THE CAR: FOR AND AGAINST

Steven Norris and Gavin Stamp put the opposing arguments

Steven Norris, who has worked in the car retail business, ZS a former Transport Minis- ter, and whose autobiography, Changing Trains, has just been published by Hutchin- son, puts the case for IN ANY audience. there is one infallible way of separating parents from other peo- ple. Ask the audience to name the most important birthday in a child's life, and the childless are certair to suggest 18 or 21. Parents know better. FOT virtually every young person in the land — male or female — the most important birthday is the one which finally qualifies them to get behind the wheel. That age is 17, for those of you still guessing. And how fortunate you are in your blissful ignorance, because if previous generations worried about offspring going too far with the opposite sex, these days the worry is far more likely to centre around Johnny or Jane wrapping themselves and Mum's car round a lamppost.

Like it or not. the motorcar is figuring as prominently as ever in the aspirations of the young. Nor is the next generation any more politically correct than its forebears in its feelings about the car. A couple of years ago I recall the Lex Motoring Survey producing the depressing — but perhaps not totally surprising — evidence from a large survey of juvenile predilections that, as far as the young are concerned, a good stereo, four-wheel drive and sports wheels all figured higher on their wish lists than environmental compatibility.

Nor, to tell the truth. are those of us for whom a 17th birthday is shrouded in the mists of time much different. I can painful- ly recall how, on a quiet news day, a mis- chievous hack lighted upon my evidence to the Environment Select Committee, and proceeded to tell the world that the Trans- port Minister hated his fellow human beings on public transport. Mea culpa: I had forgotten the first rule of politics, that irony — indeed any attempt at humour travels badly.

My point was, however, crystal clear to that tiny few who were kind enough to look at what I had actually said. I simply observed that when we travel to work, the shops or the cinema, cur preferred mode is almost always taken for granted. It's there in the drive, or a few yards away on the pavement — and have you noticed that if you're late it waits? It never goes without you, it warms or cools you as instructed, it has an endless variety of things to entertain you with — radio, tape, CD — and it never answers back. So what if the journey takes a little longer than a brisk walk to the station and a ride on a newly privatised train? Where there's a parking space at the other end, there will be a car. And let us not gloss over one other inescapable conclusion about the car. Mr Blair's Sierra-owner is telling us more about himself through his choice of colour and make than he perhaps appreci- ates. The rush for new registrations every August — an utterly meaningless exercise in itself — is explicable only in terms of the most vulgar display of sheer one- upmanship in contemporary society.

Alan Clark once referred to me as the Tory Party's garagiste (Clark actually spent far longer in Warren Street than I, but somehow I don't think he qualifies). In this role I should also point out that rates of car-ownership in Britain are relatively low. At 420 per thousand, we rank below the French and Germans and way behind the Americans, who own 550 cars for every thousand people. On that basis, we can expect demand for the car to grow as strongly in the next century as it has in this, and all the protest and agony the great unwashed can muster as they swing from the baskets of the Highways Agency cherry-pickers will not change that. Nor, of course, would any other political party. Consider for a moment the plight of the Member for Newbury, an affable Old Eto- nian named David Rendel. We all know that the Lib Dems are the natural home of the brown rice and open-toed sandal brigade, and these days the only left-wing party on the political stage. They're against roads, aren't they? Well, yes, but not In Newbury. No candidate with any serious chance dare stand in the way of the bypass bulldozer and Mr Rendel is no kamikaze. To hell with the lesser spotted ragwort or the natterjack toad when there are votes in it.

Attempts to curb the sale of motorcars would be not only politically undeliverable, but also profoundly unfair. Who selects? Who owns? And who is denied? Who qual- ifies to be a two-car family and why?

And what of the 28 per cent of the popu- lation who currently have no car? Who are we, the fortunate, to deny them the means of access to a job; a school of choice rather than the nearest; a cheaper, more conve- nient type of shopping from their local superstore, or simply the pleasure of being able to reach and enjoy so many pleasures — a stately home, forest park or funfair that the rest of us literally take for granted?

Woe betide the political party or pres- sure group whose message is simply anti- car. It won't do, either logically or politically. Consider instead the fact that whilst we own fewer cars than our neigh- bours, we use them more — particularly in our towns and cities. Therein lies the key. What we desperately need is more invest- ment in good, reliable and safe public transport. But, crucially, this should be combined with the political will to bear down on unrestricted urban car use, for example by expanding bus priority lanes, removing private non-residential commuter parking or, perhaps Singapore-style, even charging for entry.

The change this will bring to all our lives is one we all have to face regardless of political allegiance. If we care as much as we say we do about pollution and conges- tion, we can be assured that the remedy is firmly in our own hands. It makes no sense to resent the car. It is our creature. We design it, build it and sell it to willing bil- lions in every quarter of the globe. Live with it, love it if you will, and, above all, manage it. A bit like life, really.

