'We Are The Traffic'Inertia, Resistance and Potential for Change in an Auto-Hegemony

'We Are The Traffic'Inertia, Resistance and Potential for Change in an Auto-Hegemony

1) Introduction
The Twentieth century has been the century of the car. Throughout the Western world, cars have come to dominate the minds of transport planners, been the subject of immense levels of state subsidy and developed into an 'essential' consumer item among the comparatively wealthy. Indeed the privately owned car has developed into a symbol of national industrial pride and individual affluence, synonymous with personalised freedom and status. As cars have become the dominant factor in the transport systems of industrial nations, they are have also increasingly been the focus of attention in relation to environmental concerns.
Throughout their history, cars have been the subject of efforts to control or diminish their 'negative' aspects, particularly in terms of public safety. In recent times, the continual growth of increasing car-domination as a dynamic, has itself become a subject of criticism as environmentalists and other interested groups have pointed to the 'folly' of continuing a pattern of development which both assumes, and provides for ever increasing car-use. Every attempt to control the 'negative' aspects of cars, (whether successful or not) have taken place during this continuing upward trend, and all overt efforts to question the logic of continuous car-growth itself have so-far failed to curtail it. Indeed, as corporations and governments pay ever more lip-service to the need to limit the car, nothing, it appears, seems able to stop its continued dominance and proliferation.
This study includes the perhaps novel idea that what might easily be portrayed as 'failures' in attempts to curtail car-growth may actually form part of the same dynamic of continued car-domination. The attempt will be made to illustrate that many of the efforts to restrict cars, and the promotion of transport 'alternatives', 'integration' and/or 'diversity' may conversely help to both legitimise car-use and help promote the cars' positive association with images of individual status and freedom thus continuing this mode of transports' pre-eminent position. Endeavours to provide for increased pedestrianisation, growing cycle-networks and high-technology rail links are subsumed into the dominant dynamic of car growth and the overriding car-first ethos. This is perhaps best illustrated in countries which have put into practice models of ecological modernisation, in which modernised transport systems, while making 'alternatives' more attractive, nevertheless remain merely alternative to the still-dominant car.
It will be argued here, that it is primarily in the social sphere in which long-standing symbolic associations of cars and 'freedom' are, to an extent, being undermined by new, countering images which symbolically connect 'the car' with images of 'destruction' and 'dependance'. Just as 'the car' has been perhaps the symbol of industrialist pride, for many environmental groups it has also become symbolic of short-term capitalistic greed and unbridled ecological destruction. The car's symbolic meaning in political and public realms has become contested, as contradictions concerning conceptions of freedom and dependance which surround it are increasingly revealed.


