Secured by automobility: why does the private car continue to dominate transport practices?

Abstract

Use of the private car is often viewed as highly problematic. It is regularly associated with global physical, social and ecological harms such as climate change and epidemics of lifestyle diseases, including obesity.

Attempts to address these problems generally include provision for day-to-day physical mobility based on alternatives to the private car. Labelled alternative transport, these modes include public transport, walking and cycling. Yet the private car continues as the preferred way to travel in many cities. A deeper understanding of this preference can reveal under explored sites of resistance to alternative transport modes.

This study uses qualitative methods to record very personal barriers to the uptake of alternative transport. Its focus is on the use of the car for the journey to work in suburban Sydney - Australia's largest city. Applying a novel approach to participant selection, the study explores the daily practices and perceptions of those who continue to drive, despite having access to viable alternative transport. The study finds that resistance to alternative transport is more complex than findings to date suggests. Mobility practices stem from the active integration of skills, images and materials that potentially have little to do with transport. Instead, attachments to the private car, and resistance to alternative mobility, are products of other practices, such as parenting and working. The study reveals the way the private car is deeply engrained in the way people make sense of, and navigate, not only their streets but their place in the world.

The complexity of the relationship between mobility practices and ways of being in the modern world can be represented through the concept of ontological security. Car-based autonomous mobility plays a key role in experiences of autonomy, predictability and acceptance - all of which act to sustain a sense of coherency to modern life. Transition away from car use disturbs this sense of coherency and is essentially ontologically threatening.

This way of thinking about resistance to alternative transport exposes a number of sticking points for its uptake - junctures at which transition away from private car use will only occur in the face of unprecedented disruption to existing ways of 'being' in modern life. The research exposes a series of inconsistencies between the expectations of those planning for, and those anticipated to one day use, alternative transport.