Preserving The Car Culture

"The truth in question is that motorcars are dreadful things but human beings love 'em. There's a contradiction there, but refusing to accept that we are a mass of contradictions is one of our biggest denial issues... In my own town, England's blessed second city of Manchester, the city fathers who have helped transform us into a dynamic, fast-growing conurbation have been caught by the same stupidity. In adhering to the flawed orthodoxy of blindly attacking car-use, they have managed to do what one might have thought impossible - they have destroyed the essential culture of the city... [Does the car culture] make New York a machine city, a petro-freak, abhorrent waste land? Not a bit. Architect Rem Koolhaas calls it the culture of congestion. The city where the car runs free is the most human-proportioned metropolis on the planet, the most encouraging to walk in and on and through. It is a natural landscape, a modern natural landscape. For all its skyscraping, it is curiously human-dimensioned. And curiously full of cars."