CAR ALARM
I'm in love with my car (not)

In reality, I was elated. According to the Automobile Association of America, nearly 30 million people will travel by car over Memorial Day weekend, with almost a quarter million heading for my town, San Diego. Being without my car meant that I would have absolutely no chance of encountering any of them. I wouldn’t have to sit in a single traffic jam, fight for a single parking place, or deal with a single aggressive driver. I couldn’t think of a more blissful way to spend the weekend.

The friendly people at AAA went on to say that the recent spike in gas prices and the overall downturn in the economy were doing nothing to prevent people from taking to the roads over the holiday weekend. Indeed, the projected 30 million Memorial Day drivers represent a two percent increase from last year. More broadly, high prices at the pump aren’t resulting in any overall decrease in the number of cars on the road these days. Americans keep driving, filling up their gas-guzzling SUV’s with abandon, often to the tune of $30-$40 a pop.

None of this should be surprising. Americans love their automobiles. For many people, a car is more than a means of conveyance. Automobile advertising has taught us that cars are expressions of our personalities, symbols of our socio-economic status, marks of our character. What’s more, our cultural mythology—-with antecedents in Manifest Destiny, Route 66, and the family station wagon—-provides for the attitude that driving your car is as American as apple pie, motherhood, and, well, Chevrolet. Americans love their cars because our culture identity provides for few alternatives.

But there are alternatives to driving. None of them are particularly revolutionary, yet we find all kinds of reasons to rationalize these options away. Depending on where you live, public transit can get you almost anywhere you want to go. But at least in San Diego, public transportation has a stigma attached to it: only poor people take the bus. Carpooling is a great strategy for reducing volume on the highways, but what if I need to run a few errands on my way home? Bicycling is a healthy and economic alternative, but I’ll probably get run over on my bike. Besides, chances are I’m too fat and out of shape to pedal to work without having a heart attack (May 18th was Bike to Work Day in San Diego; in a metropolitan area of almost two million people, only a few thousand participated).

These excuses for relying on an automobile have a common thread: freedom of mobility. Our cars give us the ability to come and go on our own schedules without the hassle of relying on bus and train schedules or the whims of our fellow carpoolers. Moreover, cars help us buy into the cultural iconography that links freedom of mobility with fortune; you can’t get many kicks on Route 66 without your trusty auto.

The prevailing attitude is this: a cultural mandate says I belong in my car, I have the economic means to own a car, and I pay taxes to support the infrastructure that cars require, so why shouldn’t I drive? Yet when we get stuck in traffic with 30 million other holiday travelers, this attitude doesn’t shift. No one sitting in traffic thinks, “Hey, maybe there’s a better way.” Rather, the clamor rises for more roads that can handle more cars that ironically lead to even greater congestion. All so we can supposedly keep driving our way to freedom. Thus, it should come as no surprise that high gas prices are doing little to keep America off the roads.

Instead, a paradigmatic shift is required. Certainly, environmentalists and proponents of “smart” urban growth have advocated such a shift for years. But cleaner air and less congested cities have proven to be too small a carrot to dangle in front of our car-crazy society. Technology has helped, allowing us to blur the lines between the “places” of home and work, places that presumably required a car to travel between. Yet a real divorce from a culture dependent on the automobile will occur only when society at large realizes that the iconographic idea of mobility no longer equates to socio-economic freedom, as perhaps it did when Horace Greeley encouraged us all to “go West.”

In the meantime, I’m not going anywhere. And I still hate my car, mostly because other Americans love theirs.