This is part of an ongoing silly series where I complain about cars and our obsession with them. I have already written quite a few more and basically write additional entries in my head when I am biking often. Mostly Good Ideas HQ is very anti-car. If you have your own dispatch, please send in or post in the comments and we’ll compile a guest post sometime!

Dispatches from car culture, 26 April 2023

I keep rewatching the Barbie trailer and feeling the blink of astonishment and annoyance when she drives without her hands. I think about how it’s the dream of self driving cars which don’t even exist yet and keep killing people. I think about how we give kids toys to play with then make live action movies about the toys.

My favourite podcast makes an episode about screens in cars, and how the car screens will probably just keep getting bigger, world without end and all that. No one is imagining a future without cars.

I book a taxi to go to the airport on Friday. It costs the same for a taxi as it would to get the shuttle except it picks me up later so I can get more sleep. The public transport doesn’t run at that time of day. Last time I biked to the airport the straps I used to attach my bag to my bike fell off somewhere on Mount Albert Road. It was one am and I was very tired and it was dark and I couldn’t be bothered to lok for them. Now I don’t have straps and I don’t feel like biking to the airport. The taxi is infinitely more expensive than biking, which is free.

Whenever someone asks me how far away something is I describe how long it would take me to bike there.

On the way to church I experience one of the magic disappearing bike lanes. It suddenly disappears from the road. Where does it think the cyclists will go? They’re running a cycle safety campaign. At night, riding back from Sandringham, it blinks. “Drive like you know them”. It is trying to evoke drivers empathy, to see the bike riders as people they might know, not obstacles to resent.

Historical car culture dispatch: biking up a hill in Wellington, someone driving (a man) yells out the window. “Pedal harder! You can do it!”