The automobile is possibly the stupidest invention ever made.

It was not invented to fulfill any need.  There was no need that someone looked around for the solution to, and thought up the automobile for.  It was invented as a toy for rich people.  A toy.

And the inventors didn't foresee the utter catastrophe that would befall humanity when everybody started wanting one.

This one invention has caused more hardship, more misery, more waste, more destruction, more sudden death, more disruption of social systems, more alienation and isolation, more decimation of community, and more ripping apart of the societal fabric than any other invention in history.  It is completely idiotic.

Allow us to explain.

You may not have thought about this before, but the automobile has changed our living environment - the space in which we live - our home - into an place in which there are......

Huge, 1000-pound things zooming around at incredibly high speeds...

everywhere, all around us...

putting us in constant, lethal danger, and forcing us to watch where we're walking at all times, lest a single wrong step result in grievous injury or death...

And even if you're careful, you can still be killed by someone else's error... because the things are steered by homo sapiens - a species notorious for being easily distracted, easily emotionally destabilized, and easily fatigued...

and they're driven on pathways so narrow that people pass a few inches from death, dozens, even hundreds of times per day...

where a distraction of a mere fraction of a second, even a tiny slip of the hand, can result in tragedies of entire families getting killed in an instant...

requiring us, whether we consent to it or not, to place absolute faith and trust in the unwavering mental focus, emotional stability, and motor coordination of complete strangers...

...and with the entire system depending on the maintenance of absolute focus by thousands of homo sapiens at once, wherein a mistake by even one person for one second can bring the entire system to a halt...

...creating more danger, more stress, and more financial burden than any other invention in history.

And for what?

The whole point of technology is to save labor and resources.  Is the automobile system doing that?

We were getting there.  The industrial revolution (at least in the beginning) was raising living standards, reducing toil, and allowing us to provide for our needs more and more easily.  We had what we needed:  We had food, warmth, clean water, and all necessities.  They were becoming easier and easier to acquire.  We were almost there...

And then, all of a sudden, in what seemed like an instant, the bar was raised, and suddenly the entire economic system was redesigned to require every every man and woman to own this humongous, unwieldy product, with a mass greater than all other tools and possessions combined...

 

requiring us to mine enormous amounts of metal...

procure gargantuan amounts of rubber for tires by converting huge swaths of rainforest into rubber plantations...

perform constant maintenance on a bewildering array of parts so complicated an entire profession had to be created to service them for us...

space our workplaces and homes farther apart so it actually takes us LONGER to get to work and to the market than it did before the damn things were invented...

force ourselves to waste hours every day, throwing away huge portions of our lives sitting in pointless, mind-numbing, rage-inducing traffic that's so frustrating it drives some of us mad enough to attack each other...

endure an ever-present, inescapable cacophony of disharmonious, irritating background noise that clashes with our bodily rhythms and disrupts cellular processes, aging us prematurely and driving us crazy...

quarry enormous amounts of stone for roads...

surrender vast amounts of land over to dead gray asphalt, taking away our ability to garden and grow our own food because we no longer have space for it because everything is road, with roads now taking up more land space than houses...

put our food supply into the hands of distant corporations, eliminating self-sufficiency and ruining the independence of local communities...

 

...submit to licensing schemes, beseeching government bureaucracies for permission to travel...

...prohibit our children from playing outside unsupervised...

...force dogs - beings whose spirits are synonymous with running, play, and freedom - to stay unnaturally confined indoors for most of the day, and restricted on leashes even when outdoors...

drill into the ground for fossil fuels, attacking the structural integrity of the planet's crust...

subject the oceans to periodic catastrophic oil spills...

pollute cities with toxic smog that obscures the sun and kills people for breathing...

tolerate the formation of oil cartels led by theocratic dictators of authoritarian states who use the oil revenue to create global terrorism networks that force us to submit to strangers groping us at airports...

set off resource wars that slaughter hundreds of thousands of people and cost trillions of dollars in weapons expenditures and troop deployments...

and change the chemistry of the atmosphere in ways that could destabilize long-established weather patterns and plunge the entire world into climatic uncertainty, possibly raising sea levels and drowning 2/3 of all major cities.

But...

 

on the bright side...

 

we acquired the ability to go "weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

This is pure insanity.

The automobile is the stupidest mistake made by man in the last 1000 years (possibly ever), and future generations will recognize this, and they will judge our intelligence - yours and mine - by whether or not we recognized this mistake, and by how willing we were to correct it.

Your own descendants are watching you through the periscope of History.  How do you want to be remembered?

The automobile must be phased out, in order for our species to mature.  There is no way around it.  And the longer we postpone this change, the harder it will be to make.

Therefore, the Earth Party stands for the immediate commencement of a plan to phase out the automobile and replace it with a transportation grid of track-guided, automated communal transit platforms.

We already have all the physical materials necessary - all we have to do is recycle them from cars and roads.  Empty factories will be reopened to do this recycling and manufacture the new transportation tracks and apparatuses, and millions of employment opportunities will open for people looking for work.  It will restart the economy and create an economic boom not seen in decades.  

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Transportation

grid classed into 5 categories
          normal vehicle,   special circumstance vehicle
roads,    units.  each road has maximum stype of unit allowed under normal circumstances
one level above can be used, with discretion of the council of the village the road lead to
within village = feet
between villages
feet
nonmotor vehicles

UNIT                PATHWAY             PURPOSE OF PATHWAY
Being              Footpath               Connecting any place toany place (or dwelling to dwelling)

PURPOSE                                                               PATHWAY                                   UNIT
dwelling to dwelling                                       Footpath
v to v                                                                       wide footpath (3 ppl)
v to t                                                                       small rr
t to t                                                                        medium rr
t to c                                                                        medium rr
c to c                                                                       large rr

elevated / enclosed, with crossings for land-based wildlife spaced within sight of the next

dendritic is simple
simplicity is key value of tech (link)

once allowed road is built, the duplicates are torn up and given back to nature





 

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