David Ellis, one of this site’s regular controversialists, has sent me the piece below and the title gives me a fairly valid reason to include a video of a song from Jason Lytle’s album Yours truly the commuter.

It is a very ill wind that blows nobody any good and in that spirit and that spirit alone we should welcome the news that rush hour traffic has decreased by one third since the start of the current economic collapse.  Behind that statistic there is no doubt a great deal of misery concealed in the form of lost jobs, homes, health and happiness. But wouldn’t it be good if an economic recovery was not this time accompanied by not only the return of pre-recession rush hour traffic levels but yet another huge increase in them? 

Of course, I have my doubts that the economic system as currently constituted can recover at all, the structural deformities have quite probably become fatally disabling, but whatever the prospect let us eschew the unquestioning faith in the superiority and desirability of the motor vehicle especially in its role as a tool for commuting that currently grips us so chokingly tightly.  Naturally, public transport couldn’t possibly develop the capacity to get everybody to work therefore it will be necessary to make ordinary commuting a thing of the past.  We must, in future, live where we work and our children must go to school where we live. 

The environmental benefits are obvious but economically society can no longer afford to divert huge amounts of its surplus product into horribly expensive bits of tin, billions of gallons of oil, petrol and diesel and miles and miles and acres and acres of tar macadam.  One reason for Britain’s relative decline is that even the lowest paid worker requires a prohibitively expensive motor car to get him or her to work in even the lowliest paid occupations.  It is cheaper to manufacture basic items in far off places and then ship them halfway across the world than it is to make them here. 

Now that Britain’s last remaining industry, global usury, is no longer with us it is hard to see how we can earn an honest crust at all unless the car is put in its place.  Given that manufacturing is so heavily automated nowadays even a large scale reintroduction of it in humanely designed, small scale, local units, would not bring full employment under current conditions. It would be vitally important to reduce the working week dramatically.  This would have the further added bonus of bringing sexual equality to the workplace and in to the home.  With only one parent at work at any one time, perhaps we would experience the restoration of the principle of proper parental care for our children to include exercise, fresh food and home cooking.  Schools and hospitals would see parents and the relatives of the sick with a bit more time on their hands and anxious to help out bringing a new democracy and spirit to both these bureaucratised institutions. 

The surplus that is currently squandered on flash, filthy, boring, expensive cars would be better spent on improving the quality of everybody’s lives in more fundamental and meaningful ways.  The car has been the biggest dead end in history and has generalised pollution into a joined-up global phenomenon where once it was a local irritation.  Developed to undermine the economic importance of the worker in industry, especially railway workers, it has distorted our communities and our lives and induced a form of social psychopathy which manifests itself sometimes as and uncontrollable rage,sometimes as drunk or careless driving but everywhere and at all times as a barely concealed desire to hurt others.  The road is a regime of naked violence, of dog eat dog, of kill or be killed, of survival of the fittest where communication takes place at the level of the insect.  But this does not mean that the motor vehicle cannot continue to be used for recreation, delivery and other conveniences.  It is only commuting that needs to end.

It would be better to organise this consciously than to allow it to happen as it is now through economic misery leaving only the wealthy bagging the last of the precious petrol for their own private use.

Share the work, share the wealth, ditch the car