2) Capitalist Expansion and the Dynamic of Car Expansion

'Those who have taken the pains to search below the surface for the great tendencies of the age, know what a giant industry is struggling into being there. All signs point to the motor vehicle as the necessary sequence of methods of locomotion already established and approved. The growing needs of our civilisation demand it; the public believe in it, and await with lively interest its practical applications to the daily business of the world.' (From issue 1. of 'The Horseless Age', 1895, illustrated in Flink, 1970: 22).
Thus, as the end of the nineteenth century approached a discernibly favourable leaning towards the car could already be felt. The car seemed then (and at least until recently), as representative of a leap into a bright, scientific future in which technological advancements promised a modern, more affluent and more 'free' world. The notion of a world of motorised private traffic seemed also to forge a 'natural' bond with individualised conceptions of 'freedom' in a free-market, liberalised economy. The car could thus come to symbolise techno-scientific advancement , individual autonomy and capitalist industrial expansion, in short; everything that had come to be accepted as 'good' about liberal democracy in North American and European countries (Freund and Martin, 1993: 82), indeed, the degree of motorisation in a country often being taken as the measure of its level of democratisation (ibid).
The century that followed the pointed prediction made in 'The Horseless Age' (above), did indeed witness the emergence of a powerful car industry and a remarkable proliferation of 'horseless carriages' that came to dominate the transport systems and even entire urban landscapes of the 'developed' nations. The development of a major car industry can be seen as a product of an advanced capitalist society, shaped by its imperatives (in the movement of actors and products chasing profit), but it is also more than this, because a mature transport system based on individualised private transport, itself plays a prominent role in the promotion and reproduction of capitalist expansion:
'In general, auto-truck transport systems have provided capitalist enterprises with a new flexibility to reach markets and to de-centralize production......Auto-centered transport has an affinity with global capitalism not only because it is part of its infrastructure, but because it requires resource and energy-intense consumption.' (Freund and Martin, 1993: 172).
Paterson warns us against taking the massive expansion of the car industry for granted (Paterson, 2000: 262) and emphasises the degree to which a successful car industry (along with the related industries involving oil production and processing) has appeared to be a necessary precursor for high levels of economic success and the advancement of the capitalist system itself. Paterson asserts that this is not only due to the inherent flexibility (including acceleration of the movement of goods and people between places) offered by auto-transport (Paterson, 2000: 264, also noted by Freund and Martin,1993: 172) but also because of the symbolic significance of an association between the car and economic development. More generally, Paterson notes cultural assumptions which relate transport growth with the development (thus 'growth') of modern economies by both academics and transport planners (Paterson, 2000: 263). This is not least because a key factor in the economic reorganising of industrial production and the stimulation of the economy was instigated by the car industry itself, in the use of the assembly line, though a process named through its origins in the car industry: 'Fordism' (ibid: 262). This injected new stimuli for cycles of economic growth. 'Fordism ' therefore became central in 'legitimising the car's expansion, enabling the car to become perhaps the symbol of progress for most of the twentieth century' (ibid:262-263).
Paterson also emphasises the extent to which states have actively promoted the expansion of the car industry, indicating four facets of state promotion of the car that began in 1910 and continues to the present (Paterson, 2000: 265-268), these being; 1) road building, 2) the progressive downgrading of public transport, 3) the subsidisation of car-based infrastructure compared with other forms of travel and 4) incidences of collusion between states and the car industry to remove competition (Paterson, 2000: 266). Provision for cars demanded extensive programmes of well surfaced roads and associated infrastructure for parking, refuelling and so on. Much of this infrastructure was primarily or solely designed for cars and built at the either de facto or overt exclusion of other (potential) road users, seen for example in parking lots designed to be physically too small to allow the entrance of buses (ibid), and the eventual spread of motorways 'designed and regulated to be used solely by motorised transport - bicycles and pedestrians (being) explicitly excluded by them' (ibid). As states put greater investments into private-car initiatives, public transport has correspondingly been downgraded and neglected. If railways had been the previously 'dominant' form of travel (at least in terms of long distance, cross-country journeys), Western nations have tended to heavily prioritise road funding over that of rail and other means of public transport (Wolf, 1996: 75-81).
Furthermore, the kind of language surrounding the funding of differing means of transport has been used in such a way as to place the funding of car-related infrastructure in a positive light and that of other kinds in a negative one. Funding of public transport initiatives has continually been referred to in terms of 'subsidy' while that for roads has been talked of within the language of 'investment' thus placing public transport in a relatively precarious position when it comes to justifying the demand for tax-payers money, (more aspects of symbolic differentiation between car-based transport and other kinds is a subject that will be returned to later).
Paterson's fourth facet of state promotion of the car is that regarding incidents of direct collusion between states and car manufacturers and related industries to remove competition (that is; other transport options), such as in the systematic buying-up and dismantling of tram lines by motor-based companies, to reduce competition for cars (see Paterson 2000: 267-268).
In addition, states viewed the car as symbolising unstoppable technological progress to which the only credible response within an environment of inter-state competition was to 'take the lead' rather than be left behind by more progressive seeming countries (Wolfgang Sachs, 'For the Love of the Automobile' cited in ibid: 268), a response which was enhanced by the association of a strong car industry with military prowess (ibid), an alliance, (or at least a perceived alliance) not lost on Adolf Hitler in his instigation of the Autobahn system (which became the model for the UK's motorway network and the U.S.A.'s interstate highway system) (Freund and Martin, 1993: 83) and promotion of the Volkswagen car, in his advancement of automobility as a 'folk right' in Germany (ibid). Cars have since been systematically been promoted across the globe by international political and economic institutions. The World Bank has for instance, consistently supported private sector initiatives which aid the liberalisation of motorised transport (Whitelegg, 1997:51). The car as a primary symbol of liberation, democracy, technical and military expertise has thus received official sanction for strategies for its promotion and proliferation.









3) Vicious Cycles of Car Growth, Congestion and Exclusion: The Contradictions of Freedom and Dependance

