measures that are left voluntary engage the
"self eliminating conscience" dynamic, in status and power if not literally as extinction, and
anyone who walks or cycles in the car traffic may sense the immanence of the latter (note 1).
Voluntarism encourages and makes life easier for the conscienceless driving group, increasing their
power without fostering alternatives, that's why it's a tragedy, doing right encourages the
wrongdoers, consequently voluntarism achieves nothing and is discredited; a law must compel all to
abandon car use.

SOLUTIONS

NATURE OF THE BAN:  The Nature of any Effective Ban on Urban Cars.

Basically the car ban proposed is a ban on all passenger cars, including personally driven company
or government cars, within a determined distance from the city centre, in major Australian cities
perhaps 30-50 kilometres based on suburban taxi zones.  Practical refinements would need be
implemented ad-hoc. It's not a ban on private car ownership per se, but owners would have to garage
cars outside the city ban boundary and use transit, taxis or taxibuses to and from their garage for
country driving excursions, and country visitors leave their cars in the same garages.

Urban drivers of delivery, transit, emergency vehicles etc. would largely be professionals, except
perhaps for tradesmen, housecall doctors and such; but all would need pass much stiffer training for
licences, and face lifetime licence revocation as minimum penalty for culpability in collision
fatalities. Regarding those corporate or government cars that remained real restrictions on use
should apply, they should be required to have a professional driver permanently with the car,
bringing market forces into play and making these vehicles more extensively utilised and smaller in
number.  They should be required to access private, non commercial off-road parking at both ends of
their journey, further discouraging their use.  All free and commercial car parking spaces should be
abolished within the ban area.  Portions of current driveways should remain as small bays for
emergency, taxi and delivery vehicle temporary parking.

Vehicles not banned would be:
human powered vehicles like bicycles and low powered motorcycles or wheelchairs/trikes;
business vehicles used for service, courier & delivery but not used for commuting or motion about
the city;
buses engaged in charter, intracorporate shuttle/commuting as well as public route service;
emergency or police service vehicles;
taxis for the disabled or politicians, celebrities, or private people avoiding public exposure.
Motor vehicles would need display business or disability based registration stickers, road standing
would be limited to setdown/pickup stops for buses and taxis, delivery, service and emergency
vehicles, dedicated taxi ranks would probably remain.

Transgression would entail a penalty of at least arrest exerting whatever force necessary to stop
the vehicle, with vehicle confiscation and licence revocation for multiple offences. Preferably
infringements would incur criminal rather than financial penalties, months licence suspension and a
few days jail for first, more jail and longer licence suspension and vehicle confiscation for
second, licence cancellation for third.  Means of implementation would be geographically and
temporally gradual: first city centre, then inner, then middle, then outer suburbs; timing being
staged with months of warning, months of fines, before the full ban made transgression an arrestable
offence.

Supporting legislation and action would:
- banish commercial or free car-parks to the urban fringe,
- stipulate road reclamation and sale procedures,
- abolish building codes requiring provision of car parking spaces,
- compel retailers to provide and cross subsidise daily delivery within determined geographic
bounds,
- remove company car tax deduction and include transit fare tax deduction,
- ensure fibre optic cabling was universal.

STRATEGY OF BAN: The Strategy Required to Implement a Ban on Urban Cars.

Democracy requires any ban be "mutual coercion, mutually agreed to"; a majority must elect, and re-
elect, a government that will effect the ban. This seems impossible in the current car hegemony; but
as with ailing dictatorships the cars' media and market image of universal approval is increasingly
unreal (more 1). Surveys already show that public opinion on reducing car use is actually 1/3
support, 1/3 opposition & 1/3 contingent (note 1). Only local and partial bans are likely in the
immediate future, but these can be bulwarks for extension and replication.

Public acceptance could be achieved within the first 2 decades of the century because fuel crisis
economics will reduce the numbers driving and protract the average interval between voting age and
car ownership, as could future anti-collision measures. But public compliance in abandoning cars is
contingent on:
	the provision of good public and emergency transport,
	not being socially or economically disadvantaged,
	not having their physical security compromised.

These are crucial to the ban.  Any government contemplating it must establish these and make them
unable to be degraded, defunded or debundled from the ban legislation.  The universal ban itself
brings non-disadvantage. More influential people on public transport ensures its standards are
maintained.  Security is improved by freeing police from the task of averting car traffic carnage
and by increased outdoor life and walking traffic (more 2). Vested interests: private car
manufactures, land speculators, and bloated government roads departments will never accede and would
need be defeated in corridors of power and public relations.

Car manufacturers' lobby could be divided by some supplying the millions of small busses required
for the car displacing transit system along with exempt rural car markets. Land speculators, who
like urban sprawl and are major funders of the car lobby, could be countered with intense and
sustained police and securities regulatory investigation of urban fringe land deals with local
governments, this could spark real fireworks and would at least raise a widespread histrionic
campaign, but should be ruthlessly prosecuted and their media ads counterpoised by news reports of
arrest and trial of any unearthed conspirators. Government roads department influence could be
countered by paring their resources and abolishing funding to their urban planning offices, and
giving the planning funds to the transit department, in all likelihood the first well resourced
planning office the department will have had in decades.  This would reverse the omnipresence of
well-resourced, figure and study laden, representatives of roads departments in presentations to
committees and enquires, replacing them with resourced transit department representatives.

Mental hegemony can be countered with education and urban bans on car advertising and moving
motorsport to venues on urban fringes.  Phased implementation would need be carefully timed with the
full installation of good alternate transport; enforcement in itself is the least problem for unlike
the bogus alternatives a ban is policable; a car is a car, big and obvious (more 3).

REAL ALTERNATIVES: Transportation Systems that Offer Real Alternatives to the Car System.

Real alternatives to the car are walking, possibly enhanced by moving beltways in high traffic areas
such as cities CBD's, and facilitated everywhere by strategically placed roofs and shelters (more 1)
, cycles, transit and goods delivery systems, and transport displacement through electronic
communications, all of which can only come to full fruition if the car is banned. Transit and cycle
systems would be different from those one sees on city streets today.

The upright model of bicycle survives only to coexist with the car, as it is visible to drivers; the
lower slung recumbent (sitting down) cycle is better than the upright on all counts (more 2) ; only
it is too low for car drivers to consistently see.  Were cars banned it would come into its own.

Modern transit systems have evolved to complement the car culture, filling in gaps. "Transit Systems
to Displace Cars" are qualitatively and quantitatively different to them and could handle all
current personal transport within city boundaries in comfort and convenience and less cost to
government or users than the car system, with substantial quality of life and ecological
improvements.

Central to providing an alternative to cars is to have alternative means of handling cartage of
goods and objects currently carried around in peoples' cars.  Many of these are personal objects,
work files or some sporting equipment, that would be almost as readily carried on spacious,
uncluttered, uncrowded public transport.  However the required role of taxi's should expand from
purely personal transport to the capacity to carry large objects, major household objects between
family and such, surfboards or whatever on the roof, towing boat or ultralight aircraft trailers or
whatever is expected; perhaps with some change in vehicle type. The other central object, shopping,
would require that all retailers, except perhaps knick-knack or snack stalls, be compelled to offer,
and cross subsidise, at least daily delivery services within a given geographic area.  They can
offer delivery either through inhouse means or commercial courier/delivery services; but cannot
specifically charge for this service.

Having this system built into the price structure will seem to increase prices, and in the absence
of a car ban it would; but because the cross subsidy of the inefficient and expensive car system is
being removed, wages, parking lots, taxation etc., and economies of scale of delivery services
improved, this system would actually reduce prices, and consumers pay less for goods to their door
than they currently pay for goods needing a trip to the shopping mall.  Orders could be placed
either personally via a trip to the shops, or virtually via the Internet or phone.

We are still waiting for most retail chains to put their whole stock on Internet sites, but
improvements in technology will eventually allow virtual shopping via simulated, and empty,
supermarket aisles, where full packaging details can be read and possibly even fruit and vegetables
visually inspected and store workers watched selecting and even packing the fruit and vegetables one
has chosen.  For this to work well would require a generally broadband data communications
infrastructure, possibly the complete rollout of fibre-optic cable, another infrastructure that is
moving slower than it should because of the monopolisation of public resources by the car culture.

TRANSIT SYSTEMS TO DISPLACE CARS: The Kind of Transit Systems Required to Displace Car Transport in
Cities.

Car displacing transit systems are different from car complementing systems.

Table 1 - A summary of differences between Car-Complementing and Car-Displacing transit systems
Transit Type	TCC - Transit to Complement Cars		TDC - Transit to Displace Cars
Era				Current									As Soon As Possible.
Patronage		Marginal								Universal
Funding Size	Minimal transit, huge car				Major transit, Minimal car
Funding Type	Market, Political Patronage or Utilitarian
														Cross Subsidised Guaranteed Service Standard
Vehicle Size	Large, 25+ seat							Small, 10 seat
Vehicle Number	Few transit vehicles, many cars			Medium number of transit vehicles, few cars
Route speed		Slow									Fast
Frequency		Infrequent								Frequent
Routes			Meandering								Direct radial & concentric
Comfort			Uncomfortable							Comfortable
Catchment		Irregular								Regular
Required Knowledge  (Route, Stop, Timetable)
				Massive, Incomprehensible				Minimal, standardized

Car hegemony has retarded bus design for decades but many passengers could define a more optimal
design if asked. New commuter busses should deliberately be kept small for comfort and speed.
Smallness allows a minimum of pickup/setdown stops, unless full they should stop anywhere along
their route in response to flagdown, and setdown anywhere on bell ring or request, dispensing with
bus-stops and minimizing the "bunching" problem (more 1). Timetables are troublesome psychic
baggage for passengers, they should be abolished by running busses every 2 minutes in peak hour,
all making good speed overtaking their stopped fellows, none sitting still clockwatching, maximum
schedule interval should be 20 minutes or less on the graveyard shift of a 24 hour service.

There is a "topology" debate among designers about the best layout of routes; but it's puerile; the
"spider web" layout is clearly the best model because it emulates a pattern long evolved to cover a
given area to a requisite catchment density with minimum material.  This means straight radial
routes going through the central city to the other suburban extreme, perhaps branching once,
combined with concentric routes every 500 metres or less completing two way circles round the city
or coast to coast. This allows any-to-any point transit with 1 interchange, without meandering
delay, and minimises administration; a 40k-radius city with 10 x 10 central roads would have only
100 or 120 routes.

