Any real American can tell you how we love the freedom we have with a car. Like the apochryphal frog in a slowly warming skillet, we haven’t noticed the freedom we’ve lost with the car. Joe Klein reminds us of what freedom might look like with a proposal that retired seniors might be willing to trade their driving licenses for the freedom to smoke pot.
In reality, the automobile has served as the excuse for the imposition of a police state an American of 1900 would have considered to be literally unimaginable. At various points of the past century it has included Ford’s secret police spying on the home life of his workers, the great panic of the 30s about motels, cars and interstate crime which empowered the FBI to become a black-mailing and all-intrusive secret police, and so to the present day when driving a car places you outside the protections of the Bill of Rights.
What Klein has observed is that, in order to enjoy the freedom of not driving, we need to have some freedom to enjoy.
It’s a tall order for a society that has narrowed freedom to car and gun ownership. With good transit, we could enjoy the freedom of not having to park the car or worry about thieves and vandals. With walkable neighborhoods, pedestrians could enjoy the freedom of strolling and not being accosted by police when they’re doing nothing wrong. Most of us don’t live near good transit, so at the present time we don’t get any freedom from not owning a car.
In fact, even in the past half century, so much freedom has been given up that young people can hardly remember what it might look like. Understandably, they’re somewhat confused, so let me clarify- it doesn’t look like owning a car. We’ve lost a lot more freedom with the car than we ever gained.
To deal with global warming we need to create dense energy-efficient transit oriented development and cut our use of cars sharply. I am more than ready to trade my driver’s license for housing on a transit line and some real freedom. It’s time to start talking about what really makes us free.
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