Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
reality as it actually might exist, or to comprehend what our lifestyles - and travel behaviours
- currently offer, relative to the advertising and marketing dream, or what they might be in
a more sustainable world. We experience only prepared realities - the latest car advert, the
need for volume and throughput, speed and high specification, the joy of the open road, the
necessity in modern life. But often the motorised realisation is one of queuing in congested
traffic, the horrific safety record, the destruction of the urban fabric, the consumption of finite
resources, and high social inequality. The adverse costs are very high to support the motorisation
model, but are given little weight in discussion:
The very definition of the real has become that of which it is possible to give an equivalent
reproduction [. . .] the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always
already reproduced: that is the hyperreal . . . which is entirely in simulation.
(Baudrillard, 1983, p. 146)
And perhaps in a similar manner:
We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives
open to us [. . .] the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the
past decades [. . .] we live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass merchandising,
advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original
response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is
now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of [the] novel.
The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.
(Ballard, 1973, p. 1)
The motorisation culture, as it is presently framed, produced and used is therefore problematic
on many levels. There are important issues in the practice of using the car, and its central role
in everyday life and society (Bourdieu, 1972; Urry, 2007). There are Habermasian (1981)
dimensions in the legitimacy of the political debate, in the extent of participation, and in the
selling of and use of the motor car and societal organisation. Many of the practices are
continuing only under inertia, an example of adverse path dependency (Arthur, 1994; Mahoney,
2000) in terms of the environmental and health impacts. The response is often very conventional,
in arguing for a greater use of low-emission vehicles, but essentially within the same system
of mobility (King, 2008; Stern, 2007). The roadmap to survival for many is largely
technologically-based (Sperling and Gordon, 2009), comprising:
•
Electric drive technology (electric hybrids and emerging forms);
•
Low carbon fuel standards, high prices for petrol and diesel at the pump;
•
And, almost as an afterthought, new forms of mobility: smart paratransit (neighbourhood
electric vehicles), car sharing, dynamic ride sharing, telecommuting (facilitated by ICT)
and bus rapid transit.
Hence the assumption is that society still values continued mobility as now, but the
technology should become much cleaner. It is difficult to persist with this view in many
contexts, perhaps particularly in Europe and Asia, but also elsewhere. The basic paradox is
that the car is likely to remain in the short and even medium term, providing the major form
of (primarily) individual transport. In the longer term, however, travel behaviours are likely
to change markedly, with a different use of technologies, and a different balance in terms of