It can also be an open system and simple understand and hence use to identify the location of one's
destination.  Radial routes could be designated R and concentric routes designated C.  Also to
replace the esoteric and almost arcane numbering system for routes usually in currenty use the
numbers could then be based on general geographic knowledge.  Thus the radial route number could be
the degrees from due North, R180 meaning due South from the city centre, R270 due West, perhaps
reinforced by som general direction indicator like R340(NNW) proximate numbers would then go to
proximate places(except due north) and a users could choose to take a close-enough bus without
risking ending up miles away from their goal.  The concentric route number could indicate the number
of kilometres from the city centre, so C7.5 would indicate the concentric route 7.5 kilometres from
the city centre. "R.60 between C.14 and 15" or "C35 between R20 and R30" would suffice as a way
description, any busstop signs could then give precise geographic and route information, R350(NNW)
C9.5, meaning 9.5 kilometres north north west of the city; instead of meaningless route and stop
numbers, seeing 2 in a row would tell you which direction you were headed or busses could display
inbound outbound clockwise or anticlockwise designations.  All R routes would be accessible from the
centre, and all concentrics would intersect with all radials (except where promontories made for
eccentric urban layout, and these could be handled ad hoc).   Concentric routes would ease some
congestion on central city facilities.    Bus design is not the only thing retarded by car hegemony,
administration is also, driven into closed and arcane systems, instead of the open systems public
systems should be, again, if this has not been a deliberate plan to increase car use by debilitating
alternatives, it might as well have been, the effect is the same.  Busses should charge fares with a
graded subsidy from tax to ensure standard coverage of low volume routes.  Train and tram systems
should be maintained and developed operating more frequently.

Universal transit systems have totalitarian problems (eg. soviet bloc transit). Enforced privacy
legislation and disclosures should be enacted to limit passenger surveillance to special cases with
judicial imprimatur. They also have industrial problems.  The hubris and greed of monopoly transit
worker unions helped open the door for the car age by making transit more unreliable and costly than
it needed be (eg. Britain 1930's rail-strike, US rail wage inflation).  Because the nature of unions
is to only having their paying members' self interest at heart, the unions would do exactly the same
thing again given the opportunity.  Legislation should forbid industry-wide transport strikes, or
even ban trans-corporate industry unions if necessary (more 2). Most of these problems arise from
the bias toward large vehicles, meaning that large numbers of users are controlled by few workers
and a monopoly administration.  Such systems, which collect people in large numbers either on or
waiting for vehicles, are also vulnerable to the criminal behaviour currently called "terrorism", as
revealed by the Om cult on the Tokyo subway in the 1990s and repeatedly by various groups suicide
bombings of busses in the Middle East, South Asia etc.  The smaller vehicles and greater number of
drivers in this system would reduce the practicality and effectiveness of holding the system hostage
for both unions and terrorist groups; as does the retention of autonomous vehicles, giving this
system an advantage in these dimensions over the car culture's "Intelligent Traffic Systems".

The monopoly central administration problem requires a more precise solution.  The system requires
central coordination to provide universal coverage, standardize maximum fares, and allocate
subsidies, and this would be a public bureaucracy, probably in council with an industrywide
representative body; but bus operators should be a mix of state and private corporations.  The
private operators can keep competitive pressure on the state operator and push efficiency and
customer satisfaction standards; the public operators can keep the state informed of actual
conditions and operating costs and prevent the private corporations fleecing the public purse
through the impracticality of bureaucratic administrators.  The operators could be in national or
international federations, franchises or corporations to ensure economies of scale; but only one
operator from each commercial entity would be allowed in each city.

All operators would be centrally coordinated and allotted routes, the 40k city having perhaps 5
operators each running 2 N-S & 2 E-W radial and 8 evenly interspaced concentric routes, with
unsubsidised free agent companies running fill-in routes between, and bidding for term web
contracts.  It is important that the routes be interspaced between operators, with no one operator
running two adjacent routes.  This distribution of work and layout of routes encourages competition
and product differentiation and also minimises system disruption, a strike or bankruptcy in one
company would just entail a 500, instead of 250 metre maximum walk for passengers.

Expensive by car complement transit system standards; this system is cheap compared to the car
system in toto and more effective than car complement transit systems through improved security and
improved product delivery, which makes up for the losses in economies of scale. But it is reliant on
the car ban to redirect private resources from vehicles and fuel toward fares, and public resources
from traffic management and road infrastructure toward other uses and operational capital and
subsidies, and to minimize journey time and roadside pollution stress for passengers through traffic
minimization.

OPTIMAL BUS DESIGN: A Bus Designed to Displace, Rather than Complement, the Car System.

The optimal design to replace current commuter buses would be something like the following.
Multitudes of small, low floored 10 seat (incl driver) minibuses, the low floor facilitated by a
front motor and front wheel drive, that would require at most marginal step up from a standard curb
and have autoramp capacity for the passenger door.

Buses would allow 2 metre headroom in a central passage, being emergency standing room and have a
laterally arched roof to minimise sway mass, (the useless portions near the top sides of squared off
buses that causes them to sway side to side whenever they turn, increasing subliminal discomfort,).
All seats would be single window seats (urban people usually travel alone, simply look at any half-
full bus, or the majority of cars, to confirm this), the only exception to this being three seats
across the back, and with space opposite the door for a wheelchair or pram. This bus would be
narrower than existing "people movers" and able to negotiate overtaking each other on narrower roads
they share with recumbent cycles and service/delivery vehicles.

The seats would be lengthwise spaced by a full metre and supported from the wall, not floor, to
maximise convenience in baggage setdown and pickup from the space under the seat, and facilitate
proper cleaning.  This would require rigid bracing from the wall frame (which would increase the
strength of seat attachment and reduce their uprooting in collision) with some spring or gas
mounting under the seat-pad, the expensive gas mount would allow height adjustment, but isn't
crucial.

The two front window seats would be preferentially reserved for the infirm and the back 3 seats for
parents with small children, minimizing parental stresses by boxing children into many windowed
corners and not affording them the opportunity to get behind the parent's back. Tickets should be
valid over the whole web for varying periods of time, and purchasable from any bus driver, but their
validation would be via an automatic machine.

Of course beneficial technologies, such as fuel cell or hybrid electric/gas engines should be
incorporated in these vehicles.

TRANSPORT DISPLACEMENT: Means To Satisfy Economic and Social Needs Without Resort to Current Levels
of Transportation

Most environmental action involves reformulating a problem by reconsidering the needs that gave rise
to the polluting solution, and finding a non-polluting one. One example is to say our need isn't to
drive to the supermarket and do some shopping, but to somehow obtain food and household supplies.
All transport involves environmental impact, even clean transport requires energy consumption and
has spatial effects, therefore wherever transport can be minimised or displaced doing so makes the
overall system more sustainable.

Transport displacement is environmentally, socially and economically optimal. Cars aren't needed to
deliver goods, and a dedicated delivery van creates less traffic and uses fuel more efficiently than
individual vehicle journeys.  From local stores such delivery can be quicker and more accountable
because of proximity. Shopping can be done via an Internet or telephone order that is delivered by
the retailer's van, thus saving a lot of fuel, roadspace, collisions, a parking lot, some of the
customer's time, some space in the supermarket etc. which not only saves environment but money, and
the goods could be cheaper, even with the new costs of information technology and service personnel.
Thus it's not a matter of deprivation but means finding ways of satisfying economic or social needs,
allowing goods and people to circulate without resort to major movement of vehicles.

A car ban would aid the development of medium density living with the minimization of interspace.
Reductions in traffic, liberating space, make it possible for things to be closer together so
transport is also reduced in distances, not just in mode. The progress of telecommunications make
this possible and, in the context of a car ban, a virtuous circle emerges where the infill proximity
of goods, services and socialising venues reduces transport impacts by carting things and people
shorter distances.  Higher densities can also mean, if property prices can be controlled, cheaper
goods because of better turnover.  Liberating all parking and much roadspce would dampen property
prices for some time.

People fear isolation in a "virtual world", and this currently does happen: but though it uses
telecommunications and the Internet, transport displacement does not involve isolating people rigid
in their homes locked to computer screens with only virtual relationships, rather it makes the local
outdoor environment safer, quieter, cleaner and less dispersed, in short more walker friendly,
allowing local shopping, recreation and socialising venues to be within walking distance of all
homes within the urban area (more 1).

Communication and computers can also displace some work commuting, in much banking, clerical work,
etc. Much development of both technology, access and managerial attitude need occur before
telecommuting becomes a major work mode, but it is perfectly feasible. Also, because so much time is
currently wasted each day in commuting and transport foul-ups, leisure time can be increased without
reducing productivity; if one includes the hours worked just to fund the car system, this saving
could become the equivalent of a four day working week.  And for those who still had to physically
commute, the time would be radically reduced by public transport geared for quick journeys in a low
traffic environment.

REACTION TO A BAN: Some Foreseeable Reactions to a Ban on Urban Cars.

The worst reaction to any national government that embraced a car ban policy is the most
predictable, punitive international financial measures prompted by the automotive industry bloc, one
would hope that markets are not monolithic in this reaction and the novelty and insight into actual
future conditions would also trigger new investment inflows.

Another reaction would be capital flight, if from local government this would need a
state/provincial government ban to prevent subversion, a state ban would need national government
ban.  In theory a national ban would need an international one to cover it; but lacking global
government flight from a nation should still reverse eventually due to global deterioration in oil
supply and need for an operational urban workforce.  It could yield a comparative advantage within
decades as car based cities grow increasingly dysfunctional. Governments are not good at keeping
such faith and one would expect vacillation from the ban policy; but the oil crisis really won't be
that long in arriving.

Even if changing cities doesn't allow evasion of the ban because of overriding similitude of
legislation, a geographic ban still leaves people free to relocate homes and businesses in country
areas outside the ban area. Many elite bourgeoisies, who currently refer to anyone dependent on
public transport as a "captive", would doubtless do this from ingrained perceptions and ideology.
This is as it must be, some would be unable to reconcile to the new dispensation and this safety
valve must be left open.  Proscribed car city commuting would limit their environmental & resource
impact, lower middle class emulation would be minimal as cheaper child-safe housing would be
available in infill developments and their numbers would dwindle generationally from absence of the
business and domestic benefits of urban living, which developed before the car age and would revive
in its absence. Even the most car based landscape, the endless low density housing of California,
would lose its gloss were car access to urban San Francisco and Los Angeles curtailed, and
fashionable lifestyle options would trend toward infill developments.

