Wheel vs. Foot: An Unrecognized American Battle
by Car culture profoundly affects our social behavior and ultimately our healthy connection to humanity, with its negative impact on real connections with people, with the earth, and with the senses.
If you step on a branch and it breaks, you will hear it. If you step in a puddle, you will hear it (and perhaps feel it as well if the wrong shoes are worn!). If you accidentally kick a rock while walking, you will hear it. Overall, walking ensures that you appreciate, if not acknowledge, the earth that you walk on. The might and brawn of a car removes this connection. The suspension ensures that it doesn’t feel that you are even driving. The radio ensures that any noise is not registered. The tainted windows ensure that even the power of the sun is controlled.
The only connection that you have is to your isolated, doted-upon existence. Your sense of empowerment is heftily fuelled. Therefore, you forget the pleasure of feeling the planet that you live on. You forget the might that it has. You forget that it is stronger than you. You forget that you have a responsibility to it and that it deserves your respect.
One thing I am sure many of us can agree on is that life-by-car clearly encourages less awareness of your senses. The daily drive to work, to the store, to pick-up the kids, to meet your friends, etc. may stimulate your sense of sight, but rarely the other senses. Arguably even your sense of sight is not truly stimulated since you observe your surroundings through a glass window. The physical separation from what you are seeing indirectly gives you a sense of seeing something removed as opposed to what it really is – reality staring at you.
In addition, the fact that when you drive you are focusing on the road (or should be) and are moving at speed, ensures that you cannot see detail and examine it. Therefore, are you really connected to your sense of sight? Likely not.
More important, the other senses are very much shielded. Your hearing may be stimulated by a honk, a scream, or the radio. However, the hum of the car ensures that all sounds are massaged or feel artificial. Now take your sense of smell. If you are lucky you get to drive with windows open in the countryside where nature is so rich and aromatic that it can’t help but engulf everyone and everything that passes through.
Most of us in car-land aren’t this fortunate. Therefore, the window is closed, the air-conditioner or heater is on, and the smell of inside living is all that you can count on. As for your sense of taste, clearly it is not stimulated unless you happened to have indulged in spicy chili the night before.
On foot, your senses are kept alive. With a slight silt of the head the grime of a building wall is in plain view, the lovely dress of that person in-front of you is there for you to admire, the meticulously designed storefront can be appreciated, the expressions of fellow pedestrians can be observed, and rolling cloud patterns can be analyzed.
Honestly, the marvel of nature and the creativity of man are visually brought to life. Equally stimulated is your sense of smell. Granted that not all odors will be pleasant but what is assured is that every corner brings a new smell and thus a potential new sensation or a recall to memories past. In short, you are thoroughly connected to your environment.
Let us not forget your sense of hearing. Walking down a busy street you are bombarded with sounds and noises. Most you block out but many you pick up, whether because they were louder or closer, or because you were curious.
Either way you listen and hear life living. It is a wonderful experience that car-culture simply doesn’t offer.
All of this is clearly just my point of view. I have no science to back this up, just personal experience. However, I really do feel that we do not appreciate the importance of regular physical contact with others. So much of our life is now driven by pace and technology that we find artificial ways to connect, not real ones.
We seek the end destination quickly and ignore the value of the journey. We see store, club, gym, bar, and we don’t see pedestrians, runners, and drivers. Ultimately we don’t ideally appreciate the moment, our environment, and our society. Only through a better effort to do so, we will make advances in understanding our fellow-man. I suppose the only solution is for all of us to move to New York City and taste the Big Apple!
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