Delivering at the margins

I guess I’m a city boy at heart. Stuck out in the midst of corn fields, twittering birds and growling tractors, I was spurred to do a bit of math. Easily over half my life has been spent outside the bustling big city, either in regional towns or rubbing elbows with farmers.

To be honest, it was talk of high gas prices and carbon credits that really got me thinking. Now I’m no hippy, possibly a touch beat, but I always found the weekend hippy in particular and the dope smoking milieu in general, just a touch self absorbed and boring.

No self respecting socialist has really recognised me as a soulmate, although I do tend to regard them along with the dope smoking crew.

I resent to destructive fundamentalist approach of many greens movements; they come in on a par with anti-abortion bombers and their activities seem equally self-defeating.

Even without those dubious social pigeonholes I grieve for what is happening to my world, my environment.

I’ve always been an oddball in the rural setting, as I say, city boy at heart. I don’t enjoy driving or even being driven. Growing up in a city I learned early that walking, biking or public transport, with which I was blessed in abundance, were far more pleasurable and efficient.

I understand that many urban areas are designed purely for cars, and my preferred way of life is made more difficult as a result; that is something society has encouraged and now pays for in its own way. Being forced into cars is becoming a burden.

When I last lived in Sydney owning a car was an absolute luxury. Living on the edge of the city proper meant high garaging costs, no on street parking (to discourage city parking overflow) and crippling city parking costs.

Sydney has a string of major freeways feeding into it’s core, the main road I lived on was essentially three lanes, depending on peak flows and short term parking, but was fed either side of the three kilometer stretch by six lanes.

It was always a joy to stride along purposely past gridlocked drivers, fuming in the Sydney heat.

Now that was a long ramble to get to a point. The point is, governments are slowly waking up to the fact that those long lines of cars are screwing our environment. Business is eyeing the private motorcar as expendable to allow them to get on with the business making money and there normal share of greenhouse gases.

Like smokes and booze, there is a growing view that drivers can simply be priced out of the habit that has been encouraged by business and public planning.

But the high prices have another effect; while the cynical bastards are willing to use ‘prohibition pricing’ to drive social changes, that same pricing ensures that the profit margins are maintained at status quo.

Government and business is taking you for a ride again, enjoy it, but I think I might keep on walking.