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Car Sick: Solutions for Our Car-addicted Culture
The twenty-first century is gridlocked. Mass motorisation has ruptured community ties, bankrupted a nation of family shops, and bred a nation of obese children and adults. Politicians stumble from one transport crisis to the next. Lynn Sloman proposes a novel way forward-- not through the big-bang civil engineering projects, but by getting people to think about their choices, rather than reaching for their car keys. She shows how de-motorisation in place of traffic, it offers neighbourly streets and vibrant city centres. Copenhagen's decision to create pedestrian streets in the city centre has made it an outdoor theatre, filled with celebration and spectacle even in winter. From small towns like Langenlois in Austria, to the centre of London, de-motorisation is transforming urban surroundings. We do not need to get rid of cars altogether. What we do need is to change the way we think about travel. Car Sick is a passionate, well-argued case for moving away from a car-centred to a people-centred society.
192 pages, Paperback
First published September 15, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 24, 2023
Essentially a very well researched and argued book. It essentially reads as a policy document. Sloman obviously knows her stuff, and paints very vivid pictures of different towns and cityscapes affected, or not, by rampant car usage.
If you’re not that interested in transport/town planning then it might be a bit of a slog, but from a personal point of view it did make me reconsider how, even my fairly limited use of a car, can be substituted for alternatives without the need for grand infrastructure changes. Sloman herself lives in a small village in the welsh countryside and makes do with using a car less than once a week (as part of a car-sharing scheme).
The book doesn’t score higher because, as I touched on, it’s basically just an extended essay - in fact, it’s actually based on research the government commissioned from Lynn about the effects of small-scale interventions on car usage. It can get a bit repetitive, because our car culture is made out to be quite cartoonishly evil and inferior (which I don’t wholly disagree with!). But every chapter basically goes as follows:
What happens if we made more people aware of buses?
More ppl would use buses.
What happens if we build cycle lanes?
More ppl would use cycle lanes.
The details of these questions are more interesting than my crude renderings, and the sum of schemes, many being quite cheap, that can reduce traffic on the road and help us live healthier lifestyles is overwhelming, such that by the end of the book it seems a no brainier that “car bad”.
These case studies are interspersed as well with descriptions of the resulting towns/city centres: idyllic car-free community spaces, where space is prioritised for people, not machines.
It’s depressing that these problems and solutions were identified by Lynn almost 20 years ago, and presented so succinctly, but the government and councils still prioritise spending billions on road-building when they could spend millions on small-scale local interventions.
Tl;dr - car bad
If you’re not that interested in transport/town planning then it might be a bit of a slog, but from a personal point of view it did make me reconsider how, even my fairly limited use of a car, can be substituted for alternatives without the need for grand infrastructure changes. Sloman herself lives in a small village in the welsh countryside and makes do with using a car less than once a week (as part of a car-sharing scheme).
The book doesn’t score higher because, as I touched on, it’s basically just an extended essay - in fact, it’s actually based on research the government commissioned from Lynn about the effects of small-scale interventions on car usage. It can get a bit repetitive, because our car culture is made out to be quite cartoonishly evil and inferior (which I don’t wholly disagree with!). But every chapter basically goes as follows:
What happens if we made more people aware of buses?
More ppl would use buses.
What happens if we build cycle lanes?
More ppl would use cycle lanes.
The details of these questions are more interesting than my crude renderings, and the sum of schemes, many being quite cheap, that can reduce traffic on the road and help us live healthier lifestyles is overwhelming, such that by the end of the book it seems a no brainier that “car bad”.
These case studies are interspersed as well with descriptions of the resulting towns/city centres: idyllic car-free community spaces, where space is prioritised for people, not machines.
It’s depressing that these problems and solutions were identified by Lynn almost 20 years ago, and presented so succinctly, but the government and councils still prioritise spending billions on road-building when they could spend millions on small-scale local interventions.
Tl;dr - car bad
December 23, 2022
A great explanation of all that's wrong with our car dominated way of life.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews