CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
A thread to put all your favourite (anti) car quotes...
I'll start:
The automobile has dissolved the living tissue of the city. Its appetite for space is absolutely insatiable; moving & parked, it devours urban land, leaving buildings as mere islands of habitable space in a sea of dangerous & ugly traffic.
- James Marston Fitch, NYTimes, 1960.
Beyond a certain speed, motorised vehicles create remoteness that they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few.
- Ivan Illich, Energy & Equity 1973
High speeds for all means that everybody has less time for himself as the whole society spends a growing slice of its time budget on moving people...The allure of speed has deceived the passenger into accepting the promises made by an industry that produces capital intensive traffic. He is convinced that high-speed vehicles have allowed him to progress beyond the limited autonomy he enjoyed when moving under his own power...
The passenger who agrees to live in a world monopolised by transport becomes a harassed, overburdened consumer of distances whose shape and length he can no longer control.
- Ivan Illich, "Energy and Equity," 1973
Hey!
Listen, get this...
Nobody with a good car needs to worry about nothin', do you understand?
Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.
And I'll tell you why!
I come a long way since I believed in anything, and I come halfway around the world.
Where you come from is gone. Where you thought you were going to weren't never there.
And where you are ain't no good unless you can get away from it.
- Hazel Motes, Wise Blood, 1979
"The Automobile, satisfier of private needs, demands, and whims — has created an insatiable demand for access, and a whole profession of planners...serving and further stimulating that demand.”
Donald Appleyard, Streets Can Kill Cities: Third World Beware! (1980)
Can I just have a title?
Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of The American Automobile
Ralph Nader 1965
"The right to access every building in a city by private motorcar, in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city."-- Lewis Mumford, 1964
"Extreme libertarianism...begins on the road. When you drive, society becomes an obstacle. Pedestrians, bicycles, traffic calming, speed limits, the law: all become a nuisance to be wished away."
George Monbiot
"Unlike the vacuum cleaner, the radio, or the bicycle, which retain their use value when everyone has one, the car, like a villa by the sea, is only desirable and useful insofar as the masses don't have one. That is how in both conception and original purpose the car is a luxury good. And the essence of luxury is that it cannot be democratised. If everyone can have luxury, no one gets any advantages from it. On the contrary, everyone diddles, cheats, and frustrates everyone else, and is diddled, cheated and frustrated in return."
André Gorz, "L'Idéalogie Sociale de la Bagnole," in Le Sauvage, Sept-Oct. 1973
that is brilliant.
"Travel light and leave no trace" - gembo, 2021
@neddie and don’t forget your lightweight foldable grass comb. Or just use your foot to kick the grass back in to shape.
"Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of...communities."
― Jane Jacobs
These are great.
The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines, but all other animals as well.
Energy And Equity Ivan Illich, 1973
“Energy And Equity”
I keep meaning to re-read it.
Soon, if we are not more prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets.- Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear (1952)
...expensive television sets in the back of expensive SUVs or expensive motorhomes.
More climate breakdown than automobile, but this is a great quote. I'm going to use it everytime someone asks if I did a particular thing to help "the environment" (like go by train, sell the car, turn the heating down, etc.)
It's not about "the environment." Stop using this phrase. It's about whether life on Earth collapses into a shadow of its former magnificence. It's about whether humankind thrives and evolves, or descends into a long and brutal dark age on a less habitable planet.
- Peter Kalmus, NASA Climate Scientist, 2022
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