However those who engage in this flight, possibly to car based microurbia, may be sufficiently
numerous to pose the same problem for the metropolis as a whole as is posed currently to inner
suburbs by the doughnut effect, city populations becoming disproportionately dominated by poorer,
less rate paying people. Infill land sales, assets currently tied up by the car culture, would
probably be required to prop up urban revenues for a decade or so. Any more aggressive reaction,
mass drivethroughs or whatever, would need to have force met with force.(more 1)

ECO-CRITICAL (ECOLOGICAL AND ECONOMIC) PUBLIC INVESTMENT: The Critical Economic and Ecological
Public Infrastructure Ignored Because of Car Infrastructure Spending

The following infrastructure is merely an indicative selection of requirements should only a small
portion of climatic and environmental crises eventuate.

Garbage treatment. The electronics and to a lesser extent the chemical/plastics industries are land
pollution timebombs that will toxify watertables unless intercepted, a complete recycling process
could ultimately pay for itself but would require large up-front investment, probably public, in
mining trace elements, flotation separation plants etc.  It requires public money because any
capture of pollutants has to be global, uniform, not only from cashed up "marketplace" environments.
Private enterprise reclamation would, and does, focus only on businesses and other large scale
electronics users where it can implement focused economies of scale but there are enough computers
and electronics in general public possession to poison water tables when they fully enter the waste
stream; however the public effort should be substantially funded by the manufacturers and retailers
who were the major beneficiaries of this industry.

Water Supply and Sewerage - Increased population will critically stress fresh water supplies, and
this will be global, with few exceptions, in the first instance this will require governments to
protect, and possibly buy, land abutting catchment areas, this will need also private industry
activity in allowing and providing rooftop catchment but ultimately will probably require
desalination plants (so far only affordable in oil rich gulf states) and greater conservation of
wastewater.  This needs some separation of chemical from organic sewerage flows, then the sewerage
will need be treated and reclaimed, by filtration, and the solids used in either worm-farming or
methane production and liquids as greywater. Cities will need alternate drainage, possibly into some
storage and usage system because, in the event of extreme flood/drought gyrations, water stress will
at other times be critical.  These of course are major public works projects and will be impossible
unless the haemorrhage of funds into the car culture can be stemmed.

Flood, heatwave/fire and storm/cyclone (global warming) preparation.  Even beyond those island and
delta regions that will flood and whose inhabitants will need resettling, urban sewerage and
stormwater systems the world over will back up and flood with seawater rise and this could bring
epidemics, particularly cholera. Some shorefront cities will need extensive seawall development for
higher tides.  Climatic disruption will bring storms, of wind, water, snow and fire, probably
requiring the establishment of emergency services at the scale of a standing army, another defence
budget! (more 1)

Energy Conservation and Ordinary infrastructure maintenance & replacement.- Much of the
infrastructure in the western world was put in place in the 19th and early 20th centuries and is
degrading as money is ploughed into highways and "doughnut effect" ring development. If major energy
crises are to be avoided during the oil crisis a rolling refit of industry and dwellings to improve
energy efficiency through insulation, cogeneration, climatic design etc. will be mandatory, with
major public sector investment, this includes an upgrade of all gas distribution systems, a refit of
pipes, seals, valves etc. the same is true of the water distribution.

All these are included in car's costs because they a major opportunity cost, they are the things
that public investment in the car system currently prevents from even receiving serious
consideration, even in those countries where the money and construction/technological capacity would
be available, such as Japan, the car mental hegemony syphons it all off into building useless
highways and bridges.  In a car ban context they would attract more attention.

ACCESSORY FILES

AUTHOR AND COPYRIGHT INFO - Justin Moore  - Author of Ban The Car Site

My name's Justin Moore, I live in Adelaide, Australia. I conceived, wrote, designed and maintain
this site. I know most of it's true and believe the rest.

I've been an anti-car activist for decades with Friends of The Earth, Greenpeace, local groups and
local governments but this site is: -  not associated with any group, -  not a reflection of any
group's policy, praxes or priorities (Greenpeace's Car Free Cities campaign implies some ban; but I
think they haven't said it means a general urban ban), -  not related to my job or studies or funded
by anyone but myself.

I have negligible "expert" qualifications (Cert. Pro Writing, Dip. InfoTech, Cert. Env. Mgmt) but I
am a Mensan and the site is the product of ten years thinking and research, since I naively set
aside a couple of weeks to compile an environmental audit of the car.  My personal reason for
writing it is to have somewhere to direct people rather than repeating the same argument in social
interaction.

In cities I neither drive nor accept lifts in cars; I used to motorcycle and now I walk, take
transit or, rarely, taxis. This is not an ideal I expect others to follow under current conditions.
I hold no hope that it would make much difference if some did follow the example. Carlessness is a
disadvantage in a car dominated society and one would need superhuman insensitivity to have not
encountered the social and economic car dependence of many people (it is the hegemonic position
after all).  If, as people tend to do, one expects commendations and exhortations to change some
minor personal behaviour and save the environment then I'll disappoint, I think it's a bit more
systemic and ingrained than that.  Minimizing car use would be good if everyone did it; but everyone
won't, and I won't recommend wasted effort; but as the disasters created by continued car hegemony
do and will affect everyone, not just drivers, it can't be left at that.  My own avoidance of the
car is for clarity of mind and karma as an opponent and though I prefer to associate with other non-
drivers this is for practical reasons as much as anything.

I think the case for banning cars in cities is almost as clear and irrefutable as for two and two
making four, this dry certainty manifests in implacability that others persist in calling
"passionate idealism".  I don't like being called an idealist for knowing that real problems require
real solutions (as opposed to pretend solutions), regardless of how the solution is viewed by any
prevailing ideology; I think "sane" a more apposite term. I'm not passionate about it, and study
contrary arguments, there's more light than heat here; except regarding baseless denials or
distortions, and anyone can react badly to someone insisting two and two make five, particularly
when the consequences are serious.

The car problem is a tragedy of the commons and because it would produce a relative disadvantage for
the non-driving group apolitical means are useless. Nothing can be accomplished by "private group",
depoliticised, "act only as consumers" logic.  The only quasi-idealistic thing I ask of people is
that they vote for a government or referendum that will ban cars in cities, i.e.: change the
conditions. I give reasons for confidence in this opinion and for disdaining lesser measures.  As
the site argues, only a ban tackles the problems' scale and getting a majority vote will be hard
enough without getting involved trying to convince people to accept a relative disadvantage and
martyr themselves for the environment.

The contents of the site are copyright, reproduction of any of the contents is permitted without
request under 2 conditions 1. It is faithfully reproduced and not distorted or edited beyond
abridgement 2. It is acknowledged with From the Ban The Car site, by Justin Moore.
http://users.bigpond.net.au/JustinMoore/BanTheCar/index.html. I've just discovered that U.S. "Law"
would allow every idea in this site to be suppressed by the simple expedient of patenting them and
refusing licence. Obviously there's more than one kind of rogue state and criminal regime. Thus the
following: You can buy a printed version of these essays by sending me a cheque or money order for
AU$ 10,000. (email for my address). I don't recommend you do this, but selling a printed version is
legally required in the U.S.A. to ensure the ideas presented become definable as "prior art" and
cannot be patented by anyone.

I thank Peter Henningsen and his web essay site Complicity and the Brain: Dynamics in Attractor
Space http://alifegames.sourceforge.net/project/sp.html for making free with this information.

Any comment on the site can be addressed to Justin Moore at jjustinmor@yahoo.com

MORE - Expositions: Additional Exposition of content for the Ban The Car Site

Bogus Alternatives More 1. Public transport offers a number of departure times within a given
interval if one isn't ready in time or forgets something and must return, a remedy that doesn't
inconvenience a group of friends or colleagues, and if one crashes in public transport, a whole
neighbourhood or company isn't disabled by grief. Environmentally car-pooling is less efficient on
all counts. If fuel becomes very expensive many who are fetishistically attached to the car and have
ideological prejudices against public transport will adopt car pooling as a soft option; but it
would quickly lose popularity and will never reduce the number of cars substantially because it's
too big an inconvenience. Reserving freeway lanes for multi-occupant cars does little but sell more
inflatable dolls.

Car Culture

More 1. In American and Australian cities 40% of total city areas are devoted to cars in parking
roads or garaging, 50% of new subdivision developments. Many new large buildings like hotels and
conference centres have virtually no pedestrian access, only a drive up entrance.

More 2. The greatest beneficiaries, and advocates, of urban sprawl are the real estate industry, who
make fortunes and drain the resources of the lower middle class in debts and mortgages by the simple
practice of buying paddocks on the urban fringe and selling them as houseplots. This scam has been
the quick path to riches and "respectability" since the age of Greek and Roman colonisations more
than 2000 years ago, all it requires is a capital sum and the right connections for timely notice of
forthcoming land zoning changes, usually these come from within the bureaucracy of local government,
sometimes local politicians. The infrastructure that adds value and makes it profitable is often
provided by the local government at public expense, often for a kickback. In the 20thC this
occasional windfall has turned into a perpetual cash cow. Car traffic keeps reducing the
habitability of inner cities and devouring urban interspace, and the consequent sprawl suburbs yield
the real estate milieu a huge dividend. In the USA real estate money and agents are the second most
organized and vocal pro-car lobby. They stand to gain much less from the infill development
consequent on a car ban, firstly because most car parks are already owned, either privately or by
government, and the development value can be calculated in advance, and roadspace is mostly
government owned and governments would get the benefit.

More 3. The dangers the car presents are denied by car culture, Hollywood heroes in movies with cars
supplied free or with additional payment by car companies for the advertising value can run and
gambol anywhere they like in crowded city streets; the cars slide, screech, stop and run into each
other if they cross a busy road, none ever is laid up in hospital and rehab centres for months,
weeping and whining more pathetically than a baby as they learn how to walk again on prosthetics
after having their knees and lower legs shattered. In the movies only guns kill, in reality cars
kill more often.

More 4. In intellectual circles the car culture will claim that the car has nothing to do with urban
sprawl.  This garners a supportive group from the airhead right whose only interest is in adopting
opinions which confound logic and common sense, and thus are are "provocative" and "distinctive"
enough to yield social frisson.  If land speculators fund them, they claim that urban sprawl is a
good thing.

