The Lure of the Automobile Based on Ecology, Freedom and Automobility by Justin GoodNo social movement or cause in the United States can achieve popular support if it does not offer a compelling, convincing view of freedom that speaks to the hearts of individuals as citizens, as human beings, and as organisms inhabiting ecosystems. Given the profound impact of automobiles on our ecological situation, experience of freedom of automobility should be at the center of public debate on the true meaning of freedom. – J. Good Making the Case for Sustainable TransportationWhat would that debate look like? What are the countervailing intuitions and beliefs about freedom that clash in the interpretation of automobility? What measures of freedom does the experience of automobility illustrate? How does ecology undercut the viability of those measures? How might we understand freedom in light of ecology? – J. Good Debating AutomobilityIf like me, you’ve lived in an environment where you need an automobile to get around efficiently, then you’ve undoubtedly felt a genuine sense of freedom attendant upon operating and owning an automobile. – J. Good The Desire for AutomobilityThe experience of driving is an experience of liberation most obviously because of the connection between being free and being mobile and self-directed. These connections are rooted deeply in our biology and our concept of freedom as autonomy, or self-rule. – J. Good Mobility as Freedom Myth and RealityAt the most primal level, automobility answers to the same biological impulse that drives a crawling infant across the floor. Any technology which satisfies a biologically-predisposed interest of ours is going to be felt as liberating. The interest is related to the kinetic pleasure we feel in speeding down the highway, and the feeling of power and control that operating a car can give. More importantly, the mobility which cars enhance illustrates our concept of freedom as autonomy due to the ways in which cars give us new choices and options for movement. – J. Good Mobility as Freedom Myth and RealityAccording to one energy equivalence analysis, when speeding down the highway, a one hundred horsepower car does the work of two thousand people. – J. Good Automobiles Extends UsLike all technologies, an automobile serves to extend and enhance some basic human capacity. If clothing extends our skin, while radio extends the voice, an automobile extends the whole body: wheels extend feet in motion, and the internal combustion engine, like your furnace at home, extends the stomach by enhancing the process whereby we as human beings gather energy necessary for movement from the sun (from burning petroleum rather than eating vegetable or animal protein). – J. Good Automobiles Extend the BodyPrestige? Sense of Invulnerability? Power? In What Other Ways Does the Automobile Extends Us?There are undeniable limits to how technology can make us freer, despite what we are invited to fantasize about technology in our high-tech economy. In spite of our confidence in technology to empower us, we know that new technologies can often alter us, both mentally and socially, in ways that are as unpredictable as they are unconscious. From an ecological perspective, there is nothing mysterious about this, since technological innovations upset ratios and have a holistic effects on relations. As a consequence of the manifold readjustments that elements of the system make to reestablish equilibrium, the technological innovation can end up subverting freedom by subverting the ends that the innovation was intended to serve. – J. Good The Limitations of TechnologyAutomobiles were originally intended as horseless carriages, and from that perspective, they served as simply a faster way from point a to point b, and this is the basic idea behind automobility as a complement to autonomy. But the advent of the automobile has altered not simply the time it takes to get to point b, but where point a and point b are in the first place, our reasons for going there, what we see along the way and, ultimately, the structure of the society within which a and b become destinations. – J. Good The Subversive Effects of AutomobilityBecause all technologies are extensions of the human body and mind, such forms serve to give us a degree of control over our condition only by altering our nature in the process. Focusing on the car as an extension of the human body, one is led to think about the ways that your extended ‘body’ is now implicated in a larger system over which you have no control, and whose interests you are now beholden to. – J. Good The Automobile Extends Us by Altering UsThe very flexibility that automobility makes possible can thus be seen as a constraint on one’s movement. For example, sociologist John Urry argues that automobility forces us to live in ‘spatially-stretched and time-compressed ways.’ Temporally, the very flexibility in scheduling that automobility with its 24 hour availability makes possible can easily necessitate that one make oneself more available, compelling one to expect, and be expected, to travel more often and more quickly. – J. Good Automobility Alters Space and TimeFrom the perspective of town and urban planning, automobility is an economic system with its own internal ‘interests’ in perpetuating and enhancing its functionality. The architect and city planner Peter Calthorpe, for example, talks about conflicts in the kinds of landscapes that cars and pedestrians ‘want.’ The car wants lots of pavement and the low-density development that preserves plenty of space for more and more asphalt. The car also wants to travel more; between 1969 and 1990 the national population grew by 21 percent while the total vehicle miles traveled in cars increased 82 percent… Pedestrians want close destinations: shops, schools, services, or recreation. They need direct links to these destinations free of cul-de-sacs, parking lots, or massive intersections. They want safe, interesting, and comfortable streets to walk on and human scale in the buildings which line it. – J. Good Automobiles Have Different Needs from UsIn China, the competition between the needs of cars and of human beings is more basic and more urgent than either the aesthetics or civic life of our neighborhoods. As the new century begins, the competition between cars and crops for land is intensifying. The