Danger and Disenfranchisement -The Non-Motorist as a Victim of the Car
A growing awareness is developing that in the Western nations, transport systems have been developed which are so dominated by cars as to effectively create a kind of positive-feedback mechanism through which a greater physical dependency on cars is created in many people (dependencies of a more social/symbolic variety will be tackled in some depth later) resulting in more people who are able to use cars doing so, which in turn, leads to even greater reliances on cars. As we have already seen, the association of automobility with successful economic development is a notion that has pervaded the minds of transport planners as well as others. It is no surprise then, that urban planning has long been premised on the prioritising of car transport, thus promoting a double-edged trend of both increased motorisation, and increased motor-priority.
The prioritisation of cars over other forms of transport has occurred at an implicit as well as at an overt level, because high levels of motorised traffic can make other methods of travel far less attractive:
'The urban system has moved so far in the direction of satisfying the needs of the person in the car that it acts as an efficient deterrent to those who struggle on as pedestrians or cyclists...these disincentives to walk or cycle create a powerful inducement to own and use a car, thus exacerbating the problem for others and adding to the pressure for yet more car ownership and use' (Whitelegg, 1997: 136).
Pedestrians who have no access to a car often need, for example, to continually cross busy roads to get about in in their everyday lives, a relatively basic manoeuvre that nevertheless becomes very stressful and dangerous in the presence of heavy car use (ibid), something that has become a factor in discussions about 'the school run', in which parents who (in an 'ideal world') say they would like their children to walk or cycle to school (for the health benefits and so on) nevertheless drive them in on the grounds that high levels of car-use make it, conversely, seem too dangerous to not go by car (thereby making the trip even less attractive to those who still travel by other methods). Such problems have been exacerbated by planning policy decisions which have made the prior assumption of widespread public car-use. Urban zoning based on car-access (ibid) and out of town shopping and entertainment centres have become an accepted part of 'normal' living for many, and one which is highly problematic for those without access to a car. Shopping by non-car users, for example, often means either making more trips and carrying less (thereby loosing out on bulk-buying discounts) and crossing dangerous roads in the process, or visiting the remaining smaller shops (that have survived competition with the supermarkets) that are usually more expensive. Planners have also prioritised the time savings of motorists, thus causing negative impacts on the time-budget of non-motorists (ibid).
Certain groups of people crop up continually as those who are non-motorists. A study of travel decisions by Dix, Carpenter, Clarke, Pollard and Spencer (1986) for instance, found that one of the main groups of people unable to use a car for travel to work were working wives in one-car-families (ibid: 61), many of whom worked part-time and so were unable to organise lifts in cars due to the impossibility of co-ordinating their working times with other household members or friends (ibid). This provides, of course, one explanation for the growth of two (or more) car families, and again suggests a correlation between cars and perceptions of freedom. Indeed, in the latter case, the provision of a car for a working wife can be seen as nothing short of emancipatory, and thus indicative of the progress of a modern liberal democracy.
Many of the groups who are disadvantaged (in the sense that they have little or no access to a car whilst confronted with an infrastructure that has prioritised cars) are very likely to be members of of groups who are disadvantaged in other ways as well. People without regular access to a car disproportionately include those in low-paid jobs, the unemployed, women, children and non-whites (supporting the view that car-use is, even within developed countries, a relatively elite activity).
Such people, being most reliant on public transport, are also likely to suffer most from fare rises (whitelegg, 1997: 137). As Whitelegg (ibid) states, 'a public transport system which is efficient and attractive may as well not exist if the sectors of the population who are most reliant on it cannot afford to use it'. High prices mean, for example, that train travel, like travel by car, has arguably become an elite activity in the UK, with poorer groups left to travel on less attractive bus services, or perhaps not travel for long distances at all. Recent protestations by motorists lobby groups that fuel prises have become 'too high' have nevertheless faced a situation in which 'real term' costs of private car travel in Britain have remained basically stable in the last fifteen years, whereas ticket prices for buses and trains have increased by 30% in the same period (Chris Hewett, The Guardian, 'Drivers must Pay', 14/09/2000); 'Fuel tax and the worldwide increase in oil price are merely giving motorists and hauliers a flavour of what bus and train users have put up with for years' (ibid).
Disadvantaged groups are also far more likely to be victims of traffic-induced physical injury or death. Research suggests that 'foreigners', for example, are more likely to be killed on the roads than 'natives' (Whitelegg, 1997: 142-143). Similarly, killing by motorised traffic is the single most common cause of death amongst school-age children (ibid), and those from the lowest social class (in statistics compiled from England and Wales using five gradings of social class) are more than seven times as likely to die in this way than those from the highest (ibid).
It is highly likely that parents remove children from very risky environments resulting in busy roads (and even nationally compiled traffic statistics) having lower mortality rates than would be the case if they were used more by children and other 'vulnerable' groups (ibid). Indeed in the UK it is often boasted that we have 'the safest roads in Europe', but this claim is based partly on the lack of non-motorists on the streets. In terms of the deaths of children walking and cycling, we are actually in second place in the 'most dangerous roads in Europe' stakes (Wolf, 1996: 202-203). In spite of the blatantly inequitable effects of car-priority transport mentioned above, discourses of 'road safety' justify the provision of yet further resources for motoring:
'Most effort and expenditure goes into activities to protect the occupants of vehicles (who are largely protected already by mass and metal).... A child has no vote and a poor child has very little choice about daily activity patterns, types of journey and opportunities that can be exploited. This child will spend a lot of time on the street and the street is a very dangerous place.' (Whitelegg, 1997: 143).
The more that the double-edged trend of increased motorisation with the prioritisation of motorised traffic by planners and policy makers has continued, the more that those disenfranchised by the car-dominated society will want (if and when they can afford to), to leave this disadvantaged group and join the motorists, thus exacerbating the problems subjected to remaining non-motorists and the environment. Together, the trends discussed above, combined with a continuing political and economic will which favours a powerful car/oil industry and mass transit by individualised motorists (as 'rational', independent , economic actors) makes the continuation of car-domination in the infrastructures of the wealthier nations look like an unstoppable force.






Dependancy, Myths of Mobility and Poor-Health - The Motorist as a victim of the car.
As we have seen, non-motorists living in a society whose transport system is dominated by, and gives priority to cars, suffer the brunt of the unequal distribution of many of its negative impacts. One might be forgiven for thinking then, (putting environmental arguments to one side), that the most equitable answer is to try to make everyone into motorists. However, many theorists have pointed to the extent to which motorists themselves are also the 'victims' of car-dominated transport systems. Far from being 'free', painted in such a light, motorists may be increasingly being seen as being trapped into a world of auto-dependency which ultimately, does not meet their best interests. To start with, the ability 'to choose' to either be disenfranchised by the infrastructure around you or not can be seen as no choice at all. But at least, it could be said, such a person has been granted the economic power to be able to make that choice. Nevertheless, there are ways in which motorists are, in a sense, 'victims' of their own preferred mode of travel.