More 5. Motorsport is largely vicarious; most people know they can't, shouldn't or couldn't afford
to drive like race drivers. It's aggressive domination of street circuits would need be curtailed
but otherwise it could persist merely as another sport whose behaviour is restricted to a dedicated
space, without damaging an urban car ban; nobody rides horses in the streets anymore, yet the races
persist.

More 6.The global car manufacturing industry has made itself a movable feast, it typically gains
influence over regional governments by investment and employment, then uses that influence to
pressure for inflated road development and the degradation of public transport while it runs its
capital into the ground before moving on to the next city, usually spending about 15-20 years per
step. This leaves a path of habituated and capitally committed market cities in their wake. If this
has not been a deliberate policy of car companies it's been a remarkably systematic invisible hand.
But the market argument is plausible if not convincing that they simply see lower levels of car
ownership, hence a larger potential local market, in cities with decent public transport and without
a car industry. It's just as likely it is a systematic conspiracy, a more sophisticated descendant
of the intentional conspiracy that destroyed America's rail and trolley systems.

More 7. Ex-politicians remain members of public transport users associations (even though they never
use it and contributed nothing but hot air to public transport while in office) and use their status
to pay their dues for past motor industry political donations by being staunch defenders of the
existing abysmal levels of service against both further degradation and any improvement. They write
into association newsletters and officers to repress any anti-car tendencies that emerge in these
organizations, putting them in their proper place of aspiring only to complement the real people in
their cars, particularly at critical moments as billions are being funnelled into new roads.

More 8 - On the political front there are a number of groups, notably British automobile
association, who use the sympathies of the existing media hegemony to object and raise email and
phone-call storms against any media that mentions anything slightly negative about cars, demanding
the media station somehow find them equal time between the car ads, car chase movies and the formula
one coverage for them to vent their "oppressed and under- represented" counter opinion.

Car Pollution More 1 - To claim, as some of the technological optimists and more benighted "green
capitalists" do, that any industry can be completely clean and green, i.e. create no pollution, is
not only equally absurd but (in physics) logically the identical claim as to have created the
perpetual motion machine, to have eliminated all entropy.  The latter claim was the favourite
delusion and piece of charlatanry of the latter 19th century, just as the former claim was the
favourite delusion and fraudulence of the latter 20th.  All industry will create its own pollution.
This is not to say that efficiency, hence cleanliness, cannot be improved.

Collisions

More 1. Solving Collisions. "Intelligent traffic systems" have "big brother" possibilities as some
remove autonomous control from the vehicle to a central power, once effected the central power
controls where the car goes, with sinister or bureauchaotic possibilities; better to retain
autonomous vehicles, as few and as well driven as possible. In a car ban context the bus system of
public transport cuts vehicle numbers to 1/10, HPVs, recumbent cycles, are inherently lighter,
slower and less inertial than cars, doing less damage in collision and posing less threat to
walkers, the same with limited power motorcycles. The greatest inertia is in the human body riding
such appliances so this encourages caution even regarding walkers, minimizing the brutality of
mobility culture. Trains and trams are 10 times safer than cars, and safer than buses as autonomy is
limited and a system governs traffic. Couriers, carriers and taxi drivers are professional drivers
with some other duties, their training could be improved, and their numbers swelled by those who
like driving and believe they drive well, their income would improve a bit. Tradespeople are semi
professional drivers, and such services might be improved by using telephones to have parts spot
delivered and call in further expertise, reducing their vehicle size and return trips.

More 2 This discouragement isn't from explicit fear of cars, not the "quaking fear" as car culture
advocates would inevitably try to caricature the idea, it's more a simple increase in stress
required by each stroll, watching for cars, every 20 steps in suburbs where driveways cross
footpaths, waiting at curbs or lights, taking indirect and squared off routes when ones destination
perhaps lies in a close diagonal, this is added on to the age old risks of walking, watching ones
step for a irregular surface avoiding bumping ones head on the trees or poles rubbish bins or seats
or signs or garbage that overhang or impinge on the path, which millennia of instincts negotiate
fairly easily on their own admittedly, but become hazards as one watches for the greater hazard of
cars, all culminating in a sense that "walking is a drag" an increasing disinclination to undertake
the exercise, which would decline were the activity more pleasant and less stressful.

More 3. Junkfood diets play a role in obesity, but the greatest cause is losing the habit of
unfettered exercise in ordinary daily activities, and car traffic is the cause of this. Mobility
culture promotes junkfood, the hours per day spent driving could be devoted to slow healthy food
preparation.

Consumerism

More 1. There is a quote by a famous American Millionaire, which I read once but have been unable to
find again (I'm still searching, any info regarding the quote or person would be welcome). It spells
out the three aspects of the American formula for wealth generation, which is something like - to
become wealthy you must:

produce a product that is small and quickly consumed and easily lost or disposed of it must be cheap
to make and sell and have a reasonable profit margin produce billions of them.

More 2. Despite the smooth tones of Amory Lovins and Natural Capitalism, (none of whose ideas are
bad in themselves) achieving zero environmental production impact, replicating the efficiency of
billions of years of evolution in the human production process that's only a few thousand years old,
isn't going to happen this millennia, most natural capitalism improvements are achieved via changing
the distribution and utilization process, which is actually non-capitalist as service industries are
labour, not capital, intensive. Capitalism is based on massive production concentration to achieve
economies of scale followed by wide, (it prefers global) distribution and, just as importantly for
capitalist economies, protracted storage by consumers of infrequently used devices (to prevent their
multiple or reuse impairing the new device market,) and the immediate junking of all unused or
consumed objects.

More 3. Fast food, disposable razors and tissues, all manner of disposable objects, sometimes have
other rationales but essentially are designed for a mobility culture, to be purchased and used on
the spot and their packaging thrown away. Consumerist distribution systems also increase
consumption, mainly through packaging, the capitalist system usually packages at production,
increasing transportation volumes, this can save some product wastage, particularly of food, but at
a packaging and transport cost and a restriction on quantities a consumer may purchase.

More 4. Because feminism did have the impact, intentional or not, of splitting the nuclear family
into 2 separately consuming units, consumerist dominance partially accounts for feminism's tolerated
success when all other reform movements of the latter half of the 20th century, communalism,
cooperativism, environmentalism, indigenous rights etc. have faced such trenchant, protracted, legal
and violent prejudice and repression, where every issue requires public demonstration and police
confrontation to make any progress at all.

More 5. This isolation is supported by a lot of legislative wrinkles, one that I know of prevents
individuals forming formal legally recognized associations for the purpose of leasing residential
property, a device that would have saved much trauma in share, what has been called "hippy"
households, consequently large housing co-ops don't exist, only "tenants rights" advocacy groups.

More 6. It can be hoped that the "positive, institution building" qualities of the coming
generations could formally institute some institutional minimization of consumerist pressure,
instead of maximising it as current institutions do, and institutions offering legal recognition and
protection for pooled property governance as much as current laws do private property would also
help the poor of the world raise their living standards.

More 7. It wouldn't replace the on-line auction houses or trading post newspapers, but trust would
be a more calculable quality, and useful junk unfit for market, or in too small quantities to
justify market costs, particularly timber, containers, furniture and garden surpluses etc., could be
exchanged, saving environment because global capitalism would likely require such goods to be
transported from the other end of the world.

Eco-Critical Infrastructure

More 1. There is a cheaper option to creating a whole separate emergency services. This is to
rename, re-equip, retrain, reorientate and extend the automatic range of duties of existing defence
forces while integrating their command, logistics and operations with civil emergency services.
However much military tradition and right wing opinion that aspires exclusively to being elite high
performance fighting forces would oppose this. This opinion is pathological and wrong. Constant
involvement in meaningful and unpredictable ordinary operations in responding to emergencies,
fighting fires, floods, landslides and earthquakes, and escorting famine relief convoys and medical
teams in disaster zones, instead of so many stage managed war-games from the last war, would better
hone the forces' logistic and deployment capacity, (which is half a battle anyway, and the absence
of which in the field is the greatest sap on even the highest and most elitist morale). Also it
would improve the military capacity to fight low level guerilla campaigns and manage areas with
large distressed or panicked civil and refugee populations, the actual war-zones they will
experience in this crowded century, without massacring and losing the confidence of civilians and
thus losing the moral and hence the intelligence battle, which is another quarter of the battle.
Some exclusively firefight battalions could be retained.

Freedom of the Road

More 1. Christianity's success can be attributed to fortuitous timing, right in the early years of
the Pax Romana, this was the first time in human history that a widespread audience could be
addressed by non military person coming in peace, prior one would have to come as supplicant or
conqueror, and Christian evangelists best made use of this new opportunity for dispersal. Modern
western attitudes imagining that freedom of the road is an innate right spring from centuries of
most only knowing the past by means of Scripture, reading about people who could take this travel
for granted, and consequently taking it as "natural" themselves. But the Christians hadn't done
anything to create these opportunities and, with the fall of Rome, it took them a thousand years to
learn how to re-establish anything like them.

More 2. It vanished with the fall of Rome, in the European Dark Ages one day a week, market day, was
the "market peace" where the kings whole army would patrol the roads and enforce penalties, one
wasn't forbidden to travel on other days, but most thought better of it. The Roman roads got
overgrown and crumbled to ruins during the dark ages, creating the, outdated even in its time, image
we have of ancient travel, walkers, wagons and horseback travellers moving along shady forest
tracks; before that, major wagons, intercity horsedrawn buses, and a regular mail service had
traversed full scale highways.

More 3. Three forces would close roads to all but the shrewdest negotiating traders who would pay
tribute and give service to the predators. The first force would be barbarian bands, of which modern
motorcycle gangs and South African carjackers provide an inkling. The second would be towns and
locales, civilised in themselves, gating roads at first for security, then as a revenue source by
charging tolls, a tendency already evident, especially in the USA, bespeaking the increasing
weakness of the US state. This was the primary reason that Roman roads fell into disuse. The third,
sometimes in the form of the two previous, would be local warlords who would rob and kidnap
travellers for ransom, sale or service, in the military or as slaves, as already happens regularly
in the weaker states of the world.

More 4. "Freedom of travel" is literally a product of "civil"ization, of belonging and adhering to
the mores of an overriding civil authority, surrendering absolute freedom of action in exchange for
this service provided by the collectivized imperial state and, as such, is wholly subordinate to the
collective well-being (weal) and wholly within the justified purview of that state to revoke or
conditionalise should it impair that weal.

