Be a Patriot, Drive

Transportation planners would have you believe that the automobile is the source of all of our problems and if we eliminate the automobile – or at least the single occupancy automobile – then everything will be right with the world and the world environment. 
    Of course that planner pipe dream isn’t reality, but it does demonstrate a problem.  How can you control the population if you can’t control how and when they move?  How can you do social engineering – if the people you’re engineering can come and go at will? That my friend is the transportation planners dilemma.
    If you make everyone rely on mass transit  – then you can control where they go and when they go –   Planners and government are in charge of movement – when you have mass transit. 
    But, when everyone can come and go as they like by means of the automobile, then planners are unable to do their jobs. That’s why there is such hatred of the single occupancy automobile, it gives people freedom and if planners can’t control freedom of movement they can’t control you.
    They can control where you build your house, they can control where you send your children to school, they can control what you see on your television, and what you read in the media. But they can’t control where you go and when you go as long as you drive a car, unless of course they can control the highways.
    And that’s what they’re trying to do. By creating HOV lanes and by building more and more of them, they hope to eventually force all drivers to fill up their cars with others, drive to the same areas and go when they want them to go by forcing traffic jams through the means of refusing to build more highways.
    If you believe that government should control all aspects of your life then you should support mass transit, it is the means by which  the most people can be moved, at the same time and over the greatest distance with the least amount of effort.
    If however, you believe that individuals should have freedom of movement and be able to come and go when they want to and go where they want to when they want to, then it is your patriotic duty to get in your car and drive.
    But please don’t do it at the same time that I want to go, because it causes so much trouble.

(This story first ran in 2002)