“GET-OUT-OF-MY-WAY” automobility

“Car-travel interrupts the taskscapes of others (pedestrians, children going to school, postmen, garbage collectors, farmers, animals and so on), whose daily routines are obstacles to the high-speed traffic cutting mercilessly through slower-moving pathways and dwellings.

Junctions, roundabouts, and ramps present moments of carefully scripted inter-car-action during which non-car users of the road constitute obstacles to the hybrid car-drivers intent on returning to their normal cruising speed, deemed necessary in order to complete the day’s complex tasks in time…

More generally, Modernist urban landscapes were built to facilitate automobility and to discourage other forms of human movement… Large areas of the globe consist of car-only environments… About one-quarter of the land in London and nearly one-half of that in LA is devoted to car-only environments.” —  John Urry in ‘The System of Automobility’