More 5. Even the mythos that most feeds the "freedom of the road" ideology, the red-neck American
individualism based on the "wild west", was in fact opened by these social contract operations,
safety in numbers was the wagon trains' "freedom" and many found the group circumscriptions of
individual action oppressive, some even went off alone providing the Indian's earliest source of
supplies and guns, and the wagon trains ultimate security was reliant on regular troops, British,
then US, then the US cavalry. Rugged individual autonomy attitudes are dead stupid in the anarchic
"real world". Their protestations about their "individual freedoms and rights", have no more moral
weight than the tantrums of ignorant spoilt children, and are hardly worth consideration. Modern
expressions of the freedom of the road mythos, Jack Kerouac's "On The Road", occurred during the
Democrat President Harry Truman's incumbency, where he was systematically increasing the "imperial"
power of the US federal government over local authorities, and Kerouac ended his life as a fanatical
and reactionary US patriot, drawing down the security of the overriding state power that secured his
wanderings from local interference.

Global Dangers

More 1. No large organization can persist without income, the nation state's revenue base is in
chronic decline from non-taxpaying transnational economic domination (e.g. Rupert Murdoch &amp; News
Limited.

More 2. This was the conclusion of the worst case scenario, the "overshoot and collapse" global
model envisioned in the Club of Rome commissioned report, "The Limits to Growth" in 1972. A lot of
nitpicking has gone on proclaiming to discredit it; but no alternate model of the same scope has
been propounded, and humanity's behaviour has largely followed the dynamics described in it and the
model is still substantially valid.  The scientific community has recently begun a project of
similar scope, a report called Tracking the Ecological Overshoot of the Human Economy (Wakernagle et
al) has used more comprehensive data than the Club of Rome team, and concluded that currently
humanity is consuming 140% of Earth's sustainable yeild.  Thus sustainability would require about
30% reduction in resource consumption.  They confirm, in dryer language, that the Biosphere is being
killed off, that the "overshoot" predicted by Limits to Growth is well and truly underway (since the
1980's).  Unlike the limits to growth, they do not try to predict the moment of collapse; but it is
the inevitable outcome of such a dynamic (as any company spending more than it earns eventually
collapses).  They confirm that the rate of overshoot is increasing.  I'd suggest that only the most
starry-eyed would date the collapse beyond the end of this century.

Landspace Economics

Mobility Culture

Nature of Ban

Fuel Crisis Economics

More 1. OPEC oilfield capital has degraded during two low priced decades and needs hektobillion
dollar reinvestment to meet future demand, which will require higher oil prices. If the price is
forced down breakdowns and leaking pipelines will also raise prices through market competition for
reduced supply. Natural production decline begins at latest during the period 2010-2020. Extracting
states will be destabilised by dwindling wealth prospects, nationalist and terrorist forces will
ally with more farsighted malcontents in the ruling elites and will start to affect oil supply,
pipelines are vulnerable and may be sabotaged, the alternative of using truck transport or imposing
US military occupation on the Gulf States is also expensive.  In a piece of poetic justice, the
newly exploited oilfields, placed as they are at climatically and geographically remote localitions
such as deep sea oil rigs, will be most disrupted by the climatic disruptions of global warming.
Any way one views it, petrol prices or subsidies will rise, and the age of cheap oil is over.

More 2. The real economy, competent personnel and productive capital, is lacking for large-scale
alternative energy production, and a rush of investment will create share inflation, as it has
through history with railways, oil companies, skyscrapers, and latterly information technology. Such
empty speculative investment creates economic instability, possibly a recession, before it yields
substantial productive results, which usually flow only to elites because of general impoverishment.
Throwing empty money at a problem usually results in most of it being "stolen".

More 3. Esoteric capitalist knowledge that "the web" provides the best option for transport
minimization, and that only web maximised companies will survive the fuel crisis, created a smart
money capital flow that triggered the mob stampede of dumb money, the 1990's "new economy" excesses.
The smart money was in for transport substitution, but bailed out for the boom profits, and will buy
back as dumb money swears off technology stocks. (One of the few examples of markets putting
resources in better hands.) The smart money movement was synchronous with, and I think triggered by,
one event, the change of mind of a conservative resource industry body, the IEA, probably the only
source of energy information the rich investors would credit. In 1998 the OECD's International
Energy Agency reversed its predictions regarding oil production, from the technological optimist
"virtual unlimited supply" to the prediction of an oil production peak (i.e. start to decline) in
2012; predictions for this peak vary, many converging on 2005. Petrol engine car purchase from 1999
onward is increasingly "dumb money".

Transit to Displace Cars

More 1. Some bus-stops could be retained for the purpose of displaying an electronic map showing the
current position and direction of all buses in the area, information that could be easily acquired
by transmitting a constant signal from the buses to the mobile telephone network and triangulating
for position, or transmitting position ascertained via the global positioning system, this
eliminates the stress of waiting in unknowing. However given the cost of cabling this system up and
running it these resources might be better spent running a few more buses.

More 2. Industrial action isn't all bad, even for consumers who are inconvenienced, no system or
company is perfect and festering discontent affects performance and safety. There is a positive
corollary between moderate tolerance of strikes and better safety performance, so even disregarding
that strikes are impossible to suppress totally and the despotic and expensive measures involved in
attempting such action, this safety valve should be maintained, but not allowed to cripple the whole
transit system simultaneously. TDC systems need be built to have some strike tolerance, without
encouraging them.

Reaction More 1. Though cars are dangerous weapons and can be massed, so can anti-vehicle weapons,
and a ram raid can't be called civil or non-violent or not warranting forceful suppression, the
greatest danger to implementation would be sympathisers within enforcement agencies.

Real Alternatives

More 1. Moving beltways in CBD. One element of urban transport what will probably come into its own
this century is the moving walkway. Currently primitive examples of moving beltways are available in
the form of escalators and at airports etc., they are slow, monopaced and clunky. However new
materials and innovations are such that by the end of the century one would hope to see urban
centres dominated by moving beltways for human beings. Science fiction imaginings of beltway
transport were, as usual, both right and wrong, they imagine a series of belts beside each other,
each faster or slower which one walked onto and off to change ones speed. The accelerating beltway
has now been invented, this consists of a series of thin synthetic belts, each progressively faster
that the other, abutting each other so finely the transition is imperceptible, and moving a human
being or even wheelchair from a slow walking pace up to any speed (probably a maximum of perhaps
20kph to minimize casualties in any sudden stoppage). Of course one could speed this by walking
along the belt. Reliability issues would need be checked, a sudden stop at 20KPH can cause one to
fall over as badly as if one fell at a full run, but the survival and injury rate would be better
than for being hit by a car moving at the same pace and they would be no more unreliable than
escalators. These are point to point transit, small distances would still be conventionally walked,
belts could link blocks corner to corner, and the sci fi step-on and off fast belt could traverse
the whole city central area at the constant pace of the central fast section of the block length
belts, an over/under system requiring one step up or down half a body height depending on which axis
one was travelling could have the whole central business district grid traversed with a non stop
walkable streetscape. These would only be a couple of metres wide, but would require that the
central city streetscape be substantially cleared of car traffic; a prospect only feasible in a ban
context.

More 2. Recumbent Cycles. With visibility dangers reduced current bicycles would quickly be replaced
by recumbent cycles where one is seated much like as one is in a car or pedal-boat with pedals in
front of one. These are stabler in load carrying or towing, faster, they convert human energy more
efficiently without straining the back in force transfer, so need less exertion and sweat and short
commutes don't require showers and a clothing change, they don't give one a sore backside from
prolonged riding and one can travel further and more consistently on them. They are wider than
upright cycles, as they are usually arranged in tri or quad cycle configuration, but not much wider
than the human body. Most current models have some maintenance problem because of front pedal
propulsion for rear wheel drive, needing long complex chains; but nothing that couldn't be
configured more efficiently given capital and attention, front wheel drive, drive shafts etc.

Cars and Security

More 1. HIT AND RUN. - Forensic psychology has repeatedly affirmed that those who mistreat and kill
animals in their youth grow up to be psychopathic violent adults from whose ranks mass murderers
emerge.  Apart from indicating the tendency the animal killing is a stepping stone of
desenitization.  What then are we to make of a way of life that acculturates almost every adult to
the routine killing of cats, dogs, possums, reptiles, birds, in fact anything animate at all that
tries to cross their path; paths that incresingly dominate most outdoor space in cities.  Could it
rightfully be called a psycopathic (sick-mind) culture, and is not hit and run pedestrian killing an
extension of the indifference to animal deaths, the constant advice that "it is better to kill it
than have an accident avoiding it" constitues an extremely "slippery slope" of moral hazard and hit
and run driving is merely the application of the same principle and habit to humans.  The culture
creates a normalization cloak for psycopathic malevolence and a laid out excuse path for capricious
murder sand I think it psychopathic. I have often heard drivers saying how "dangerous" pushbikes
are; which is a classic psychopathic reversal of blame, the typical self justification as part of a
build up to criminal assault or culpably negligent manslaughter; actually the bike is not dangerous;
it is dangerous to ride a bike in car traffic but the danger comes from cars.

More 2. THE VOLVO EFFECT. - In the 1970's Swedish carmaker Volvo started building crash survival
features into it's cars, many of these involved reinforcing the car's frame so that, instead of
collapsing, it would break that of most other cars first, preventiing injury to the Volvo driver but
usually making the damages and injuries to the other car and driver more serious than they would
previously have been.  By the 1980's the Volvo had become the car of choice for those who wanted to
drive most aggressively and didn't care what damage they did to others.  This progression shows how
fine a line there is between security and aggression, as anyone who has been in a position to
"protect" others and then had them attempt to turn the protection into a weapon for their power and
profit will testify. Through time, habit, impunity and desensitization protection become aggression,
security for self becomes violence against others.  Volvo drivers got a bad reputation and stigma
that endured for about 15 years; but the stigma has largely been forgotton and the ever increasing
numbers of SUV's have taken over the mantle of most dangerous vehicles on the road, their popularity
showing that the violent doctrine of unilateral security is now normalized and orthodox and the four
wheel drive Range-Rover style vehicle is now the main impetus behind the private arms race. Social
Effects

More1. The most equal place for cross street neighbours to meet is in the middle of the road, cross
road conversations are too demanding but as the neutral space is uninhabitable interaction must
entail one going to the other, thus being outnumbered by members from within the opposite house or
incurring a hospitality debt in any sustained interaction. These are stressors on friendship and
ultimately there can be no friendship between unequals and, moved by inclinations based on the most
fundamental and primitive economic insights, people desist. "Middle ground" and "Neutral ground" are
essential for social interaction; but in modern cities the middle ground is overrun with cars.  The
only places outdoor life and neighbourly interaction flourish in modern cities are middle and outer
suburban cul de sacs with no through traffic and little local traffic. With narrower roads and less
traffic the habitability of the road would not become absolute, but time between interruptions would
be increased. Busy wide roads halve the local casual human interaction nodes physically and through
the ambient effects of noise reduce them further because people do not go outside if they can help
it.