Health
Air pollution is not something easily contained by physical boundaries. Clearly, good arguments can be made for the likelihood of air pollution being suffered more greatly by poorer people in, lets say, traffic-congested city centres, than by those who can afford to live in leafy suburbs. Nevertheless, an infrastructure which facilitates significant pollution of the air ultimately (and to a greater or lesser extent) pollutes it for everyone. Indeed, some studies have suggested that car-born pollutants are less inequitable than might previously have been thought, due to pollution levels inside a car being found to be much greater than that immediately outside (The Times, 24/11/1997 cited in Baird, 1998: 118).
An important area in which cars are implicated in the health of their occupants, is that concerned with the relationship between health and levels of daily activity. The routine use of the car for all kinds of journeys, including trips of a few miles or less (and thus easily achievable for most people on a bike or on foot) is implicated in the remarkably sedentary lifestyles of modern Westerners. Sedentary lifestyles are thought likely to reduce life-length and exacerbate the chances of becoming seriously ill with heart and respiratory diseases (John Roberts, 'Trip Degeneration' in Whitelegg, 1992: 156). While many people think they are too busy to fit an exercise routine into their lives, to use a more 'active' form of travel for shorter trips may take up no more time than the driving alternative (as we shall see again later):
'Walking and cycling are the most appropriate (forms of exercise) from the point of view of their wide scope for take-up across all sections of the population, and for their ability to be maintained throughout life as they can be more readily tied in to the daily routine of travel to school, to work and so on' (John Roberts, 'Trip Degeneration' in Whitelegg, 1992: 156).
Motoring, especially driving in congested traffic, is also increasingly being linked with unhealthy levels of driver-stress, which, as Roberts points out, many motorists react to in a somewhat contradictory way: 'Some deal with this by driving to the health centre for a half hour stint on an exercise bike!' (John Roberts, ibid: 157). By leading sedentary lives which are then 'fixed' by arranging extra time to be fitted in at the gym, such arrangements seem more likely to scrapped when resources of time and/or money are scarce, thus forcing car-travellers back into an unhealthy lifestyle. The idea (probably widely held by non-cyclists) that cycling on the roads is prohibitively dangerous is dismissed by research which shows that the health-benefits of regular cycling more than off-set any increased danger of suffering an accident (Krag, 1989 cited in ibid). In similar vein, the British Medical Association has taken a stance against making the wearing of helmets compulsory for cyclists on the grounds that the overall health benefits are greater if more people cycle than if some are put off cycling by having to buy expensive head-wear (bid).
Of course, it seems likely that the more sedentary peoples lifestyles become, the more unlikely they may be to give up the relative cosyness of their car in favour of some mode of travel which may be in their own, longer-term, health interest. Thus more reliance on the car may lead to greater loss of health resulting conversely, in yet greater use of the car, a cycle which seems likely to be reproduced in the future by the dominance (and routine acceptance) of car travel in children's lives.




Myths of Auto-Mobility
The health problems associated with car-use touched upon above become particularly pertinent when it is considered that a considerable number of car journeys are short trips which could easily be accomplished by moderately healthy people on foot or bicycle. Government statistics (DETR, 1998: 29) point to some three quarters of all journeys being less than five miles and one in four car trips being under two miles. Such a multitude of short trips by car, apart from environmental implications, are also contradictory on the grounds that they aid the tendency towards sedentary lifestyles (and resultant consequential health-threats) and because many motorists believe that such journeys are achieved more quickly by car. But this may be seen as but one of the myths of automobility. Wolf (1996) talks, for example, of 'The Speed myth':
'The speed myth is part of car travel. The great majority of car drivers firmly believe that the car is the fastest way of getting anywhere. The car manufacturers promote this belief by making their cars faster and more powerful every year' (Wolf, 1996: 178).
In real-life travel experiences, the power output or top-speeds that a car is capable of make very little difference to journey times (ibid). The speed myth is also perpetuated by the practice (of both the public and motoring organisations) of calculating journey times purely in terms of place A to place B travel. Wolf draws attention to the fact that time spent on routine car maintenance (including refuelling, washing, lubrication and so on), normally omitted from car travel-times, could add a minimum of some 50 hours a year (ibid: 183). Similarly, the sheer expense of buying and up-keeping a car is such that when speed is calculated in terms of kilometres per hour of lifetime, and this is factored into average speeds of car journeys;.....
'The result is quite amazing: the real average speed achieved by the car society, around 20 km/h, is comparable to that achieved by a very fit cyclist (where the average speed of the cyclist is estimated in the same manner)' (Wolf, 1996: 187).
'A to B' travel times are often quicker by bicycle than car in urban trips of a few miles. Official average speed statistics normally fail to include time spent stopping and starting in traffic jams (ibid: 180-181) let alone time spent by motorists looking for cars in car-parks, strapping themselves in and so on. The tendency to 'up' car journey times can be seen as a kind of countering 'flip-side' to the tendency to completely overlook the often very significant levels non-motorised traffic, not least in the common assumption that the word 'traffic' itself refers only to vehicles with engines, something that shall be dealt with in more depth later.