Gavin Stamp, architectural historian and author of The Spectator's Not motoring' column, puts the case against: THERE is nothing wrong with cars in themselves, I suppose. They are often use- ful, and in many parts of Britain and for certain professions essential. As with the atom bomb, we cannot disinvent the car; it is here to stay. But the plain fact is that there are far too many of them around. Worse, traffic planners and that political- industrial nexus serving the purposes of car manufacturers and road builders which Mrs Thatcher once described as our great car economy' seem anxious for us to have even more of the things, regardless of the social and environmental consequences.

If everybody had a car and used it. life would become hell as Britain would have to be largely given over to roads and carparks, and yet there would still be traffic jams. The answer to congestion used to be more roads, new roads, wider roads, but now even the Automobile Association seems to have grasped the simple law that traffic expands to fill the space available for it: build more roads and you encourage more traffic. What now needs to be tried is turning it around; that is, reducing the number of roads and seeing if the traffic will go away.

Behind all this is the insufferable assumption that everybody wants to have a car, everybody ought to own a car. I do not; I do not want the expense and the bother and, besides, there are other ways of moving around which are as agreeable and rather better for all concerned. An important objection to the great car econ- omy is that, pace the Conservative Party, it reduces choice. Concentrate on the car and pour public money into road building and public transport withers, making it very difficult for the non-driver to get around.

Exclusive reliance on road transport dis- criminates against those who cannot be, or ought not to be, expected to drive: against the young and the old, against the blind and the infirm, against the incompetent and the drunken. The last is important; car-worship plays into the hands of the new puritanism that would ban alcohol. Of course people should not drive cars (or trains) when inebriated; but how much better to go by train, in which you can read or work or think, or eat and drink. Besides, railways represent true freedom through order and hierarchy; cars the ruthless self- ishness of laissez-faire capitalism, if not anarchy, which ought to be anathema to the conservative mind.

Some of the manifest problems with cars may one day be solved, while the wicked- ness of built-in obsolescence may become politically and economically undesirable. The internal-combustion engine consumes large amounts of fossil fuel and it pollutes. A future with quiet, solar-powered electric cars is, I suppose, possible, but, for the moment, what with the undeniable fact of global warming, the answer is surely to reduce the number of vehicles and encour- age forms of transport which are more effi- cient. As anyone who stands by the roadside vainly trying to cross well knows, most travelling cars contain but one person.

But a more powerful argument against cars is that they are bad for you; they really are. I read that obesity rates in Britain have doubled in the last decade. This is scarcely surprising when so many now spend almost all their time sitting when not lying down: sitting in the office, sitting for hours in the car to and from work, and then sitting slumped in front of the televi- sion. It is surely no accident that so many citizens of the nation most obsessed by and most dependent upon the private car, the United States, should be so obscenely fat. At least those of us who walk to the bus stop or railway station get a little exercise. And as for the answer to the consequences of the sedentary life adopted by the high- powered executive — the private gym and the exercise machine — I find that as pathetic as a caged hamster running in its wheel. Try walking: but to walk, these days, is almost a political act.

Then there is the psychological damage caused by excessive dependence upon the private car. I firmly believe that the car, along with the television, is largely responsi- ble for the fragmentation and breakdown of modern society. Think: if you spend hours of your life moving in a hermetic metal cocoon from (detached, suburban) home to the (out-of-town) office, you are largely cut off from everyday humanity. Many, of course, find that desirable; Mr Steven Nor- ris, when Minister of Transport, once mem- orably expressed his distaste for encountering ordinary people on public transport. Quite. Those of us who use public transport at least have to acquire a smatter- ing of civility to cope with others, while to succumb to that contemptuous view of humanity as seen through the windscreen leads to alienation, selfishness and, at its worst, uncontrollable 'road rage' — which, of course, is but the tantrum of the spoilt child. Again, it was Mrs Thatcher, she of the great car economy, who declared there was no such thing as society, these two delusions are related. No wonder that ministers, fer- ried about in chauffeur-driven limousines, live in an unreal world of their own. Give me Mr Attlee, who travelled to Westminster on the Underground.

But above all, perhaps, is the fact that cars — or, rather, an interest in cars — is really rather common and vulgar. I suppose I am reacting against my suburban childhood of the 1950s and the weekend ritual of car- washing, against the Autocar and the Motor Show. Remember Betjeman's 'Slough' and the 'bald young clerks' who 'talk of sports and makes of cars/In various bogus Tudor bars'? Now I loathe the childish, macho image of cars peddled by the advertisers. And I cannot help noticing that those who most despise the pedestrian and who wage war on the cyclist are the car-stealing classes and aggressive youths of all colours in their ostentatious new vehicles, pumping out deaf- ening music for all to enjoy.

As I say, the car is here to stay, but it must not rule. In the country, it is essential, but most of us live in cities and the dominance of the car undermines civilisation, spoils architecture, destroys comfortable urban environments and impoverishes life. Car mania has now reached the point where the Department of Transport can seriously pro- pose building a new road which will spoil the celebrated view of Salisbury Cathedral painted by Constable. If that is allowed to happen, England really is lost and damned. But there is an alternative.