On 16/02/07, Niall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > What a worldview. > > If you think cars are "making your life a misery" you are in something of > a > minority, and one I can't really relate to.
You see Niall, you don't understand that it is possible to have a view on this issue without that view being an emotionally extreme one. Whatever makes you think that I think that cars are making my life a misery? How many times do I have to say this? I am not anti-car. I am the owner of two cars, one of them a mass production classic marque which I keep on the road because of my interest in the history, development and technology of the motor car. But - a big but - in the same way that I like beer too, I don't spend half my life pi$$ed. The facts is that the motor car is increasingly dominating our life and environment. I don't know what experience you have outside of the UK, but an hour of LA, Peking or Delhi in the rush hour is enough for any sane person to realise that things cannot be allowed to develop as they are doing. The motor car has changed all our lives for the better, but it has, and continues, to change them for the worse. And I am surprised that anyone with their eyes open cannot see this. Just one example, since you restricted yourself to one in your posting. When I first came to live in London in the early 70s, the levels of traffic compared to my home town Leicester were...well, they were incomprable. In Leicester you could drive from one side to the city to the other in minutes, there were never traffic jams, you could walk up the High Street in total safety. Nowadays traffic in Leicester is equally as bad as it was in London all those years ago. The traffic moves at crawl, it is constantly jammed and there were so many accidents in the town centre that tracts of it had to pedestrianised simply to avoid casualties. This has come about for one reason and one only: there are far more cars than there ever were. And all the projections for car ownership, historically very reliable statistics, are that they ownership will continue to increase at the same sort of rates it has been. But, you see, as someone who, against the overwhelming weight of scientific opinion, still doesn't accept that global warming is a direct result of CO2 emissions, much of it from cars, I just know you won't accept this. But I would go further. I would say that even the 'cleanest' car on the roads now has to be seen as polluting. It is the cars themselves, not just their emissions, which is the problem. And I think, painful though it is to me personally, that the days of go-as-you-please motoring which we remember from the 20th century will have to be curtailed in the future. Or putting it another way, I see no alternative that car use will have to be limited, by price or sanction or whatever. Yet people are still going to want to get about. Public transport IMO offers the only long term way out. Steve [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
