Apathy: a powerful weapon in the war on cars

Nicholas Maronese
Editor-in-Chief
You may not know it, but there’s a war going on.
I’m not talking about the stuff our troops in Afghanistan are going through – I mean a war here at home.
I mean a battle fought not with guns and grenades, but with policy and punitive fees; a war waged not on a foreign nation, but on a familiar friend. This war on cars is taking place right here in Toronto – at least, if you ask Rob Ford.
On one side: the bike-riding ‘pinkos’ who’re taxing every aspect of your driving experience in order to get you to ride the streetcar. On the other: sensible, freedom-loving Canadians like Ford, who’re fighting hard to make sure you can commute in your car uninhibited by unnecessary fees. (Is the sarcasm coming across?)
Full disclosure: I don’t buy into the whole war on cars – it sounds too much like a conspiracy theory to me – but I try to give it the benefit of the doubt, both as a driving enthusiast and automotive journalist. This wariness didn’t stop me from walking into one of the war rooms Oct. 21, 2010 – it happened to be here in the York Research Tower – to witness some of the negotiations go down.
The treaty title? “Technological Futures: Automobility and Beyond.” The peace-broker? York’s Canadian Centre for German and European Studies (CCGES). They had attempted to bring both sides together – this included industry reps like BMW Canada v-p Christian Feilmeier and “anti-car” journalists like the Star’s urban issues columnist Christopher Hume – to discuss exactly where this war was going.
Both groups discussed the brutal tactics employed in this conflict (the push for compact “city cars,” the effectiveness of ads for the TTC) but ignored one ruthlessly efficient weapon: apathy.
Like I said, “You may not know it” – must youth don’t really care about cars. Buying your first car is no longer the priority it once was; the freedom automobility provides has been forgotten; and most urban 20-somethings are perfectly content getting around on the TTC. There’s a good chance that you, as a York student, don’t even have a driver’s licence.
The car is slowly losing its status as cultural icon – and slowly losing ground in the war, but bike-riding ‘pinkos’ have nothing to do with it, and neither do registration fees. This shift is hard to explain, the result of many factors; some writers have pinned it on the fact youth today live in a “virtual world” where your cell phone or laptop is the number one object in your life.
Of my ten closest friends, I’m one of two with a valid driver’s licence. Those are numbers from the front lines that show that if there is a war, the body count is piling up on the cars’ side.
Apathy, of course, will mean victory for the anti-car side, and a dismal future for the auto as we know it.
I’m not trying to change that – though I probably should, seeing as my professional career as an aspiring automotive journalist is inevitably tied into the future of the automobile – and I’m not enlisting in Ford’s army. I’m just saying that if you didn’t know you were signed up in a war, you are. You represent an entirely different sort of demographic, and while you aren’t thinking about the auto industry and its defenders, the auto industry is thinking about you.