Quotes
“In a sense, cars are clumsy machines…cycling can actually be quicker… [cars] cannot be maneuvered easily…are absurdly expensive …take up a lot of room …date very quickly…and are exceedingly boring topics of conversation” (Wright and Egan, 2000)
“we have come to the point where each of us knows more and more about less and less, until as a society we all know almost everything about nothing” (Rifkin, 1980)
“Drivers typically have many things on their minds in their daily lives besides sustainability, and must be “cognitive misers” to survive and prosper.”
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Leonardo da Vinci
”The automobile, especially, is remarkably addictive. I have described it as a suit of armor with 200 horses inside, big enough to make love in. It is not surprising that it is popular. It turns its driver into a knight with the mobility of the aristocrat and perhaps some of his other vices. The pedestrian and the person who rides public transportation are, by comparison, peasants looking up with almost inevitable envy at the knights riding by in their mechanical steeds. Once having tasted the delights of a society in which almost everyone can be a knight, it is hard to go back to being peasants. I suspect, therefore, that there will be very strong technological pressures to preserve the automobile in some form, even if we have to go to nuclear fusion for the ultimate source of power and to liquid hydrogen for the gasoline substitute. The alternative would seem to be a society of contented peasants, each cultivating his own little garden and riding to work on the bus,
or even on an electric streetcar. Somehow this outcome seems less plausible than a desperate attempt to find new sources of energy to sustain our knightly mobility.”
Kenneth E. Boulding
Science, Vol. 184, No. 4134, 255-257, 1974