What's wrong with Car Free Day?

[andygates]

From our intranet:

[Car Free Day aims] to encourage us all to leave our cars at home and explore other options for getting to work. Organisations across Devon have previously participated in the day, with staff using tandems, space-hoppers, wheel-barrows, rowing boats, skateboards and piggy-backs to get to work, as well as more ‘normal’ sustainable travel options. This is a fun day with a serious underlying message as transport is one of the biggest contributors to our carbon footprint.

Space hoppers.  That's what's wrong with car bloody free day.  It's a one-off, a silly smug novelty that does nothing to apply pressure where pressure needs applying.  You want to cut driving to work?  Cut parking spaces.  The Unions will whine that it unfairly hits the lower-paid staff, well, tough: driving to work is a luxury.  If you can't afford to drive forty miles to work on your modest salary, move closer or get a bus or change your damn job.

You want to boost cycling?  Covered bike racks where staff can see them.  A memo to managers not to be shirty to people who turn up in weatherproofs.  Our bike racks fill in a delicious parody of predict-and-provide.

You want to boost bus travel?  Tickets at a reasonable price from where people live to where they work.  It's not hard (it just may not be as profitable but hey, you did sell the bus companies).  Call 'em sub-prime or social routes and insist that the companies serve them or take away their licences.

You do not have a right to drive cheaply to work.  You have a responsibility to get to work on time and a responsibility to not squander your wages on tat when you've mouths to feed.

Entitlement culture, it's the thing that will kill the west (if hurricanes and bird flu don't get to it first).

Comments

Curious.

[n-decisive.livejournal.com]

So, what would you do to fix the entitlement culture? Perhaps it'd be best for the hurricanes and bird flu to do them all in, but that'd take a lot of decent sorts away, too...

Re: Curious.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

We've grown up entitled. All that will fix that is for our kids to face real hardship. So, either we fix scarcity and end up with an Iain M Banks style of post-scarcity Culture in which the idea of "entitlement" is itself obsolete, or we all starve in the squalid wake of Peak Oil.

But mostly I'll try to blame credit and MTV. Credit (which has driven Western capitalism since the mid 1700s) for offering easy loot; and MTV for blinging up everyone's aspirations.

Re: Curious.

[n-decisive.livejournal.com]

All that will fix that is for our kids to face real hardship.

There are certain people who are giving me grief about letting my daughter move to Seattle and take a year off before starting college. They think she's going to ruin her life.

Thing is, she hasn't had it too hard, even if she was the one of the only kids in her class who had chores, had to earn extra money by doing extra work around the house, and had to let us know where she was. The trade off was that she also got to be open about things because there wasn't any condemnation. Despite those things, she still has some entitlement issues. She's better than most, but they're there.

It's my belief that taking the year off won't ruin her life, it will improve the person she is because it's not going to be as easy as she thinks. Nothing wrong with that.

You're right about it being something a generation learns as they grow up, but I can't blame all of the entitlement problem on the same things you do. They definitely play a big part, but some of it's because even liberal parents shelter their kids. Sheltering leaves them with a false sense of security, allowing the other contributors to entitlement to have an increased impact.

Re: Curious.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

I mean by a generation that we grew up fat and secure; we had electricity and our parents had jobs. Despite wrinkles, there were no major wars, recessions or famines. I'm talking about the really basic stuff.

Re: Curious.

[n-decisive.livejournal.com]

Ah. I thought you meant the more specific stuff. :)

We'll have to see how long the recession we're supposedly not in yet lasts. It could dramatically impact my daughter's age group as they look for educational funding and jobs.

I'd prefer that we didn't have a major wars, though.

Re: Curious.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Just wait for the Colombia water war with Mexico... or the Canuckistan/Russia Arctic oil war, in which you guys play proxy...

Re: Curious.

[n-decisive.livejournal.com]

Aw, but I thought we'd start off with a Native American uprising triggered by fishing rights!

Seriously, though, there are some things I could wait an eternity for and not mind a bit.

What will the UK equivalent be, do you suppose?

Re: Curious.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Energy spats over Russian control of natural gas, probably, or some sort of horrible scrappy police action along the northern Mediterranean as north Africa gets uninhabitable and a wave of people try to migrate north. That one's going to be nasty.

Re: Curious.

[n-decisive.livejournal.com]

I can see how a police action might occur. Seems to me that we could face a similar issue as more Latin Americans attempt to flee desperate conditions in their own nations.

We're just a bit screwed in the future, aren't we?

Re: Curious.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Only if we try to play Canute and resist the tide. If we manage migration sensibly (defuse the old-guard bigots and scared masses somehow) it could be no big deal. But there will be a thread of politicians who will go on about walls (like you now have with Mexico).

[jonnycowbells.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about this the other day but in relation to holidays. I can't get over people taking their kids out of school because it's so expensive to go on holiday while school's out. There's a cunning solution to this problem - take less expensive holidays. If you think it's too expensive to go to that 4 star resort in Portugal in August, this is not because the ministry for education and the holiday companies are ganging up on you, it's because you're poor and the world doesn't owe you a living. Suck it up. Go camping. Or don't buy that flat screen TV - keep the 5 year old CRT that works perfectly well ("It's only 28 inches" does not qualify as "not working") and spend the extra grand on the holiday if you like. Or on healthy, organic food for your fat kids.

It drives me up the wall, it really does. I say let's go for zero tolerance. Let's talk in very loud voices about how it pisses us right off when people want something for nothing. I pay my taxes and social security contributions and you don't hear me complaining about it, but I do it so the state can give these people a baseline of respectable living and they can bloody well appreciate it. I don't do it so they can whinge when they don't get more than the one UK-based holiday a year that my parents got. Where are ration cards and conscription when you need them, eh?

Ahem.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

A fat handful of truancy notices and suspensions ought to get people's attention.

[jonnycowbells.livejournal.com]

Yes, and some lynchings. Don't forget the lynchings.