When you are car-free you forget about what travelling around is like for people who do not have their car-free-dom – in the UK it is suggested to be about 17 million households are car-free. Last post I wrote about my weekend ‘with van’ (we hired/rented one for a couple of days) – and it is amazing how much moving around by motor vehicle changes your experience of travelling and being alive.

As a child we pretty much always went by car. It was like a bodily reflex, you walked out of the front door of your house and got into the car. In total, like many children in the UK, I must have cumulatively spent weeks, possibly even months in a car. It is suggested the British adults drive 285,012 miles in their life time!

When you are travelling in a car you are in an enclosed space – perhaps unless if you have a convertible and the weather is good with the roof down. Being in that private enclosed box – your car – your perception of the world changes. Well mine does anyway, it happened on that weekend with the van – it’s like the rest of world becomes some indistinct backdrop that you are not really part of.

I feel detached and abstracted from the rest of the world in a car. You are not feeling the movement of air on your skin or any physical sense of effort to get from one place to another. You may well have the air conditioning and stereo on sat in your room on wheels – so you have your senses full occupied with those.

You might say it’s the same detachment if you are sat on a bus or train, but I think it is different. You need to get to those modes of transport, probably by walking or cycling to the bus stop or station. This means that you have felt and breathed more of the world enroute (although perhaps not ideal if there are a lot of fumes from traffic!) than just briefly walking down your drive, or crossing the road outside your house, to get into your car.

On a bus or train you are also not encased in some private space, but you are in proximity to others, and so able to directly sense more of the world around you which is not just in the interior of your car. Of course at times there are aspects of the world, and the people in it, that you might well have been happy to not have encountered on the train or bus!

You miss a lot in a car. I think life behind a windscreen/windshield dulls your sense of connection to the places that you are travelling through and between. Instead of being places of intrigue to explore as you move through them on your journeys, they become an inconvenient backdrop of interruptions to navigate past as quickly as possible.