The argument against car culture seems to be clear. The biggest killers in major cities are pollutants caused by motor vehicles. Cars produce 21 percent of carbon dioxide, 90 percent of carbon monoxide, 53 percent of nitrogen oxide, and 46 percent of hydrocarbons. Asthma has increased by 60 percent in the last ten years and one in seven children in Britain now has an asthma related illness.
Cars are incredibly wasteful: 70 percent of the world's rubber is used in cars. In Britain 140,000 cars are scrapped every year, and 40 percent of urban land is taken up with car parking. Cars kill - last year 3,814 people were killed on the roads in Britain.
It is all forecast to get worse. Car usage is predicted to double and pollution increase by 130 percent in the next 30 years. However, in western Europe just two thirds of people have a driving licence. Only half have access to a car on a daily basis.
The standard response from across the political spectrum is to blame people for wanting to drive cars. This is the new strategy behind 'green taxes' which include punitive parking fines, massive taxation on petroleum and road pricing. The impact of such policies is to impose a backdoor tax on working class people. Cars are a necessity for millions of people to get to work and who have no alternative way to travel. In inner city areas the stepping up of restricted and resident only parking has very little to do with 'going Green' and a lot more to do with cash strapped councils raising money.
People use cars because of the way cities are designed and the sort of society we live in. Car ownership was not an accident but a deliberate result of government policy.
People may have seen the cartoon film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? about how the motor companies bought up the tram lines to force people to drive, every bit of which is true. A US Senate report in 1949 found General Motors had been involved in the replacement of more than 100 electric transit systems with General Motors buses in more than 45 cites including New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St Louis, Oakland, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles.
In 1935 LA was served by 3,000 electric trams. In 1937 Pacific City Lines - owned by Standard Oil and General Motors - bought up and started to scrap the LA tramlines. In 1944 another company owned by GM and Standard Oil bought up the city centre streetcar company and the LA railway, and scrapped the lines. The result is palm trees dying from smog, orange groves that have been paved over by 300 miles of freeway, air that has 13,000 tons of pollutants pumped into it, gridlock and pollution.
The movement of people into the American suburbs, the so called 'white flight', was a deliberate result of a whole range of government polices - low federal interest rates for people buying homes in new areas, tax advantages for new businesses, an ideological climate that saw cities as problems, for example, over crime. The most visible part of the process is the out of town shopping mall.
The suburbs then started to suffer from gridlock on the freeways due to people commuting. An irony is that the people who have fled to the suburbs because of crime are in fact in a more dangerous environment. One study in the US showed that children between 14 to 16 are more likely to die an unnatural death in the suburbs than in the cities! There may be 'more' crime in the cities but there are a lot more road traffic accidents in the suburbs.
In Britain the key turning point was the Beeching Report in the early 1960s which allocated replacement of rail by bus.
In 1970 there were 200 cars per 1,000 inhabitants. By 1980 there were more than 300. In the 1920s expansion of the London underground increased faster than population growth.
Margaret Thatcher used to boast she never went on a train. She certainly didn't like spending money on them. In 1979 the government spent £967 million on the railways. In 1995 it spent £663 million. Under the Tories, road investment took up 93 percent of funding while rail took up just 4 percent. In the Department of Transport just 1.2 percent of its staff were concerned with rail.
The road lobby in Britain is very well organised. The British Road Federation has a turnover of £500,000. In 1991 road construction companies donated £714,000 to the Tories. For most of its 18 years the Tory government spent huge sums on building roads.
The result is that from 1970 to 1989 there was a 25 percent reduction in goods carried by train, a 54 percent increase in goods carried by road, a 13 percent increase in people travelling by train and a 92 percent increase in people travelling by car. In the 1920s a quarter of all travel in London was on the tube. Today it is only 15 percent. Bus deregulation has led to a fall of 40 percent of people using buses in Sheffield.
Government policies developed greenfield sites that can only be accessed by car. So the cinema building boom in the last few years has been on the outskirts of cities. Similarly the big supermarkets have moved away from local shopping to hypermarkets only accessible by car.