More2. Competition for resources does this in itself, and this can be generated by a variety of
conditions from economic depression to population pressure; but inflating the base capital
requisites of life exacerbates it.

Space Issues

More 1. Humanity has not yet achieved the sophistication of nature, which can have interspace also
as productive space, pastures that can be both crossed and grazed.

Strategy of Ban

More 1. The media campaign has picked up, the hype in advertisements and advertorials is increasing
which may indicate some low-level panic. Media personalities would be likely to have no experience
at all of opposition to cars, they are typically in upper income brackets and have spent a early
career hopping from place to place perhaps with sound or video equipment in journalism, so are ripe
to swallow and perpetuate the whole hegemonic line, viewing car sales figures they take that line
and interpret many acts of career or social necessity, lacking an established alternative, with the
usual phrase that people "love their cars"; some do love their cars of course, some are indifferent
to them except to avoid further expense, some loath them.

More 2. Security is the most problematic, increased outdoor life and walking traffic would help, as
would the liberation of police resources from averting car traffic carnage; but the desire for
security is the motive force of oppression and totalitarianism and a balance would be difficult to
maintain. However modern doctrines of mutual security are making some progress in diminishing
oppressive security.

More 3. A simple windscreen exemption sticker would of course be forgeable; however the problems for
breachers wouldn't end there as finding somewhere to park the car would present a problem in itself,
requiring encroachment onto business premises or a flagrant declaration of fraud with residential
neighbours aware that the individual has no physical disability.  Bogus buses and taxis would
eventually be discovered through failure to respond to flagdown. The abuse of genuine trades vehicle
privileges would be the most problematic violations, as business cars are abused now; but by
penalizing such violations via the trade or business licence would give most tradesmen sufficient
pause to prevent substantial abuse. Some of the alternative propositions are, by contrast,
ludicrously unpolicable.  Dedicated lanes for multi-occupant cars in California have, according to
many apocryphal stories, been cheated by drivers propping a blow up dummy in the passenger seat,
fuel or engine specifications require police pull up and inspect every vehicle etc. etc.

Tragedy of the Commons

1. There are many examples.  In nature we can take the example of an invasive species such as
rabbits in Australia.  While there's more grasslands than rabbit colonies the breeding habits of
rabbits is rational, they grow and prosper, when the grassland dries up during drought the breeding
habits cause a complete destruction of the pasture and most of the rabbits that are born die while
the surviving population chews the grass roots and seed, so the pasture never recovers wholly from
the drought and the total number of rabbits that the landscape will support drops to a level lower
than it would if rabbits bred slower and lived within their means, i.e. it is irrational of the
rabbits to breed so fast.  In the human sphere we are currently witnessing a number of tragedies of
the commons, apart from overpopulation the two most salient at the moment are: - Overfishing - If
wild fish were infinite the logic of putting more and more fishing fleets into the seas (it becoming
more common) would yield more and more fish; but fish aren't infinite, so the logic leads to areas
being fished out and the total catch declining even as more boats are launched. - Global Warming -
The atmosphere is a commons (an unregulated resource equally accessible to all), which all countries
exploit to maximize their separate profit.  In a worldview that lacks any real idea of the whole and
sees only individual interest posed against other individual interest, it is rational for individual
countries to do this; but in terms of the whole it is irrational to do this as it leads to a huge
calamity, a general tragedy.

2.  It's not really a paradox, most of the behaviours have a negative side even in individual
behaviour, e.g. one car in isolation will still generate a death zone and air pollution, but as a
proportion of the total environment it will be a small proportion and insignificant compared to the
benefit the individual gains from mobility.  When masses of cars generate death zones (occupy space)
and pollution to the point where they slow each other down or cause motion to stop the proportion of
the total environment affected by these negatives is higher, eventually reaching the point where, as
a whole, the choice of automobiles as transport mode is irrational and not beneficial.

3. Hardin makes much of the fact that solutions do not have to be perfectly fair and just, private
property and "market value" being persistent examples; but they are accepted as better than the
alternative chaotic free-for-all.  However in affairs of state there need be some movement toward
fairness as the least fair states are the least stable, people can find the violent chaotic
alternative less undesirable if business as usual is too institutionally iniquitous.  So for a
solution to environmental problems, that has to last indefinitely for sustainability and a long time
at least for ecosystem recovery, a fair and just solution is the most optimal. The fair and just
solution is all or nothing, everyone benefits if everyone is restrained and everyone suffers if
everyone isn't restrained.

4. Authoritarianism is the nature of the state, all states, even those that call themselves
democratic, employ authoritarian mechanisms for the simple reason that a law cannot be enforced any
other way.  To democratically enforce a law basically requires an armed mass uprising every time an
infringement occurs, otherwise, one on one, each person has equal claim to be "the people" with
equal right to make and enforce the law, and confusion reigns.  Uprisings and interminable debate
are far too disruptive of life and eventually no-one bothers.  Most human populations have been much
more pragmatic in their dealings with the problem of evil, and invariably called for someone to "lay
down the law" and coerce the uncooperative into restraint. And thus the authoritarian state always
reestablishes itself, one law for all enforced by one empowered (legitimate) agency. It's as much an
act of specialization of labour as anything else.

5. Democracy, markets, education and experience in themselves have no capacity to solve a tragedy of
the commons: - Democracies fail because usually a majority perceive the disadvantage that would fall
upon them as individuals and don't see how they would benefit from the overall improvement. The
inability to counteract tragedy-of-the-commons effects is the principle weakness of all democratic,
liberal, laissez-faire, libertarian, egalitarian, consensus, socialist and republican philosophy and
the reason human society so regularly relapses from conditions of freedom into authoritarian states,
and why people acquiescence or (initially at least) enthusiastically support such relapses. -
Markets fail because supply and demand has two variables prices and incomes; their only control
method is to price something higher (e.g. a fine for stealing), which in theory means fewer people
will do it; but in practice has meant that a group generates by hook or by crook a higher income
that can accommodate the price and still perpetuate the activity.  This action increases the
environmental and social damage and by increasing the advantage, increases the attraction and
ultimate emulative propagation of the behaviour, thus it propagates the problem (this is the case
with the first world effect on third world behaviour). - Education fails to solve the problem
because upon leaving childhood the individual must adopt the destructive praxes to obtain social
parity and thus have the status to be taken seriously in the society, and the alienation of
knowledge from action engenders fatalism and disempowerment. - Experience fails because the
experience of a catastrophe does not immediately point one toward a solution, only experience of an
alternative would do that, and the individual alternative, individual restraint, yields a worse
individual outcome.  In a tragedy of the commons condition, all individuals suffer from the
individual choices but an individual is powerless to put the situation right.

6. Democratic idealists, Hardin is an example, call for "mutual restraint, mutually imposed", and if
this could be achieved it would work; but historically this is the kind of problem at which
democratic process has proven inept, for a majority, involved with their own problems, don't see the
need or benefit in advance, and only realize it post-facto of the ban, and usually in a longer time
frame than a electoral cycle, and the act is often reversed with change of government and benefits
never realized.  It poses the central problem of society; the relationship of the individual and the
mass; without it any authoritarian measures by the state could be done away with (except in war
conditions); but the problem always returns in the form "what can we do when a common behaviour is
the main problem?", so a state must act in an authoritarian way or allow the tragedy to unfold,
either course threatening its legitimacy on one or another grounds. However, a state that can rouse
itself to action when a TOC threatens, and largely restrain itself from heavy handed
authoritarianism when no TOC is threatening, is effectively the definition of "good government".
However democracies largely fail to act, as in the global warming tragedy, facing this failure
liberal theorists try to fob it off with "the people get the government they deserve".  In more
intelligent societies the threat of regulation, of "use freedom responsibly; or lose it" can bring a
tragedy down to manageable levels through the generation of cultural customs and conventions, but
these are fragile once their violation proves profitable for an individual, also in non-traditional
societies the collective memory of the mass consequence fades and traditional taboos are dismissed
as if they were founded only on superstition and their adherents derided as old-fashioned.

7. Some believe the authoritarian state only exists to protect peoples from outside enemies by a
standing army; this is simply disproved by reference to ancient Egypt, the most advanced and
bureaucratic state of the ancient world evolved surrounded by impassable desert without outside
enemies for thousands of years.  The problem for Egypt was to regulate its own populous so it lived
within its means without destroying its survival source, the produce of the Nile valley.  The often
abused authority of the state could not have evolved without the tacit acceptance of the people, and
this acceptance must have been based on something substantial, not just myths, religion or coercion;
humanity is consistently neither that stupid nor that cowardly. The state, despite all its faults,
was better than the alternative.

Transport Displacement

More 1. Urban planning techniques could do much by systematically emulating an early industrial
revolution technique, proximity optimisation; minimization of large transportation interpenetration
of residential areas actually improves peoples ability to get out and about and interact, because
for all that cars improve long range access to nodes of human interaction, vehicular traffic
obstructs and makes stressful many of the short range nodes which historically and culturally form
the bulk of human interaction, while extending the distances between these with wide roads and
parking lots; in a ban context infill development could also improve local access to many
facilities, sporting, medical social etc., and public transport more efficiently still provide
access to the mass events we currently experience.

Glossary for Ban The Car Site

Glossary

Anthropogenic - Generated or caused by humanity.

Biosphere Services - A way of looking at the biosphere economically.  One calculates the services
provided by "nature" and estimates what it would cost for humans to provide them.  These services
include waste recycling, cleaning air and water, generating rainfall etc. etc. Perhaps needless to
say their total estimated cost is much larger than all the human economies in the world combined.

