To Drive or Not to Drive: That Was Never the Question

[Woodmonkey]

To Drive or Not to Drive: That Was Never the Question


Every now and then I meet someone in Manhattan who has never driven a car. Some confess it sheepishly, and some announce it proudly. For some it is just a practical matter of fact, the equivalent of not keeping a horse on West 87th Street or Avenue A. Still, I used to wonder at such people, but more and more I wonder at myself.

I’ve been driving now for some 40 years, right through what will come to be thought of as the heart of the Internal Combustion Era. There is no learnable skill — aside perhaps from reading and writing — that is more a part of me than driving. My senses have completely engulfed the automobile, like the tendrils of a vining plant. Or perhaps it’s the other way around, and the automobile has completely encased my senses.

That first time behind the wheel, probably in 1965, I could feel myself manipulating the machine through an unimaginable series of linkages with a clumsy device called the steering wheel. The car — a Dodge from the late 1950s, without power steering — felt more like a fallout shelter than something mobile. I had very little sense of where it began or ended. I was keenly aware of what it prevented me from seeing. A highway was just a linear succession of blind spots. As for backing up, how could you really trust what the mirrors told you unless you got out and checked? The transmission — manual, of course — was an instrument of betrayal. To drive down the road, those first few times, was to lurch through a series of unrelated states of being.

And now? I understand the richness of the phrase “second nature.” The car’s mirrors are no longer a Cubist experiment in perception. They have joined together in a panoramic view of the past, of where I have just been. I feel the road through the tires’ treads as though they were my fingerprints. When I learned to drive, I was taught to prize continuity above everything: to feel the drift of the car, to understand inertia, to ease into and out of a stop, to emulate the smooth orbital passage of the planet. Speed has turned into an extension of my consciousness.

How “natural” all this is becomes apparent when you realize how few people — still far, far too many but still miraculously few — are killed in accidents every year. If there were not some profound intuitive fit between us and these machines, we would be dying by the millions. Yes, there are too many people who drive while drunk or fall prey to road rage. But for most of us our behavior in cars reveals our innate orderliness, our willingness to get along with one another while still, soundly, keeping a wary eye out for the drivers around us.

Driving is the cultural anomaly of our moment. Someone from the past, I think, would marvel at how much time we spend in cars and how our geographic consciousness is defined by how far we can get in a few hours’ drive and still feel as if we’re close to home. Someone from the future, I’m sure, will marvel at our blindness and at the hole we have driven ourselves into, for we are completely committed to an unsustainable technology.

And it has all come to pass in just a couple of generations. My dad was born in the mid-1920s, just as the automotive moment was becoming inevitable. And now here I am, always wondering how much longer we will be driving, certain that every time I start the engine in my diesel pickup I am firing up a dinosaur technology. You could ask for no clearer sign of the bind we are in than Mitt Romney’s campaign promise to reinvigorate Detroit in an era of $100-a-barrel oil. America is full of people like me, who remember when gas was 21 cents a gallon, which is the price of admission to climate change.

I see that now. But try explaining that to me when I was 13 and learning to drive on the back roads of Iowa.

The Source

[redtanker]

I learned to drive young, 12-13? I had driven go-carts, ATV's and such even before that. I lived in a rural town where the back roads were just off our back yard. I drove my dads truck with him in it several times and I remember him buying me a 200 dollar chevy monza 3 speed, I think it was a 1976? 1977? it was in rough shape, bad paint job torn seats, dented hood. But he said I could drive it on the dirt roads and I did. Drove it for about ayear until it just quick. He told me if I could learn to drive this standard an automatic would come easy and he was right.

I have though about people incities who don't know how to drive and wonder about them. I can not imagine not being able to drive.

I have driven across the US and back many times, driven in several countries, both sides of the road and I think it provides a person such freedom.

I don't know where I would be with out driving.

[Anth]

I took driving lessons nearly 4 years ago, with my first one being on my 17th birthday (legal driving age for cars over here) then stopped well before I was ready for my test. It was partly due to a bad instructor and partly because I realised how little I would use a car.

Instead of driving, I use the propulsion that evolution has given us - legs - and my bike. For longer distances, bus and train. I know that some people will say you can get places quicker, but a lot of the time you can't.

Take my usual trip to university. Set off at around 8:50 - 9am and its mayhem on the roads in town for drivers. You get a dozen yards at the traffic lights then they're back to red. On my bike I can take any number of routes depending on traffic, pedestrians or even the weather (pedestrians + rain = umbrella. Umbrella + cyclist = blind cyclist). I can cross roads to avoid things such as a mega busy roundabout and use cycle and bus lanes where cars can't go. I can cover the 1.5 miles in around 9 minutes now. So what if I get soaked? Last week I did and I managed the distance in 7 minutes because I wanted to stay warm and get to uni quicker to get dry!

As for longer distances, I can use my journeys home as an example. Its roughly 100 miles from Co. Durham in the north east to Huddersfield in West Yorkshire and just a bit outside of my cycling range. Instead of driving I get the train. Given the current petrol prices (over £1/litre and £15-£20 for the 100 miles) I can get a train ticket for a lot less than it would cost to drive it - £10 including my bus fare from Durham station to Peterlee (home). I don't have to watch out for other drivers, I don't need to keep my foot in one place all the way, no police making sure I don't speed. I just sit back, music blasting into my ears and nose in a book letting the train take the strain (to use an old advertising slogan).

I'll probably need to learn to drive in the future, but until then I'm quite happy with what I have.

[Woodmonkey]

You've got alternatives, Anth. They aren't always available, or convenient, over here.

[Old Fart]

I've been a licensed driver for 46 years, I've never lived anywhere there was any sort of reliable "rapid transit", I can't picture being without my "wheels"