Car-Dependency
The contradictory belief that the motorist is leading as 'free' as a life as s/he can, while maintaining a lifestyle which helps promote (their own) poor health, and which may not actually facilitate travel any better, also occurs within a situation in which the motorist is, in a sense, often 'trapped' into a car-dependant lifestyle. The freedoms of a motorist to choose other modes of travel, where more appropriate have often been cut off by their own 'choice' to own a car.So much of the expenditure of owning and running a car is tied up in its initial purchase and annual payments of insurance ad so on that much of any one journey has already been paid for before it starts. In this light, an extra say, bus journey in which a traveller's share of insurance and maintenance for instance is paid for wholly in one ticket purchase seems an irrational 'extra' burden for a motorist who has spend a fortune on their car already, before a journey even begins. So the 'rational' thing for a motorist to do might seem to be to limit themselves to the car alone and use it for every journey.
Furthermore, people who have been brought up being used to travel mainly by car are likely to have chosen where to live and work based on accessibility by car, rather than by any other means. This is particularly apposite in the case of newly 'rural' commuters, who, 'in choosing to move out.....have chosen to have no choice' (Adams, 1996: 223).
Similarly, the supposed freedom involved in the cars rapid A to B movement (see myths of auto-mobility above) is further diminished by any such advantaged being offset by the consequential increases in journey distances. The amount of time spent by Britons travelling each day has actually hardly changed since 1950 (ibid: 225).
Overall, motorists can still be said to occupy a relatively elite position, but the reality of mass motoring and the burdens it brings, along with an increasing awareness of 'down-sides' that motoring bears upon those whose travelling methods are car-orientated, casts doubt onto many of previously held assumptions surrounding the car and freedom.


4) Car Culture and Symbols of Freedom
The idea (or even 'ideal') of individual car ownership is so ingrained in the notions of both the public and industrial realms as to make the car a relevant topic in terms of 'ideology'. Freund and Martin (1993) claim that the routine acceptance of motor domination in the daily lives and thoughts of modern Americans and Europeans is indicative of the existence of an 'Auto-Hegemony' (Freund and Martin, 1993: 61-126). We arguably live in a car culture in which not only travel by car is naturalised, but in which the car has a symbolic significance which makes our (cultural and individual) attachment to it extraordinarily strong, and any attempts to diminish its widespread use seem 'unrealistic', if not perverse.
As suggested earlier, children (for example)- past and present, are/have been brought up with a 'normalised' sense of car travel being at the centre of their lives to the extent that this is not particularly thought about, but is rather experienced as a taken for granted 'fact-of-life':
'Ideologies....come to be taken for granted when they are embodied in various material and cultural forms. For instance, rush hour radio traffic reports reaffirm the centrality of the auto and its "natural" place in our daily lives as the predominant -even the only reasonable- means of mobility' (Freund and Martin, 1993: 81).
Similarly, many maps ('road maps') assume that the viewer will be a motorist and emphasise roads to way beyond scale-widths, while railway lines (let alone numbered bus-routes) may be almost invisible if they are shown at all. This and similar assumptions can become self-fulfilling prophecies in that they facilitate motoring over other travel modes. The assumption that everyone is a motorist has also been taken up (whether implicitly or explicitly) by overt pro-motoring campaigns such as 'The People's Fuel Lobby' (www.peoples-fuel-lobby.co.uk) which makes the words 'person' and 'motorist' effectively equal and interchangeable, thus if you are a 'person' in this society, then you must surely be a 'motorist'?
Bendixson states that 'cars are a marvellous way of getting about, providing that you have one and the rest of the world does not' (Bendixson, 1976: 214). The situation becomes problematic however, when we try to equate individual freedoms while living collectively (Freund and Martin, 1993: 88-89). But the cultural forces which maintain a significant symbolic relationship between 'The Car' and personal freedom are powerful. Cars have been identified as being especially significant in symbolising freedom, and especially that specie of freedom equated with 'Individuality'. They are seen as important tools in displays of status and self-representation (ibid: 86), with perhaps something of a particular symbolic leaning towards representations of masculine power and sexual potency (ibid: 87).
Freund and Martin suggest that the equation of (auto)mobility and freedom has extended, with the maturity of motorway/freeway/autobahn systems with their high-set speed limits, to the equation of speed, - 'the premier cultural icon of modern societies' with 'manliness, progress and dynamism' (ibid: 89).
The gaining of a driving licence is arguably modern societies' equivalent of a 'rite of passage' in which becoming an adult is, for many people (and especially males), exemplified by learning to drive, passing a driving test and gaining a licence to drive under one's own authority, alone. In this way the car stands for both relinquishing parental authority and rebellion against 'authority' in general (ibid: 93). Thus displays of car-control become displays of self-authority, autonomy and freedom in which 'the person's power is amplified by a light touch on the gas pedal' (ibid: 91).
The cultural values associated with the car do not occur in a vacuum but are promoted and (re)affirmed by car advertising, an ally and sub-section of the car industry itself. Car companies invest huge sums on advertising. In a study made in 1996, it was estimated that the average UK television viewer saw more that seven hundred car commercials that year, advertising thirty six different car models (Dwek, 1996. 'Are Car Advertisers Wasting Money?', Campaign, 10 May cited in O'Sullivan, 1998: 288). Though the power of advertising may well be significantly strong, in a sense car adverts can be understood as propping up the social understandings and meanings which the car already possesses, as a cultural icon of the age. The (non-advertising specific) media in general routinely refers to 'traditional' images of the car and driving which 'have become part and parcel of the popular culture of modern times' (O' Sullivan, 1998: 288).
More recently, advertising cars has arguably started to become problematic. There is some feeling that car-advertising is undergoing something of a minor crisis as adverts themselves become 'stale', as they rely on the same tired old messages of status, sex and safety (Baird, 1998: 148). This has resulted in some innovations such as adverts which depict the experience of sitting in a traffic jam, in an air-conditioned 'home-from-home', as being one of serenity and relaxation (ibid: 154). The difficulties involved in promoting cars today may, however, be more deep seated. Sachs argues that:
'The (car-related) dreams are ageing in our day: boredom with motorisation is widespread....Today it is the personal computer, more than the internal combustion engine, that causes excitement' (Sachs, 1992: 8).
It seems that it is not only 'boredom' with the car that has seen the demise of the hay-day of brash car-advertising along with any 'golden age' of motoring itself. Car advertisements now seem to feel the need to defend their environmental credentials and social responsibilities (O'Sullivan, 1998: 295-296). It is likely that we are increasingly facing a 'reality crisis' of modern motoring. Old images involving the successful , high-status motorist who commands the empty highways are moderated by the reality of traffic jams, asthma and obesity. The driver in today's advert is more likely to be the 'caring family man or woman' than the 'selfish go-getter' (ibid), such representations of 'the motorist' as (arguably) increasingly demure, less confident, more defensive and caring perhaps reflects the less confident position in which today's motorist finds him or herself in, as the social and environmental realities of car-domination become harder to ignore.



