The Automobile’s Forgotten Secret
14th July 2010
The automobile’s potential is its greatest secret—an open secret and yet, it often seems, a forgotten one. The big SUV in my garage may occasionally make a 10-mile trip to Walmart or 2-mile run to the volunteer fire station when the siren sounds. But it has the potential—the size, the power, the range—to take me, my friends, and our bicycles over the mountain to a distant bike trail, or 1,100 miles with a load of furniture and books to my son’s house in Florida.
This is why trains suck unless you haven’t got anything better, and underlies the Crustian fondness for mass transit: because it constrains the ability of the Lower Orders to move about freely.