Company cars have been encouraged and subsidised to the tune of over £1 billion a year. Of the traffic going into central London, 40 percent has free parking and 40 percent are company cars. Only 39 percent of people who use public transport receive any assistance. Despite only 10 percent of cars being owned by companies, they take up 25 percent of road mileage and cause 33 percent of accidents.
It is very hard to imagine capitalism developing in the 20th century without the car. In the 1950s the slogan, 'What is good for General Motors is good for America,' summed up the interdependence between the car companies, the state and capitalist society. Ford developed mass production techniques to build cars, the oil companies became the force they are today because they were needed to provide petrol, roads were built to enable cars to move, and oil tankers were built to move bulk cargoes around.
The process of shifting to car only transport has gone furthest in countries in which car production is concentrated. Scandinavia has lots of public transport and a small car industry. The cities with car production at their hearts are cities in which you need a car to get around - Birmingham in Britain, Detroit in the US.
Freight transport and car usage were also driven by an ideology that exalted the car as the great liberator of mankind, allowing individual freedom, whereas railways and public transport were seen as levelling class divides. The car culture invades every aspect of life. Whole programmes on television like Top Gear are dedicated to cars. Driving along the open road at crazy speeds is seen as a liberating experience. Today the new line in corporate perks is to fly executives to Germany at night so they can drive at maximum speed on the German motorways which still have no speed limits.
The final absurdity is the way in which car users are put up against people who want to reduce the use of the car. In London today the journey time by car is the same as it was 100 years ago because of the congestion. The fastest way to travel across London is to cycle. Less cars on the roads would mean those people who had to drive could move faster than the present 8mph.
Since 1994 there has been a big shift in the attitude coming out of the Department of Transport, the road lobby and big business. A Royal Commission report argued for a radical shift in government thinking away from increased car usage. Local authorities were given planning policy guidance (PPG 13) to stop car expansion, and the standing advisory committee on trunk road assessment came to the conclusion that more roads created more cars. The latest CBI report argues, 'It is not going to be possible to build road capacity to meet all anticipated demand... No solution to the problems of transport will be effective without a substantial increase in the amount the country invests in transport.'
However, the shift in government thinking has as much to do with the need to slash public spending as the realisation that car culture no longer works. The amount of money to be spent is left to the madness of the market. This is the only way you can understand the Labour government's announcement of the new road building programme, which is a messy compromise.
The new Birmingham toll road is being built in part because the previous Tory government had entered contracts committing itself to building the road. Labour accepts the priorities of the market and honours contracts it did not sign. Road pricing hits those on low incomes disproportionately. It creates a two tier car system - the well off use the toll roads while the poor stick to the run down ones.
New investment for public transport is meant to come from the private sector. So Labour has floated selling London Underground off to a private operator and using the money for investment. One only has to look at the one major rail investment that has taken place under the Tories, the Channel Tunnel, to see the result of the free market at work. It is both bankrupt and dangerous.
In any rational society policies would be pushed that would mean people would not want to drive. However, two things are required, firstly money, and secondly the rejection of the market as a way of organising the transport infrastructure. There are obvious things that could be done very easily.
Encouragement of cycling so cycle lanes are separated from traffic and pedestrians, with safe lock procedures at train stations and showers and lockers provided at work.
New tube lines could be built with fares subsidised to make public transport more viable. When the GLC did this with its 'Fares Fair' policies in the early 1980s it led to a massive increase in usage on the tube. A return to bus conductors would be much more efficient at moving buses around - they are still kept in central London for this very reason.
Bus deregulation should be ended and local transport authorities should plan integrated transport systems.
Planning regulations should stop out of town developments and get the centres of cities moving again.
In some cases roads might need to be built. Some people need cars, for example people who find it difficult to get around or people with young children. However, to fundamentally shift away from the car requires more than just a transport solution.
Capitalism talks about choice but provides very little. Most people have no choice about whether they want to drive or not. People who might want to drive occasionally cannot do so because they cannot afford the upkeep on a car. People who would much rather read on their way to work are forced to drive because public transport is poor or non-existent. A socialist society would be about giving people a real choice.