Antithesis to the Systemic and Intractible Need for Private Automobiles

So many people openly and freely declare in our time that there exists an imperative toward private automobile ownership, truck transport of goods to diverse locations, and an ever expanding and better built highway system. It would seem at a glance that these are some of the most obvious affectations of a modern advanced civilization. Nowhere does a great accumulation of capital and wealth come to full foment, without a complement of automobile highways. The phenomenon of highway proliferation through incessant extension is easy to explain in the context of applied state craft and broadly effective legislative bodies common in our time.

To observe the phenomenon of highway proliferation, for its means of effect, with full objectivity, is to reveal a deeply imbedded, systematic, highly contagious and socio-cultural suicidal process of material evisceration.

The building of highways is possible through the following channels of human experience: highways are a popularly accepted thematic consequence of modern (not progressive)  civilization, determinedly inescapable and often reluctantly desirable, legislated beyond reach of common opposition through media and industry coordinated publications on their increasing necessity. The process is inter-generational practically assuring popular interpretation through lens of cultural amnesia and the sensations of both sentiment and folklore, the process is contemporaneously an enormous provisioner of career opportunity and target of good labor enduring through socio-cultural mores. These are typically consequential to the nature of inter-generational infrastructure/monumental works (think of the enormity and cohesion of effort required to construct many of the wonders of the world over decades or centuries).

Through cultural amnesia we becomes accustomed to notion that our neighborhoods and cities have always been constructed as so, and that progress consists of producing greater consequences in the form of familiar physical constructions; thereby we experience intensification of our desire to see highway networks expanded and new territory unlocked for our private cars by their reach. The desire may be fleeting as nascent expressions, but is deeply rooted in our image of culture, society and progress. The reality is that in our time many of use do not know what virgin landscapes and their native assortment of plant and animal life would look and feel like in absence of the human touch provided through proliferation of automobile and its infrastructural accoutrements.

The truth is that most of human history has occurred in spaces designed at a scale suitable for little more than access by foot traffic, and that large highway type constructions are a cultural construct invented almost entirely within the past century. The presence of the highway has, only in the last few decades, come to make a noticeable mark on the large majority of nations presently employing its use and almost certainly new developments utilizing major highway construction do so through the means of promisory socio-cultural improvement in the conditions of labor and employment and in the provison of goods, modern services and conveniences.

In the period following implementation, you would likely find a great resentment revolving around particulars of the highway, such as pollution, traffic, noise, unsightliness, "perceived crowding," and inflation of many consumer costs. Price inflation may be hidden at first as wages increase with the coming of highway and automobile related employment, but the contemporary expansion of urban slums, mentioned in previous postings and obvious throughout the developing world, serves to illustrate the disparity of human conditions prevailing upon completion of a modern city system. The physical network of highways and the patterns of land use promoted as part of the industry and political apparatus that often prevails under the same popular politico-cultural conditions are indicative of slowly deteriorating social conditions as one may easily observe ripening in cultures that continue to embrace the automobile and highway in lieu of improvement to the human condition.

I promote elements of human achievement determined through observation to contribute to socio-cultural success and human/environmental betterment. One transportive technology that can hardly be described as significantly or substantially burdening its employer (when removed from the context of automobile traffic conditions) is the human-powered bicycle. Another transportive technology of similarly positive net effects would be the train (though requiring some of the same inter-generational commitment as automobile highway infrastructure to fully-realize its potential).

I've included some photographic illustrations (brought to you by independent unnamed photographers) of the bicycle in its various utility.