Bikes? Bike racing? Italian cars? Images? Music? Sustainable corporate environmental-ism? Ouch, my brain hurts! Just search gtveloce thanks!

Lijit Search

OffLine

For sustainability --> villages not motorways and car parks --> eco-friendly gadgets --> small cars, fast bicycles and a smaller footprint for humanity on this planet...

Monday, July 03, 2006

I do like cars, really I do

I do like cars, really I do. It's just I seem to find more and more to dislike about them as well. Here's a list of goodnesses:
  1. Expanded mobility (fancy way of saying I can go where I want, quicker and further than a push bike and almost irrespective of how fit or well I feel)
  2. Expanded flexibility of scheduling (fancy way to say I can go when I want)
  3. Increased freedom from borrowing, renting or otherwise engaging trucking concerns to shift small to medium loads
  4. I can do all the above for other people, too (great for social networking)
  5. It's fun and somehow empowering pressing on a go pedal and just accelerating.
As I've said before, cars also drag us down into a pit of despair. When there was just one car in the street (back in the 1930s, say) it looked really elitist to actually own one, but gee people wanted to know you and it didn't harm too many people if you drove it around carefully. We were still a community after all and it was safe to cross the road.

Now we have cut down trees and destroyed farmland and communities by paving everywhere, dedicated multistorey carparks to the damned things, built special multi-car houses for 'em alongside or maybe inside our own homes, and become so accustomed to them that it's annoying when we can't take our cars with us everywhere. Sure they are convenient but now everyone wants one and they are so cheap almost all of us has at least one. I have 3.

How much iron have we dug up, how much oil have we burned and how much energy have we wasted in building these personal transport devices and creating the perfect automotive world around them? How do we cost this in land lost to pavement? How do we cost the air and noise pollution? The accident and incident costs? The loss of exercise and consequent health issues? Now multiply that by the rest of the world catching up with the so-called 'first world' rate of car ownership. What happens when most of the 6 billion people on the planet also own a car? Does the planet fall in a heap? Probably.

Still, as I said, they are fun. And if you are going to drive you may as well understand a bit about how cars work. I have written here about handling. And here about Alfa Romeos. Don't blame me, we all bought this one and now we all have to pay!

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Links to this post:

Create a Link

<< Home

blog comments powered by Disqus

-->

These posts represent my opinions only and may have little or no association with the facts as you see them. Look elsewhere, think, make up your own minds. If I quote someone else I attribute. If I recommend a web site it's because I use it myself. If an advert appears it's because I affiliate with Google and others similar in nature and usually means nothing more than that... the Internet is a wild and untamed place folks, so please tread warily. My opinions are just that and do not constitute advice or legal opinion of any sort.
All original material is copyright 2008 by myself, too, in accord with the Creative Commons licence (see below).



QuickLinks: Addicted2Wheels Autoexpo 2000 GTVeloce Automotive Gallery GTVeloce.com GTVeloce Image Library Fort Street High School Class of 75 All purpose Chatroom Userplane Chat Fortian Image Gallery 1975 Flora Gallery Miscellaneous Image Gallery Bike Racing Gallery Airliner Gallery Airline Postcard Gallery Gerry's Gallery GTVeloce rave on Alfa Romeos Alfa Gallery Automotive How-to Index Staying Alive Handling 101 Handling 102 Handling 103 Tyrepressures Camber Toe Caster Polar Moment Roll Oversteer Understeer Weight transfer Coil springs Wheels and Tyres Pitch Heel and Toe Double Declutch Offset Rollbars BMEP calculator Cornering load calculator GTVeloce Blog Offline Blog Out Out Damned Blog Addicted2Wheels Blog The Spiel on business MBA Resources HR Resources KM Reframed Bike Racing forum KlausenRussell Com-munity Chain Chatter Unofficial RBCC info Official RBCC info Unofficial CCCC info Official CCCC info Rob's Guide to Road, Crit and Track Racing Rob's Guide, part 2 Track race tips Sydney's Velodromes What do those lines mean? Automobile links Mustknow links Philosophy links Music Links Images of the Russell, Matthews, O'Brien and Brown families in Australia Rob's Amateur Art Gallery The GTVeloce GiftShop The GTVeloce Shopfront Rob Russell's images at Image Tank



Creative Commons License