Not driving and liking it.

Flaws with driving off top of my head, just to get ideas flowing:

1)30k dead in US, many more expeience incapacitating injuries. This is the easiest disease to cure, don't get in a car, yet not only do we ignore this risk for, in my opinion, the hypnotic attraction that driving has over us, but we demand higher speed limits.

2)70% of the oil barrel is for transportation. Transportation is not worth 70% of the oil barrel, the ways we use transporation are not so essential to having a good life that we would choose to ration 70% of oil to be used for transporation. Do some soul searching and find what you need nearby, bring the fun to you.

3)A lot of oil burned, any global warming?

4)I'm not sure how to quantify this, but imagine all the people on the oil rig, all the people in the metal mines, all the people on the factory lines, all the people manning the gas stations or trucking the fuel, building the roads, etc, essentially so we can live farther from where we work, eat,a nd play. Is that sacrifice of their time worth it.

5)Roads and parking lots everywhere. Noone has any other right than force to decide to turn vast stretches of land into otherwise useless concrete plains for their choice of travelling means. I would argue that land is more valuable for other uses, so the less people travel and thus the less roads we need, the more useful the land would be. I define use as producing happiness, not stuff, although stuff factors into the equation.

6)We lose one of the main benefits of travelling, in that each step is a new destination and each traveller passed a potential comrade, but when you pass everything by in a noisy blur, you can't grasp this.

Driving to me is like the cigarettes of travelling. Using it, done only because it is "cool", creates a new physical craving for a non-life-supporting substance. For cigarettes that is something like dopamine pathways or whatever of body chemistry, and for driving that is the creation of sprawl, sprawl makes cars more necessary. Basically, I don't think any of this is worth it. I think that to make driving commonplace is for one reason only, and it's some sort of luxury: so we can live farther from where we eat work and play. I can't even think of a reason to desire to do that. People can wean themselves off personal driving by depending on the more efficient travelling of delivery drivers and public transporation, and then wean themselves off those by building local sufficiency.