The Coming ‘Post-Car Era’

It’s not just the government that’s banning cars – or making it hard to own a car. Private developers are working toward the same thing  – styled the “attrition of the automobile” in urban planning circles.

One of these developers – Culdesac – is erecting a specifically car-attrited stack-a-prole apartment complex in Tempe, AZ. There are no parking spaces or even places nearby to park a car. The whole point of the operation – in the words of Culdesac’s visionaries – is to build “housing” for the “post-car era.”

Which would be fine if it were a natural evolution. Some people either don’t like or don’t feel the need for cars – or for the personal space/independent ownership a single family home provides – and like the idea of being able to walk or bicycle to and fro.

Such people choose to live in cities – and apartments.

Fine.

What’s not fine is forcing people who don’t want to live in cities – or stack-a-prole apartment complexes – into the “post-car era.” Which is what this is all about.

Culdesac isn’t banning cars, per se.

It hasn’t got the power to do that – or to force anyone to move into one of its 636 stack-a-prole apartments in Tempe. But it is anticipating an artificially created demand for such stack-a-prole housing, as more and more people are forced into cities and stack-a-prole “housing” by government-corporate policies designed to make owning a car (as well as a single family home) onerous – and driving one unpleasant.

Italicized to emphasize that it is intentional. Government/corporate elites (it amounts to the same thing) dislike the autonomy that is a function of personal mobility.

This isn’t an interpretation; it’s a fact. The War on Cars – which is really a War on Personal Mobility – has been under way for at least 50 years now.

The first salvos were fired in the form of exhaust emissions standards, which had the sheen of legitimacy and reasonableness because at that time (the 1960s) the air in some areas was smoggy and motor vehicle exhaust emissions were contributing to it. But that problem was solved 30 years ago – in the 1990s – which left a need for new ammunition to use against the car and the people driving it.

“Fuel economy” was loaded into the breech – justified on the basis of supposedly imminent fuel scarcity and thus a need to “conserve” the dwindling supply. But this wasn’t even a problem – ever. The “scarcity” bogey was never real; it was the result of political machinations by OPEC – the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries – which turned off the spigot to punish Uncle for his policies in the Middle East.

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