Bunching - Something that happens with buses, the first bus stops to pick up passengers and the
following bus catches up a bit, eventually they run immediately behind each other or leapfrog one
another, creating long gaps with no buses. This is minimised with small buses that proceed to the
next setdown stop once the seats are full, reestablishing spacing. Car Sharing/Clubs - A form of
local self-help organization where neighbours pool their resources to buy, garage, clean and
maintain only one car amongst many households, booking in advance and paying for their individual
usage of the car.  Posited as an alternative to the car culture it's actually a bogus alternative as
it is a marginal activity of stable, middle-class, homogeneous neighbourhoods in Europe and North
America; which is all it ever will be.  A cutesy form of middle class "social enterprise" one is
splitting hairs to essentially distinguish it from ordinary car rental, perhaps differing in hours
of accessibility; but most car-clubs can be expected to devolve into simply all-hours car rental
companies once the social novelty wears off and the stresses of collective enterprise take their
toll.  Good as an indicator of people's will to reduce their car usage, it's effectively meaningless
in car traffic reduction, like voluntary car rental, its impact on traffic reduction is self
limiting; once traffic declines, driving becomes more attractive and is resumed by many. Car Pools -
Another form of social enterprise imagined by middle class utopians as a way of reducing traffic.  A
group of people take turns to drive their car, typically to and from work, and pick up or drop off
the other members of the group en-route.  Obviously, if everyone did it, it would reduce traffic.
Equally obviously, everyone won't do it.  It's the worst of both worlds, as private transport one
loses autonomy and privacy and one's own schedule, as public transport it only runs once a day!
Both this and car clubs are ineffectual because they are grounded in private logic.  This is logic
where one provides for "one's friends", and can forget the rest, palliating one's conscience,
perhaps in the expectation of moral pay-off, whilst around one the problem snowballs.  It functions
on an assumption of limited responsibility where anything or anyone one doesn't like can be excluded
or expelled. Thus those expelled have no option but to "drive themselves".  This logic drives the
entire capitalist/privatizing world and is fallacious in the public domain as it presumes exclusion
and expulsion as solutions to problems. The public sphere must include and provide for everyone and
everything, absolute liability, and those who cannot be accommodated are not expelled but
incarcerated.   Only such catch-all logic can solve problems inherent in the structure of the
civilization, such as the environmental and social disasters of automobile ascendancy. Carriageway -
A road regarded in its whole width, carriageway can be divided into traffic lanes, and these can be
individually regarded as laneways.  Carriageway does not include walkways or the areas which in
Australian common parlance are called "nature-strips"; but in officialese are termed "reservations",
i.e. areas set aside for future road widening. Concept of the Car - A personally autonomous land
motor vehicle capable of holding the self and some family or occasional companions, large enough to
act as a cart for most of the materials required in human life or tow a trailer that can contain an
even larger proportion of human life's requisites. The internal combustion engine is not essential
to the concept, nor is metal, rubber or any particular material, wheels probably are but hovercraft
could fulfil the concept; size and "death zone" are inherent to the concept as are unnatural speed &
inertia and consequently collisions where that inertia is converted into destruction. Collision
avoidance requires systemic control, abolishing autonomy and violating a fundament of the concept.
Contingent - Dependent upon some other variable, "iffy". Conurbation - Multiple urban centres that
have been linked by sprawl into the one urban mass, sometimes called a megapolis. Dead Heart Effect
- Where city centres become very corparatised and traffic laden; people and even cafe's and theatres
can't afford to or don't want to reside there, so they are bustling in the daytime but cemetery
desolate at night. It's a waste of infrastructure replicated on a larger scale by the doughnut
effect.

Doughnut (or Donut) Effect.- On its way to and from the car intensive middle and outer suburbs,
traffic funnels through inner suburbs and makes them hard to live in because of traffic, noise and
concentrated pollution.  They become unhealthy for children so those who can do so leave them for
fringe suburbs creating a vacated area that usually becomes cheap rent neighbourhoods where the poor
and pensioners live, this wastes legacy infrastructure like schools. The cheapest way to provide
utility and social infrastructure to a city is a radial centric model, one hospital in the centre,
pipes and electricity brought centrally and distributed.  However in car based cities urban
residential areas break up into a doughnut or ring shape which makes radial centrism impossible:
people can't come from these fringe suburbs to a centrally located hospital or other infrastructure;
pipelines, powerlines etc. can no longer be brought centrally and dispersed; all must be separately
delivered to four or five points in the ring.  Services already established and capital already paid
for must be duplicated again and again at great cost, anything located on one side of the ring is
unknown or too difficult to access for people on the other.  So the doughnut effect radically
increases the cost of running a city in everything from energy to physical artefacts and leads to
the deterioration or abandonment of many services, police and ambulance, even garbage collection in
some places. It's another example of the car's fiscal black hole sucking in resources better spent
elsewhere. It extends the problem of the "dead heart" of modern cities. Local governments are
currently countering it with expensive "infill development" to try and attract well off younger
people and boost their rate base, but they'll probably see the same flight and decline because of
traffic, and this may speed official enthusiasm for car bans.

EPR Energy Profit Ratio - This is the degree to which an energy source multiplies the energy devoted
to its acquisition, i.e. energy value of fuel divided by the energy devoted to its production. It
isn't about monetary profit; but energy profit.  An EPR of zero means the energy output equals the
energy input, e.g. an oilwell that yields enough joule value of oil to smelt the rig and run the
drill and transport the oil to where it's used for these purposes, but no more.  Oil's EPR has been
as high as 60 during the 20th C, and is currently under 20 and falling; the absolute best alternate
energy EPR is Hydro-electric at about 11 and a few photovoltaic cells can approach 10, liquefaction
of coal to produce artificial oil or gas yields an EPR of about 8.  The best non fossil fuel
(transport substitute) at the moment is methanol, whose EPR is under 3, Hydrogen's EPR is improving
but still a fraction of that of the electricity needed to produce it; and will never exceed that of
the electricity (as oil's did, and still does), whose best non fossil EPR is around 10. The
bountiful energy of the 20th Century will not be replicated; i.e. 20th C western lifestyles are
unsustainable, particularly with regard to transport.

Exchange Space/Interspace - Exchange space is the economic term for space required to be set aside
for the transport of persons and goods which facilitates exchange thereof and thus supports economic
activity, it is distinguished from storage space, production space and recreation/residence space.
In a private building this might mean driveways, loading ramps, corridors and walkways etc. Because
it is space set aside from productive use one economic school, of which the capitalism's idol, Adam
Smith, was one, holds that exchange space should be minimised to optimize productive space. Recent
studies have sought to find optimum levels of exchange space. Country roads are largely optimised
exchange space, urban roads should be called interspace, it differs from normal landspace, stretch
of desert etc., in that it abuts production, residential or consumption areas but is set aside from
either. It is the inflation of urban interspace, roads and carparks, by the car that causes urban
sprawl.

"Green Cars" - These are cars which are designed to reduce some of the environmental impacts of
standard cars.  Usually this is a reduction in vehicle emissions but it can range right up to making
the car itself from hemp to reduce the environmental damage of car disposal.

Hegemony - Dominance, usually of one powerful entity over other entities that are, notionally, its
peers. A 20thC Marxist definition usefully applied the word to the control of all "presentable" or
"realistic" thoughts and worldviews, a hegemony determines not precisely what is thought or done,
but the range of things which can and cannot be thought or done. In this way the car culture
dominates other transport thinking. In my usage hegemony differs from dictatorship only in that
dictatorship is overt, explicit, visible and commits crimes of commission; a hegemony beleaguers
alternatives (like presenting one with 4 doors and locking 3 of them) so one "freely" chooses the
direction it wants one to go which it advertises as a "free" choice and a vote of support for its
decisions, it assaults one's reason by representing any objections in the form, "but you tried the
other ways, and they didn't work", it is covert, implicit, invisible and commits crimes of omission.
Western democracies, controlled by a limited range of political parties whose agenda is linked to
interests of corporate (business, union etc.) sponsors function overwhelmingly as hegemonies,
Republocrats, Laberals, Labatives etc. Dictatorship prescribes and coerces, hegemony circumscribes
and corrals. Corporate controlled political processes keep car reduction off the agenda.

Infill Development- This is development of space within the boundaries of existing urban
infrastructure, as opposed to new fringe subdivision. It is being promoted by inner suburban
governments to try and repair their rate crisis by attracting wealthier young people after decades
of the doughnut effect. Ironically, as this group are high car users, currently the most successful
design of these infills takes a full block and rebuilds the 19th century park square, minus the
roads, a multi-storey square of apartments round a large central open space which excludes cars
altogether, banishing them to garages under the apartments, with only external access, banning them
from the central lawn or recreation area, and from sight of the balconies. This tacitly admits that
the worst thing about city life is car traffic in itself; not it's air pollution. In the context of
a future car ban infill becomes the whole of urban development.

Infill development 2 - Means exist for using liberated roadspace that don't involve the total
demolition and redesign of neighbourhoods with narrower roads, which would demand too many resources
and damage too much heritage, primarily by the partial closure of ingress roads to residential
blocks and selling the former street ingresses as houseplots leaving a walking and cycle path beside
the new plot, and selling block extensions to residents by narrowing the road. Villages blocks thus
formed could span perhaps 5 hundred metres between bus roads and be accessible to taxis, emergency
and other vehicles by one or two ingress roads. Infill housing expansion is low cost because major
infrastructure is already in place, and helps arrest outer suburban sprawl because equal or lower
priced housing becomes available within existing city boundaries, thus not incurring the high
property costs that follow curtailing sprawl by statute. Liberated car-park plots would provide
major infill opportunities without pressure to impinge on current parks and greenspace. It allows
local governments more money available for social infrastructure, liberated from the current costs
of extending physical infrastructure and maintaining roads, while increased numbers outdoors and
reduced through traffic and slower getaway prospects improve security. Such infilling would improve
local markets, thus minimizing transport requirements, and lowering public transport per capita
cost. Low cost development, for a lower cost lifestyle, may well be crucial in surviving the energy
crisis recession without major social upheaval.

Infrastructure - the basic foundation buildings or installations that underlie the operations of an
organization, in civilization, this is classically summarized by the words transmission and
transportation; transportation and communication constructions, roads and bridges, rail, ports and
mailboxes and offices, telecommunication wires and transmitters, pipes and wires pumps and
generators for the provision of utilities like gas water and electricity, drains, sometimes the
production facilities for these utilities, sometimes social service structures are included, schools
hospitals, police-stations etc. The public infrastructure is (or should be) anything that goes
beyond the property of any one private owner and crosses public land to another property, this
includes all broadcast frequencies. A good old word for public infrastructure is "the commonwealth".
Private organizations build their own infrastructure within their property, pipes, computer networks
etc.

