The ethos of our car culture has always centered around that most American of obsessions; freedom For a long time, I thought car = freedom, even when my own eyes were telling me the exact opposite.
Think greasier 1950s teenager with the wind in his hair (and it’s always him) on a once-in-a-lifetime road trip, or parked in Lover’s Lane reminiscing with his best girl. But friends, I’m about to blow your mind: the car has made us less free, including men, but especially women, minorities, and the disabled.
I want to take you back to the 1920s, when mass adoption of the automobile was beginning to pick up. More cars on the road started to match more and more police. Even today, most police interactions most people will experience involve some form of traffic stop. The rise of the car may be directly related to the rise of the police state in general and the curtailment of our freedoms, as Sarah Seo argues in her book Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom. As public roads became the playground of more powerful and dangerous vehicles, America needed more laws and more police to handle these new motorists. Even being out of a car on the road became a crime as car ownership exploded. The term Jay-Walking was coined to describe humans just trying to navigate busy roads.
But even culturally, the car only always meant freedom for men. For young women, their place was perpetually in the driver’s seat. Young men were always assumed to be the drivers and this meant that these boys had complete control over interactions with the opposite gender. From staying out of curfew to ‘parking’ for dates and assault to full-on sexual assault, the car was a dangerous place for a young woman to be and could make the community question her ” goodness”.
For married women, the car was always just a tool to fit in more tasks, especially as families began to move en masse to the suburbs. A car was needed for shopping, picking up the kids from school, going to the dry cleaners, etc. It was such a tedious tool that Betty Friedan, the groundbreaking feminist and author of the book feminine mystic, he sent his children to school in a taxi in order to find more time to work.
And while owning a car could mean freedom for a black person to find a job or more equitable housing, the car also became the focus of intense police interactions with black people, a situation that continues to this day with tragic consequences.
Today we are all in the driver’s seat, because we have built our culture and communities around the car. There is no freedom in not having a car if you want to participate in any aspect of public life in many communities. Public transportation has degraded in American cities and suburbs to almost nonexistent in some places, stifling options for the elderly, the disabled, and people too poor to pay all the taxes, fees, parking occasional or speeding offences, payments and insurance required to keep a car on the road.
Here’s another way cars make us less free: Tickets from traffic stops or moving violations can drain a person’s bank account with fines and fees for years. Hi, when I applied for a mortgage seven years ago, the lender submitted a speeding ticket I had received three years earlier. That’s why I got a worse rate on my homeowners insurance, even though I average one speeding ticket maybe every five years or so.
None of these factors are the fault of cars, but rather the toxic culture around cars. I love cars. I really do. It just annoys me that they force me to have one for most everyday functions.
