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Jonathan Kershaw, Coventry University, UK
With projected increased urban populations in the future, developing a sustainable urban mobility assumes a great importance. However, given the impact that the car has had socially and culturally, what are the prospects for a sustainable urban automobility?
At the root of this question is the notion that the private car isn’t going to go away, at least not any time soon. The autopoieisis of the system of automobility (Urry, 2004) has ingrained the car upon our landscape. For many, the car is also too convenient, too aspirational, and too desirable. Much has been written about the costs and impracticalities of low carbon vehicles, and the car; although the cultural and semiotic nature of the car means that it has always been more than just a means of transport, less is known about how socio-cultural mores regarding the car might impact upon the transition to low carbon motoring.
How we ‘consume’ the car as icon, avatar, cultural artefact and experience – whether as driver, passenger or pedestrian – is crucial in effecting a transition to a low carbon automobility because cars carry more than people; indeed it is precisely because they carry people that they can transcend their instrumental use, carrying experiences, meanings and feelings too (e.g. Sachs, 1992; Miller, 2001; Sheller, 2004; Steg, 2005) and, in doing so, cars can become more than just transport.
Yet, as Urry notes, the number of cars on the road globally is such that automobility can be regarded as “a modern day Leviathan” (2008: 265), at once threatening to consume us as “urban space … tends to be sliced up, degraded and destroyed” (Lefebvre, 1991: 359, in Sheller & Urry, 2000: 742) yet at the same time hinting at the hold that the allure of the motor car has over society. However, there is more to Urry’s Leviathan than traffic congestion, something else that ‘drives’ my research.
Such has been the ‘lock-in’ of the internal combustion engine (Black, 2006; Ivory & Genus, 2010), increasing emissions and air pollution is necessarily concomitant with a rise in automobility. The private car uses more energy and emits more greenhouse gases per passenger-kilometre than any other surface transport mode (Khan Ribeiro et al, 2007) and, in Europe, where road transport not only accounts for almost 75% of transport emission (EC, 2011a), it is claimed that the car alone is responsible for 12% of all CO2 emissions there (EC, 2011b).
Of course, there is more to transport emissions than CO2. We’ve all seen pictures of the Los Angeles haze and the Beijing smog and, from my own experience of walking down Oxford Road in Manchester, reportedly Europe’s busiest bus route, the localised air pollution from the petrol and/or diesel internal combustion engine (ICE) can be almost tangible. The transition from the horse to the automobile which may have resulted in a welcome reduction in the amount of dust and flies (Zierer, 1922) ultimately replaced one form of loc