ITS Intelligent Traffic/Transport Systems - These are traffic management systems implemented
primarily by traffic authorities.  They range from systems currently used such as monitored traffic
flows with traffic lights manipulated to maximize flow, to proposed computerized systems which
control all arterial roads and remove the driving of the car to automatic systems until one want's
to leave the controlled road.  ITS's are either common sense interim management praxes at the lower
end to futile techno-fantasy at the upper.  Imagine a controlled highway, all cars lined up close to
each other moving at the most safe and efficient speed and you have ... a very inefficient and
expensive train!  Even cars driven onto a train and driving off at stations would be more fuel and
space efficient. Many at the techno-fantasy end of the spectrum betray the fixed idea and monomanic
fetishism bred and fostered under car culture hegemony.

Littoral - Of lands and waters on and near the seacoast, typically rich fishing and fish breeding
areas. Mercenary - It originally meant soldier of fortune or gun for hire, mercenary behaviour
encompasses any action for monetary gain done without scruples, sensitivity, consideration of
another or care as to what is damaged, this includes violence and murder. This is the natural
attitude of a minority of people but not a majority behaviour except where the cost of living
exceeds available income.

New Urbanism - A largely American based movement among architects and town planners.  It strives to
create better urban environments with better walking, natural areas and sometimes energy footprints
by designing spaces for these activities and minimizing cars by controlling traffic flow with street
design, sometimes it resorts to almost 19th century house spacing and square design. It takes a line
of least resistance with regard to the car hegemony, eschewing car bans often in favour of "traffic
calming" devices such as winding roads and roundabouts and often complete car permeability of
neighbourhoods to minimise any particularly heavy traffic flow along one road.  It has had some
short term successes with residents who opt in to their subdivisions; but the neighbourhoods can be
expected to be overrun by car parks and widened roads within a generation.

Personal Cars - Official statistics persist in calling them passenger vehicles; but the average is
about .3 of a passenger so they're called personal cars here and this more accurately expresses
their owners subjective possessive relation to them. The ambience of selflessness imbued by terms
like "passenger cars", and "family cars" is an utter misrepresentation of their usual usage.

Poly-pharmacy - An illness caused by too many medicines.  It arises from the uncalculated and
untested interactions of the many different medicines some people use, each tested in itself but
untested in combination with all others.

Regulation - (also regular, register, registration, registry) emerges from the Latin root, rex,
regis, Regina, meaning king or monarch, inherently implying both external coercion and a unified
authority imposing a standard.  It has been humanity's only successful defence against tragedies of
the commons.

Riparian - Of the area in and near a river.

Right of Way - The conventional term to describe the space in front of a car which need be vacant in
order for there not to be a collision, describable as an area so long and so wide, e.g. 60 metres by
3 metres for a largish car moving at 60kph. Right of way once meant crossing rights, it's been
adopted by the car hegemony to retain an illusion of respectability by being redolent with
"rightness"; but I prefer a more empirical term, "death zone", a reserved area that is usually a
permanently reserved tarmac road, stripped of vegetation, habitation or productive use and only
crossable by people and animals, and garnering a toll of animal and human casualties. Any fast
vehicle of course needs a death zone for its functioning; reducing the number of vehicles is the
only way to minimize landspace devoted to death zones.

"Smart Cars" - This tag represents a whole variety of improvements to the basic car, from fuel
regulation, auto-turnoff to navigational aids to proximity sensors to help avoid collisions, all
made possible by computerization.  They can reduce the fuel consumption and mitigate traffic jams by
monitoring traffic flow and recommending a less congested route.  All up, they are expensive and
their impact upon reducing the car's environmental damage is marginal because, unfortunately, they
can't create a car smart enough to fold into a timewarp with a microscopic portal or travel and park
in hyperspace instead of the street.

Transpiration - Water evaporating from leaf surfaces, like perspiration this has a cooling effect.

Urban Sprawl - It's necessary to distinguish this from urban growth. Many cities in the 3rd world
are growing because their population is increasing; largely this isn't sprawl, despite geographic
expansion, it's growth. Sprawl is the quotient of geographic growth that is higher than population
growth. Most first world cities are not growing at all in population, yet continue to grow in area.
Some argue sprawl is independent of the car, as some "sprawl" tendencies were visible along train
lines before the car, but this was no such thing, merely small, medium density townlets around train
stations. The car is the biggest cause of low density sprawl, because of it's space demand, road and
parking amount to 40% of all urban area in Australian and American cities, and 50% of new
development. On most national maps cities should not be represented by symbolic dots in countryside,
but as visible areas of tarmac.



NOTES: Notes and Links for the Ban The Car Site

Introduction

Some economists, sparked by an economics students' rebellion in France in 2000, are attempting to
recreate a real economics.  See "Post Autistic Economics. http://www.paecon.net"

Ban The Car

Bogus Alternatives 1. For insight into the realities of "alternatives" under the car hegemony, try
New York's non-car users' site http://www.rightofway.org. Among other things, they draw "crime
scene" body outlines on the roads where pedestrians and cyclists are killed by cars.

Car Culture 1. Premature car-culture triumphalism has made the relationship between real estate
interests and car culture propaganda easier to demonstrate than might be expected. For instance one
might explore the opinions and political activism of the California Association of Realtors, whose
website has the revealing URL, http://www.car.org

2. A short summary of the conspiracy that destroyed the USA's urban trolleycar systems is available
at http://www.verdant.net/natlcity.htm. The whole story was explored in a film documentary called
"Taken For A Ride". Which "Reveals the tragic, little known story of how the auto and oil industry,
led by General Motors, dismantled electric streetcar lines nationwide and replaced them with diesel
buses." Available from New Day Films -

http://www.newday.com/films/Taken_for_a_Ride.html

Car Pollution

Collisions 1. "Tranquillisers a Driving Menace." - Stephen Luntz, pp.11, Australasian Science, Vol.
23, No.4 May 2002.

Consumerism

Eco Critical Public Investment

Fiscal Black Hole 1. Worldwatch Institute, State of the World Report 1993 Ch. 7. Rediscovering Rail
by Marcia D Lowe. Note 66 David Alan Aschauer, "Transportation Spending and Economic Growth: The
Effects of Transit and Highway Expenditures" American Public Transit Association Washington DC Sept
1991.

Freedom Of The Road 1.  see Mobility Culture: Copenhagen Declaration Text adopted during the Car
Free Cities Annual General Meeting 1996 8 May 1996 Copenhagen

Global Danger

Infill Development

Landspace Economics 1.  In "The Road from Inequity" by Peter Mumford - for the Adam Smith Institute
- (A privitisation-advocacy thinktank in Britain). It's dubious because pollution costs are
minimised, it doesn't include appropriation of police and litigation resources, and it's definitely
not true globally (Britain has comparatively high car taxing). While dubious in Britain, the
statement is patently untrue in Australia.  $14 Billion is collected in all taxes, and though a
separate compulsory insurance scheme covers personal injuries from collisions; congestion alone is
calculated at $13 Billion cost and infrastructure at $7 Billion cost per annum, without even
approaching environmental costs.  These figures are available as facts sheets from the Australian
Government Bureau of Transport and Regional Economics.
nt 2 From RoadFacts 2000.
nt 3 From RoadFacts 2000.  As this includes all urban local roads, not just those in cities of 40000
or more population, it inflates the local road area a little, so this could reduce the rent figure
slightly, further detail of stats is needed for an exact figure, but some other lack of detail
reduces the figure in other stats, it might balance out.
nt 4 width of space (2.6m) x length ((5.m) + access lane width (4m)) (measured in supermarket car-
park Adelaide)
nt 5 Excludes parking or traffic fines
nt 6 2000 from ABS
nt 7 estimate from curb to curb, not counting naturestrips or footpaths
nt 8 estimate from random measurements
nt 9 An estimate.  Any stats on actual numbers would be welcome.  These are &quot;free&quot; car
park spaces that receive public subsidy through taxation or commercial subsidy (eg supermarket)
through price structure, or residential cross subsidy through rents (from non drivers and drivers
alike).
nt10 approx. 75% of national car fleet.  Approx. 80% of pop that lives in cities of 40000 or more,
nt11 Value arbitrated as lower (2/3) than urban industrial average rent value, in consideration of
the lower level proprietary rights and development; but not much lower in consideration of
opportunity cost for excluding residential, retail, recreation and office use.  Calculated from Real
Estate Institute of Australia values.  See Spreadsheet for details.
nt12 See, Nature of Ban, Public Transport to Displace Cars and Transport Displacement.
nt13 Multiply Arterial road length by Arterial road width
nt14 Multiply local road length by Local road width
nt15 Add Local and Arterial road areas
nt16 Multiply sum of Urban and Local Road Lengths by optimal road width
nt17 subtract optimal urban road area from actual urban road area
nt18 Multiply parking space area by ratio of parking spaces to cars, then multiply by urban car
fleet numbers
nt19 extra road and car park area over and above optimal roadspace, area demanded exclusively by car
culture and unnecessary otherwise,
nt20 divide car culture appropriation by car fleet numbers, this doesn't count any private space
appropriated, paid parking or private driveways and garages
nt21 Multiply car culture appropriation by rent per m2.
nt22 (Space subsidy *100)/GDP
nt23 (Taxes*100)/Space Subsidy  This would be a greater percentage if parking fines were included;
but so far I've found no data on this (still looking).  Ordinary paid parking space is not included
in the subsidized space area.
nt24 Annual rent due divided by Urban Car fleet.
nt25 Annual rent due divided by Australian population.  Amount paid by every person in Australia to
subsidize the privileged access to space of urban car drivers.
nt26 Amount each urban car culture member doesn't pay for space appropriation they exclusively
access, to other's detriment.

Mobility Culture

Nature Of Ban

Oil Crisis Economics

1. Most data from "The Decline of the Age of Oil" by Brian J Fleah.  Pluto Press Australia.  1995.

Reaction to a Ban

Real Alternative Transport

Social

Space Issues

Strategy Of Ban

1. NSW Royal Motorist Association driver opinion survey NSW Australia 1997.

Tragedy of the Commons 1. Initiated by an article by Garrit Hardin in 1968 "The Tragedy of the
Commons". Copy of original article at. http://dieoff.com/page95.htm

Transit Systems to Displace Cars

Transport Displacement

© Justin Moore, Plympton South Australia, 2006 Sep 11 Mon