Car Culture: Toward a Definition

In today's bicycle vernacular, it's fairly common to hear talk of "bike culture" and "car culture," yet these terms are never really defined or explained. In light of this, it seems appropriate to conduct an exploration into what these "cultures" are all about. Since most of the Unofficial Guide's blogs are fundamentally focused on creating a broad and general sense of bike culture, let's start with car culture.

It seems that the underlying principle of automobiles and the car culture they create is that of alienation. The use of an automobile is a multi-layered system of alienation and separation between the driver and the transportation being achieved.

The operator of an automobile is immediately separated from the actual environment through which he or she is traveling – the temperature, the air, wind, precipitation, and even the texture and condition of the road are all external and unperceived by the driver. One may, of course, roll down the window and allow the wind or the sunshine or the rain to enter into the car, but ultimately, the automobile is designed to keep one separated from the environment being travelled through. In fact, cars are designed to create unnatural and false environments: driving through Baker, California in the middle of July and the car's interior is a drafty 68 degrees.

Viewed at a larger scale, the environmental alienation inherent in the automobile leads to an unnatural form of parasitic exploitation. With the car, no longer are human beings required to provide for and nourish themselves, to fuel their own activities and movements. Instead, it has become possible to leach material from the earth, entirely unusable by humans, burn it in a manufactured machine, and catch a cheap ride ourselves. Nowhere in this entire process is the human living within natural laws, but is instead trapped in a system of creating new objects requiring new materials and consuming new fuels. These objects are the things actually working, actually moving, and the human beings are the chiggers riding in the leg hairs of the machine, biting the calves of the earth.

Driving a car, therefore, is a separation from the effort needed to move and travel. Gingerly pressing on a pedal should not in any natural way propel one for miles and miles at inhuman speeds. The ability to do so creates a scenario of false motion. The effort and labor required for movement are cheated.

Driving a car represents an alienation from other travelers. Of course, it is possible to yell pick-up lines or cuss words from a car window, but for the most part, when people are in cars, they are packed away in compact individual units, perhaps glancing at one another when passing, but without the time or the ability to really interact in any meaningful way.

In the end, the use of an automobile is an alienation from what could otherwise be a dynamic and interactive experience of transportation. While in a car, there is no interaction with the environment, there is no interaction with effort or personal and physical movement, and there is no significant interaction between travelers.

Here I should interject that I like a good road-trip as much as anybody else, and while I recognize how nice it is to be able to travel hundreds of miles in a day before sleeping in the backseat of a station wagon, I also think it's good to remain aware of the actual process involved in driving an automobile. There are also real and positive uses for the automobile, such as ambulances, fire trucks, and school buses, but in all of this, the real question is, how regularly do we want to alienate ourselves from our environments and the processes of movement? Even though there may be times when a car is helpful, or even necessary, is this something we want to make a habit of? A daily lifestyle of? What other attitudes or forms of alienation might the automobile create?

Given this basic functioning of the automobile, it becomes apparent how thoroughly the bicycle presents itself as a natural solution and positive alternative to car culture.