5) Resistance to Car Dominance: Counter-Symbols of Destruction and Dependance

The Threats of Car-Dominance and their Subsumsion into the Car- Dominant Dynamic

The history of resistance to cars can be seen to a great extent, as a history of a growing car-dominance in which criticisms of motoring have failed to halt the car-dominant dynamic, and may have even supported its authority. Since cars first began to appear on public roads, and a car had to be preceded by a walker carrying a red flag to warn of the oncoming danger (McShane, 1994: 94), there have been restraints to counter cars' perceived negative effects. However, many such restraints have, with the passage of time, been repealed, and those which have remained have arguably helped to legitimate the progression and maintenance of a car-dominant society.
Much of the concern surrounding car-use has revolved around the danger imposed on the public, in which public 'danger' has been successfully remoulded by discourses of road 'safety' (John Roberts, 'Trip Degeneration' in Whitelegg, 1997: 136). The accentuation of 'safety' as opposed to 'danger' is highlighted in the routine use of the word 'accident' in reference to road crashes, a word which tends to promote the idea that the occurrence of such events are unlikely, and unpreventable, in spite of the vast majority of road deaths being the result of driver negligence ( Department of Transport Road Accident Unit cited in Baird, 1998: 88) . 'Accidents' in other forms of transport commonly seem to receive disproportionate levels of media (and thus public) concern leading to a situation in which a one-off train crash which kills a few people can cause public outrage, whilst similar numbers die quietly and anonymously every day on British roads. Victims of roadkill, however, simply seem to have been the unfortunate casualties of normalised and seemingly 'unpreventable accidents'. The cloaking of the death of Princess Diana for example in stories of conspiracy, assassination and harassment by paparazzi conceal the more 'mundane' truth that she died in an all too typical Twentieth century way - death on the road.
While there have always been attempts to make cars less-dangerous (or 'safer' to use the more conventional term), this has partly resulted in the emergence and strengthening of a powerful road lobby. The road lobby consists of car manufacturers, the oil industry (and its many related industries), road-hauliers, motoring organisations and motorists. Arguably, one major success of the road lobby is the fixing in the general public's mind that 'we are all motorists now' (Plowden, 1973: 372), perhaps to the extent that even non-motorists believe it, and so feel a greater urge (still) to become a motorist like 'everyone else', when possible.
Car-restraining forces however, developed alongside the emerging car-culture. The feeling that 'the power of the motoring organisations was out of all proportion to that of their disorganised victims' (Plowden, 1973: 271) lead, for example, to the development of The Pedestrians Association in Britain in the 1930s (ibid). Early attempts to reduce motor-induced dangers through the likes of speed-limits and drink-driving laws were confronted by indignant accusations from pro-motoring organisations that 'intolerable restrictions' were being burdened onto the motorist (Plowden, 1973: 269) and even compared with Stalinist Russia (ibid). Limits on speed were argued by 'The Motor' magazine as burdening those (elites) who were creating wealth and (then, as now) already paying more than their dues in the form of 'exorbitant taxes', 'creating more offences and more penalties among a class who already paid millions of pounds in excessive taxation' ( ibid: 281).
While such restrictions have been successfully and continually applied, they nevertheless occurred within a background in which car-domaintion proliferated and the favouring of cars in transport systems continued. It was believed in some quarters that the numbers of cars on the road would reach a 'saturation point' (Plowden, 1973: 362) and that remedies to car-induced problems would naturally catch up with the car-owning population (ibid). Such attitudes may have partly bolstered the (now discredited) policies of 'predict and provide' which dominated road building programs in Britain right into the early 1990s (Whitlegg, 1997: 88). So while gains were made, in terms of increasing legal restrictions on motoring, such gains were made in the name of 'road safety' and thus have arguably and conversely, helped legitimate the emergence, proliferation and dominance of an inherently destructive car-first transport system.


