1 January

Modern cars are too well made, and too comfortable. I say this because I think the reason cars are destroying our communities is because they’re not just modes of transport. Cars are the way people never have to leave home, to leave home. In that comfortable shell we venture into social space in the most anti-social ways. I’ve used buses and trains for years, and the experience - the social side of it - is completely different to driving. You have to actually encounter other people, and negotiate and compromise. What cars enable is selfishness. We’re cocooned in our homes and then cocooned in our comfortable cars as we move about society. People might be more inclined to improve social spaces if they actually had to experience them, rather than drive through them in their comfortable cars. People ‘escape to the country’ in their cars, but that just spreads the same disease further.