We've seen how civilised countries squeeze people as much as possible when it comes to driving and owning cars, and strive for them to use public and collective transport.
With the strict environmental requirements the governments have imposed, it has become very hard for certain cars to drive in the streets... old cars, for example, which give off a lot of exhaust, and if you go to replace parts of the engine you won't find spare parts any more, because the factories have stopped producing them.
And car graveyards appeared for the first time... and a new trade began of crushing these old cars... and melting them down as metal.
But the carmakers didn't stay silent, and they came out with a new alliance.
An alliance with the makers of electric motors and the electricity companies.
And electric cars and the "hybrid" appeared.
And the "hybrid" is a car with two engines... an engine running on ordinary fossil fuel... and an electric motor... and as long as it is running on fossil fuel it charges the electric motor... so that it can run on it later.
And they told us that these cars are safe for the environment.
And the truth is that this is the biggest lie in the history of the car industry.
Where are the batteries of these electric cars manufactured? There are special factories... using acids and molten plastic and carbon plates and manufactured products, and they pollute the environment just the same!
So what they did with the "carmaker - electricity" alliance is that they shifted the problem across time and place, and that's all. The pollution is still there... the heat of the engines and the batteries is still high... it disturbs the environment in itself.
In addition to other problems that concern you as a car consumer.
With the scarcity of fuel, which is diminishing around the world, a time will come when this car is worth nothing.
Just a crouching iron monster that cannot move anywhere.
Remember what prices were like when goods were transported by rail, and how today, when they are transported by cars and trucks, their prices are affected by the price of fuel.
Remember how the big new cities, when they were being built over the past decades, were settled... very slowly, and many of them remained for years as ghost cities... despite the existence of roads for cars leading to them.
But cities really do flourish when railway lines and buses and means of collective transport are extended to them.
Imagine your anxiety over your children while they are driving cars... or even while they are riding a taxi or an Uber... compared with your peace of mind while they are on the metro.
Abandoning cars for means of collective transport is the first step that relieves you personally as a citizen. And for the third time... imagine the following.
Alexandria has put new cars on the city tram... the car takes 200 passengers per trip... at a rate of 15 trips a day... so we are talking about 3,000 people... riding this tram alone... as a means of collective transport.
Imagine cars became cheap... and suddenly you found, in the street that this tram passes through, 3,000 extra cars!
There would be no traffic flow... and you wouldn't be able to breathe from the pollution and the exhaust... and you would come home every day as if you had been possessed by a madness of horns and the lead your body has been saturated with and the noise and the crush and the eternal grind. You wouldn't even be able to walk on your own two feet on the pavement.
And instead of waking up just an hour before your work... you would have to wake up three hours before it... and take 3 hours to get home from it.
An unbearable life.
That is why the only solution is collective transport. And that is the state's role here... extending metro lines and railways and trams... rolling out new, clean, humane buses... encouraging people to ride them.
Public transport is a national security matter for any country.
But the solution is absolutely not for cars to become cheap and for everyone to buy them.
In time, things will settle down... and the cars will be few in the streets... and only a few will ride them... and the roads will clear and the pollution will decrease and the moods will improve and the noise will diminish and life will be better.
These photos are from Cairo... downtown in the '70s... when cars were rare... and now the same place... when cars are available on instalments and within reach and it is easy for anyone to buy a car.
Which one would you like to live in?
So the solution is for you to let it rust, however cheap it gets. The solution is for you to let it rust forever.
#Let_It_Rust
#Let_It_Rust_Forever
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Previous posts:
1 - https://bit.ly/2WA5W5m
2 - https://bit.ly/2SaiIcp
3 - https://web.facebook.com/hammouda.m.hammouda/posts/2374474132565332