Car-Domination as an Environmental Threat
This is not the place for descriptions of the effects of cars on the physical environment, which are detailed greatly elsewhere anyway. What is of important in terms of this study, is the significance of the emergence of the idea that the car represents a threat to the environment (when we talk of 'the environment'' in perhaps, its broadest sense, including the social environment), and the impact of such an idea, and the symbols which surround it, on orientations towards transport and (thus) transport policies.
The era of the car as an unabashed object of desire, in which its proliferation into every corner of society is perceived as wholeheartedly welcome, must surely now be over. The dream of the car as an ultimate symbol of personal (as well as national/political) freedom is increasingly being undermined by the contradictions of such (perceived) freedoms (discussed at length earlier) and their increasing emergence in the public realm. The certainties that the car brought, in its representation as an icon of technological optimism is now shrouded in uncertainty and suspicion.
The knowledge that driving cars short journeys (the most common kind, as we have seen), say, to buy the morning papers, may be (taken together), a major contributor to global climatic change, is potentially a little disturbing to the daily rituals of affluent, Western living. The world might be becoming a little strange, a bit topsy-turvy, as even the most powerful of the pro-oil and pro-motor industry giants seem to feel the need to brandish their 'green' credentials. Ulrich Beck suggested that one major victory that the Green movement can claim, is the universal 'compulsion to perform ecological lip service' (Beck, 1992A: 340), and this universality now extends even to the most archetypal of world polluters.
A case in point is that of the oil giant, B.P. ("British Petroleum"), who have recently rebranded their motto as 'Beyond Petroleum'. Such tokenism predictably makes the company a target for environmentalists. Greenpeace duly responded by pointing out that the company spent more on their logo-rebrand than they are investing into renewable energy sources (Terry Macalister & Elanor Cross in The Guardian, 25/07/2000) while playfully declaring that the company name really stands for 'Burning the Planet' (ibid). While corporate moves such as this may no doubt, have more to with with cynical commercial image-marketing than with any genuine concern, they nevertheless draw attention to the extent to which societal values are changing:
'Underneath all the hype is thought to be an acceptance that the traditional image of the oil company has become a negative one in the hearts and minds of the consumer' (Terry Macalister, The Guardian, 29/07/2000).

While such corporations change image rather more than they change their destructive activities, this is nevertheless an interesting step. B.P. is, so far, the only oil company to acknowledge the likelihood of human-induced climate-change, a fact which may make us question whether this is because such a step, may be, for an oil company, a dangerous one. Once again the contradictory nature of present-day symbols are revealed, as the prime movers of recent historical 'progress' begin to subvert their own previous meanings, and the certainties of yesterday become the uncertainties, and potential threats, of today (see Beck, 1992B).

The More Things Change, the More they Stay the Same?
However, it is also not without significance that another reaction to B.P.'s expensive re-branding was that of the road lobby, said to be 'up in arms, complaining that the cash should have been used for lowering petrol station prices' (Terry Macalister, The Guardian, 29/07/2000). As awareness of the environmental impact of widespread car-use has grown, certain measures have been put into practise under the guise of 'increasing transport choice' or 'reducing car-dependency'. But as such schemes are initiated, cars continue to be used more and more, the car-dominance trend remains resolutely un-bucked.
It could be argued that Britain has started (to some extent), to use other European countries as a template (albeit in a toned-down way) in the instigation of some recent transport projects. A system of cycle routes is being built into a national network (see www.sustrans.org) amid worries that the availability of some optional cycle paths may lead some motorists to feel that cyclists do not belong on the road (which is often the more convenient option for a confident cyclist). Indeed, considering the growth of off-road cycling as a recreational activity (as opposed to a utilitarian one), it seems likely that some of off-road cycle routes may be likely to generate car-traffic as families access sites for leisure-riding (on hired bikes, or with bikes attached to a car). Similarly, 'park and ride' schemes (where motorists park and then take a bus into urban centres), while taking thousands of cars out of cities, probably also promote suburbanisation (and the consequential increases in car-use) through effectively 'advertising' such facilities to suburban populations, and encouraging them to drive to the edge of town (Baird, 1998: 171-172). 'Park and ride' represents an important aspect of the present governments transport policy (DETR. 2000: 57).
'New Labour' came to power, promising an improved transport network, saying that 'present levels of growth in car usage are unsustainable' (DETR. 2000: 59). The government's policies are focused on large scale projects (such as rail-infrastructure investment) and on reducing 'congestion', an orientation which is both bound to please motorists (who wish to fulfil the 'dreams' of free-travel on the open road, as promised in the advertisements), and may be fundamentally flawed in terms of most people's transport needs:
'Big projects and modernisation are all very well, but the vast bulk of journeys are not commuter journeys from city to city, but shorter, more complex, journeys by ordinary people....that is why (community-based charities and environmentalists) favoured investment in bus and cycle lanes, speed reduction, home zones, and safe routes to school .' (Ros Coward, The Guardian, 21/07/2000).
There is a feeling that Labour, ultimately, have given in to the political power of the motoring lobby. In concentrating on freeing-up traffic congestion, and a new commitment to building 'relief roads' (ibid), the message can be taken as one of re-affirmation to motoring freedom. Whatever the intention, after two years in office Labour had already presided over an almost 10% increase in motorised traffic on major roads (David Gow, The Guardian, 6/08/1999).
Perhaps the most damning evidence for the failure of modern transport systems to genuinely tackle car-prioritisation, is found in countries which are often elevated as models of 'ecological modernisation' (see Dryzek, 1997: 137-154). In Munich during the 1980s for example, policies focused on tacking congestion, traffic calming, computerised traffic management, greatly improved provision for cycling and other facilities for 'coherent alternatives to the car' ( Hajer & Kesselring, 1999: 1-23). However, the period continued to see increasing intensity of both localised car-usage and that travelling into, and out of the city. The attractiveness of such policies to the motoring lobby is suggested by the close involvement of the BMW car company in the formation of the strategies (ibid). The company was convinced that cities like Munich were close to their maximum car-traffic capacity, and that going beyond this capacity would not be in a car manufacturers' interest as the (business) costs of mobility might increase, the attractiveness of such cities might diminish in terms of overseas business investment and 'if car traffic is primarily associated with congestion, car traffic might lose its attractiveness as the optimal means of mobility altogether' (ibid). So even a country seen as taking seriously the task of creating an integrated transport system, remains fundamentally car dominated, and even becomes increasingly so.


