Posted by
Playful Walrus on Friday, January 07, 2011 3:21:27 PM
Nature-worshipping freaks, environmental alarmists, and commie mass transit advocates knock the personal automobile. I love automobiles. There are many reasons to love automobiles.
1. It’s there on demand. No looking up schedules, no walking several blocks to a station or a stop, no scrambling to conform to a schedule, no dealing with late buses or trains.
2. It gets you exactly where you want to go, in using the route that is of your choosing, as direct or as scenic as you choose. You don’t have to go way out of your way and wait for a transfer. If you want to slow down and pull off of the road - maybe to dump some toxic chemicals into an endangered species habitat, or eat an artery-clogging burger made from a dead cow, or hunt a defenseless little furry animal - you can. Just try dragging a game carcass onto a public bus. Ain’t gonna happen.
3. You can have some level of privacy. This allows you to call in to Dr. Laura without anyone around you hearing. It also allows for you to have you kids sit in the back and earn their keep doing child labor while you go over their homeschooling lessons.
4. You can listen to what you want without disturbing others or having to wear earphones. The Bible on tape, Atlas Shrugged on tape, Rush Limbaugh - you can listen to it all and still hear that siren.
5. Any passengers are of your choosing. Do I need to draw you a picture? No holding on to your wallet or enduring paranoid mumblings. You can hide “passengers” in the trunk, too.
6. The aroma is of your choosing. See #5.
7. The climate is of your choosing. I like running the air conditioner full-blast and having all of the windows down.
8. Automobiles allow a wide-range of self-expression, from that little fish symbol, to an NRA bumper sticker, to that red-white-and-blue paint job, to that horn that plays “Battle Hymn of the Republic”.
9. Automobiles allow for self-determination. On a commuter train, you are often delayed when someone jumps in front of it to kill themselves, but in an automobile, you can run right over them, back up over them, and run over them again, then take off, go home, and have an adult beverage as you wait for the police to arrive to hear your explanation involving assisted suicide.
10. People used to use horses for transportation, but now horses can be sold to Europe to be turned into meat.
Of course, this all depends on the men and women who design, engineer, build, and maintain our roads, highways, bridges, and traffic systems. Without those, automobiles would just be another place to make love to your spouse.
Automobiles may change over the years, getting safer, more efficient, and more “environmentally-friendly”, but is hard to beat the basic premise of a passenger-controlled vehicle that can be navigated to exactly where the passenger wants to go, exactly when the passenger wants to get there. Long live the personal automobile!
(This is a repost.)