If petrol was free and burning it actually sucked pollutants out of the atmosphere and turned them into fresh air and bunny rabbits I still wouldn't drive a car. Cars isolate you from the rest of the world, they change the way you act and the way you think, and not just when you're in them. Having a car gives you a warped view of where you are in the world, and a warped impression of the people around as you shoot past them too fast to know what they're up to but slowly enough to jump to conclusions. Cars carve up our cities and make them treacherous and unpleasant places to travel through if you don't have a little armour-plated cocoon of your own. Cars are noisy and ugly, all modern cars look exactly the fucking same and boast in their advertising about how buying one affords you the opportunity to express your individuality. And cars kill people. With the possible (but still debatable) exception of an ambulance, a vehicle that has just killed someone was not going anywhere remotely important enough to justify that person's death. Every time you get behind the wheel of a car you create the possibility that somebody might die because of that decision, and not just an abstract little possibility either; you're shifting a ton or so of metal at high speed very very close to squishy and defenceless people. Yeah, it's not a motorist's fault that they need to drive for one reason or another but that doesn't change the fact that cars are inherently evil and we will never be free while they still roam the earth. IMHO
e2a: all that translates to the 'carfree' option in the poll btw.
Someone ought to play devil's advocate and put over a different - if not diametrically opposed - point of view, so here goes.
No means of transport, and very few human innovations of any sort, are without their downsides. The car is no exception to that. Cars are inefficient of space and they're often dangerous, to name but two problems with them. They're a crap way of getting about in built-up areas, basically. Like everything, though, they also have their advantages.
The private car represented, and still does represent, a huge increase in freedom of movement for people who don't live in the major cities. For anyone needing to travel at odd times, with a family or luggage, or tools of a trade, it is unparalleled. It's all very well for some to point out that most people managed without cars until the last century, but that rather ignores two facts. Firstly, rural employment was much greater then (often in low-paid agricultural occupations) and the need to travel for work consequently less, and secondly, people were considerably poorer and had fewer choices in terms of employment, leisure, supplies of food and other necessaries, and so on. The decline of local services and shops is a tragedy, but it's not one wholly of the car's making, and it does need to be balanced against the unquestionable advantage that greater mobility brings.
Cars aren't just a use-value. Very few means of transport are. Car enthusiasts are no different than enthusiasts for cycling, trains, old buses or whatever else. People appreciate the engineering that goes into cars, enjoy learning and exercising the skills needed to handle them well, and they compete in them in the same way as they did when horses were the main means of transport. In fact, the horse a century or two ago forms a rather interesting comparison with the car now in all sorts of ways.
Cars kill people and they cause congestion, but neither problem started with the car, and neither will end with it. London has been notorious for its congested streets since time immemorial, and browsing through Liza Picard's very enjoyable book
Victorian London the other night, I noticed the rather startling figure of 200 people killed in the city in 1868 in road accidents (page 35, if anyone wants to go and check). That's in a much smaller city with a much smaller population than now. Congestion and accidents have both multiplied with the car, certainly, but they aren't unique to it, and despite the fact that the number of vehicles on the road has increased enormously, road deaths now are half what they were in the 1930s. Nor, FWIW, is the way cities have been carved up to accommodate it: tens of thousands of people were displaced in nineteenth-century London to make way for the railway lines. Not that that excuses some of the appalling schemes inflicted on many cities in the last fifty years.
The problem with cars isn't so much with the machines themselves as the assumption that once you've got one, there's no need to use any other means of transport. That is partly cultural, but partly also a product of the fact that, once you've forked out to buy, insure and maintain one, the marginal cost of each journey is pretty low. I'd like to see some means of shifting more of the cost of tax and insurance onto fuel, so as to give a more realistic cost per mile of motoring. That, more than anything else, would shake up the 'car culture,' which I'm certainly not denying is not a good thing.
I live in London, don't need a car, can't justify spending the money on one and don't agree with driving in cities anyway unless it's absolutely necessary, so I don't own one. When I move out of London I might get one, probably something old and quirky, such as a Morris Minor or a hefty old Volvo, which I'll get a certain satisfaction from tinkering with at a weekend and attending the odd classic car show and rally in. And it won't get used much, since walking, cycling and buses are a much better way around cities and I enjoy long train journeys far more than motorway driving, so the price of fuel won't really be much of a factor.
