This post will hopefully highlight why I don't drive. Cars are like cigarettes, once you start its very very hard to stop, and the effects of your driving and owning a car is bigger than just your bank account.
It affects the way cities are designed, landscapes are moulded, and houses are built.
These following images will show just how much the car has changed the way we inhabit space.
Houston, Texas
All those empty white spaces you see here are CARPARKS and ROADS.
There are blocks after blocks of cement, smothering any form of plant life, water, shade...life! This image is particularly disturbing to me, to see that someone or a group of someones would allow the construction of this. If you could imagine what was lost not just in the way of what was already there, but the potential alternatives for this space.
When you drive a car, you don't keep driving forever, that's the problem with cars, you have to put them somewhere when you finish driving. This is the result. A concrete desert. This space would be extremely hot as there are no opportunities for shade, the concrete would be absorbing all that heat during the day, and if you went out there at night you can be guaranteed that it would still be hot, as the heat will not be able to fully escape in the night hours before the next day of relentless sunlight.
I want this image to be seen to be a visual for people to realise the extent to which we are blinded by cars, and just how far much we put everything else second. Say you had a house and you had a front garden just big enough for a car port but you could put anything you wanted on it in terms of landscaping or a paved drive way. What would come first, the paved space for your car, or a beautifully landscaped outdoor area?
That leads to my next image: Housing Design In Perth
In Perth house and land packages come at a premium, and you pay a starting price of $200,000 which means you are paying $40,000 for a carport!! Parking space and road space is taken for granted these days as necessary. But this is relatively new. Perth has the highest new house size in the world, over 200sq metres. which means 40sq metres is taken up for your car alone!! That is a huge waste of space when populations are increasing rapidly and we are running out of space. 40sq metres is as big much of the world populations dwelling size, and here in Perth we use that for our cars!
It has become so blinding that our road designs have taken a toll. See in the next image.
Mandurah, Western Australia: Car Orientated Street Design
This is the ridiculousness of planning these days! If you lived in house A and you had a friend in house B the only way you could go and visit them would be to follow the yellow line.
This design is 100% designed for cars. What happens when you are elderly and cant drive anymore. It would be ridiculous to call a taxi for this small of a distance, but it would also be ridiculous for an elderly person to be expected to walk all this way. What are we to do?
I don't drive a car, because of many many reasons, and some of those reasons are the ones that don't directly affect me, such as how other people plan the world around me assuming that I am going to drive a car.
My choice isn't an easy one and I do need to get lifts from my parents and friends from time to time when it is just easier to drive than walk or try and hop from bus to bus to bus, which could turn a 5 min drive into an hour long public transport adventure.
But I hope that in being one person not following this assumed life necessity, i will be able to convince other people that the car is not the only or best option.
We invented the car to move us faster, but then we changed the roads to make them longer to accommodate the car. We have forgotten what came first to the point where we are now more inefficient than ever. On a blocked up road a bike will be faster than a car, and if we design our roads for walking and cycling they will be shorter and much more efficient again because they will make sense. Like a road between house A and house B because no sane person would design a road to be walked as far as in the picture when you could just put in a lane way that can be walked in 2 mins between the two houses.
What I have suggested is not revolutionary, its actually been done before, I'm only suggesting we go back to what we got right the 1st time.
Next time you get in the car, ask yourself, is it really that far that I NEED a car?? What would you change so that you could do the same journey without a car?
Happy contemplating!
Em
No comments:
Post a Comment