I invite you to walk at 1am, everyday, through the dodgy parts of London with your smartphone in your pocket. Please, report your mugged or stabbed rate in a year.
Yeah, crimes in London is on the rise. And at the same time, people also keep getting hit and killed by cars. The diesel exhaust is filling people’s lungs, and the constant traffic noise is certainly putting a strain on people’s mind.
And instead asking Londoners to spend lots of money and get a car which they will have nowhere to park, what about reverse the police budget cut that left us with 22,000 fewer police officers?
(If anything, by segregating neighborhoods and exacerbating wealth inequality, cars make the problem worse.)
If you get dragged into the dirt between parked cars for some extra brutality then none of those people driving by in their cars are going to stop and intervene. You are hidden by cars and in that peculiar filth that cars bring to the street. Plus noisy car dominated roads mean that everyone in residential housing shuns the street, so there is nobody looking out.
I felt sorry for the gang that picked me off but I felt a lot of anger and resentment thereafter to car drivers that expressed forthright opinions on the matter with an air of 'knowing best'. As if any of them had a clue or direct experience.
If everyone hides in cars because the area they are gentrifying is 'not safe' then you only end up with vulnerable people on the street getting preyed on by the more violent members of society. Everyone ends up terrified. Streets become walled off behind rows of tin boxes and there is no community. Excessive car culture is part of this climate of cowardice.
Bikes, buses, trains would work so much better in London without the tin boxes cluttering up the place. Kids could play in the street. They could know their neighbours. Regular taxis can work fine, there is no need for this gig economy Uber nonsense.
Oh, so what about the disabled? Well, people would be able to visit them for a change. Delivery vans, people moving houses and all those whataboutisms? All that can be resolved easily when we drop the mentality of people having to be in their own armoured tanks for security.
We have gone past 'there is no such thing as society'.