6) Conclusions
Reclaiming The Streets
As has been suggested earlier, the word 'traffic' in its normalised use, tends to refer only to motorised traffic, and not, for instance, pedestrians or cyclists. It is occasionally pointed out that such groups are also frequently missed out of official statistics. There is evidence to suggest that urban cycling has increased in some cities through the 1980s and 1990s (Wolf, 1996: 163), (probably through its obvious convenience over stationary cars in peak travel periods) and surveys have shown that in Britain, three quarters of trips of less than a mile are made on foot or bicycle (John Roberts, 'Trip Degeneration' in Whitelegg, 1992: 159). Journeys under a mile are conventionally excluded from the National Travel Survey and other data sources used as a basis for policy formation (ibid), thus distorting the official view of travel patterns. The practice of ignoring non-motorised traffic even occurs on colossal scales, as shown in the case of the World Bank's study of transport in China '...for which the final report did not even mention the word "bicycle" despite the fact that there are over 400 million of them in the country' (ibid: 162). In Britain, journeys by foot or bike outnumber those on trains and buses by three to one (ibid: 166). These are the most 'benign' forms of travel and the most ignored.
The battlecry from some organisations of non-motorised groups to 'reclaim the streets' can be though of, in part, as an attempt to counter the organised ignorance of their existence (and importance) by official bodies. It is also partly an attempt to draw attention to the manifest contradictions and irrationalities (detailed in this study) of transport systems bias towards one particular form of elite and destructive mode of travel. Indeed for many at what might be called the 'deeper green' end of environmental political thinking and action, 'the car' may be seen as a kind of anti-icon, an ultimate symbol of capitalistic consumption which links corporate and individualised modes of destruction, the antithesis of previous 'Fordist' constructions of the social meaning of 'the car'.

What Chance Change?

'The Demise of the car', as Nicola Baird has pointed out, '...like reports of Mark Twain's death....has been exaggerated' (Baird, 1998: 226). The social, political and historical forces which (have, and continue to) promote and maintain car-domination in transport systems of developed countries are immensely powerful. The car has stood as a symbol of capitalist growth and success, and this has strengthened its promotion by states, already bolstered by the very real (shorter-term) advantages that mass auto-transportation brings to a capitalist system. In the social realm, cars are associated with images of success, power, wealth, independence, sexual potency and rebellion, in a word, 'freedom'. Furthermore, It has been argued here that accepted 'down-sides' of automobility have resulted in restraints (occurring within the contexts of 'road-safety' and 'technological progress') which in some ways actually legitimate the (mass) use of cars and thus further promote their domination.
However, 'the car' is presently undergoing something of an image crisis. Countering images of destruction to both social and ecological environments increasingly surround mass auto-transportation, and such images are occurring within a relatively new context of 'dependancy' as opposed to 'freedom'. Thus car-use as a taken-for-granted part of everyday life has become deeply problematised, and while the social/political framework which make car-use seem desirable remains, this is now undermined to an extent by these countering images, images which disturb the confident 'dream' of car-travel as an ultimate saviour of individual and national freedoms. There is tremendous inertia behind car-domination in the transportation systems of the wealthy nations, but the previously-held confidence in auto-domination is, perhaps, melting.








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Newspaper Articles
David Gow, 'Prescott in new jam over traffic', The Guardian, 06/08/1999.Chris Hewett, 'Drivers Should Pay', The Guardian, 14/09/2000.Terry Macalister & Eleanor Cross, 'BP rebrands on a global scale', The Guardian, 25/07/2000.Terry Macalister, 'Oil company looks beyond petroleum', The Guardian, 29/07/2000.
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Democracy in the Risk Society?, Learning from the New Politics of Mobility in Munichin, Marten Hajer & Sven Kesselring; http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tps/eprint/envpol99.htm;19/11/00. 1999. (Also in Environmental Politics, no. 3, pp.1-23.)The Guardian Unlimited, http://www.guardian.co.uk; 25/07/2000.The National Cycle Network, http://www.sustrans.org; 22/04/2001.The People's Fuel Lobby, http://www.peoples-fuel-lobby.co.uk; 22/04/2001.