I hate car culture

I have just come back from a trip around the North East of Scotland for work. I drove 483.3 miles over three days. According to the trip computer in the car, my average speed was 33mph.

No wonder I was sick of driving by the time I got back.

Why so slow? Well, there’s being stuck behind slow moving lorries on the A9 up to Inverness. Then there’s the nightmarish roadworks – expect delays until September 2011 – on the M9 around Cumbernauld: it took me an hour and a half to travel 10 miles. This is the main road between Glasgow and the North, and it’s frequently impassable – why do people put up with it?

Worst of all was Friday’s traffic jam in Aberdeen, made worse by the snow – it took three hours to get out of the city.

In Glasgow, my average driving speed is worse. At busy times, it’s less than 10 mph. It goes up if I take the motorway, but then the journey’s longer, and the average seldom gets above 15 mph.

My average cycling speed is 14 mph. I am not particularly fit, and I don’t have a super bike, but cycling to work is substantially faster than driving or taking public transport. In fact, looking at my recent trip up North, it’s beginning to look like a viable option for long distance travel as well. Despite the lack of cycle lanes and the appalling state of Pollokshaws road, I’d still rather cycle than sit in a car travelling at walking speed.

I am not opposed to cars. I own one, and I like it, and I enjoy long drives on open roads, and getting away into the Highlands at weekends. It is also the only reliable way to do a journey like I did last week, where I had to visit a number of places that are not accessible by public transport.

But the fact that our culture embraces private cars as a mass transport option is crazy. The car is the most illogical way of travelling around the city, and commuting by car makes no sense – especially when you factor in the £20 per day that parking in the city can cost.

The official solution is just to build more roads, and the M74 extension is being constructed in Glasgow now, at a cost of untold millions. This will just compound the problem, and make the city less livable. In a few years, the M74 will be just as jammed as all the other roads.

Personally, I think that light rail, and proper cycle and walking routes, are the answer to urban travel, but I don’t make transport policy.

I don’t understand why people sit, like lemmings, in traffic every day of their lives. There are alternatives.

One day, when I was in my early twenties, I took acid and wondered around Table Mountain in Cape Town, feeling at one with nature. At the end of the day, I walked back, and had to cross the M3, the main road between Cape Town and the Southern Suburbs. The road was gridlocked with stressed people travelling back from work. The stark contrast between the tranquility and beauty of the mountain, and all the people trapped in their cars, making pointless journeys, made a deep impression on me: I swore to myself I would never become one of them.

Like cigarettes and fatty foods, car culture is an addiction. We need to break the habit.