Glossary

Addictive - Strictly speaking addiction is a state where, as with nicotine, heroin, cocaine or caffeine, physical withdrawal symptoms follow inevitably from ceasing to use the addictive substance regardless of the person's attitude or anything else they do instead. Because the arousal of car driving can be achieved using any other kind of excitement driving as such can't be called an addiction, only a bad habit.

Anthropogenic - Generated or caused by humanity.

Biosphere Services - An "accountant's" look at the biosphere. One calculates the services provided by "nature" and estimates what it would cost for humans to manufacture them. These services include waste recycling, cleaning air and water, generating rainfall, making soil, pollinating crops etc. Perhaps needless to say their total estimated cost is much larger than all the human economies in the world combined.

Bunching - Something that happens with buses, the first bus stops to pick up passengers and the following bus catches up a bit, eventually they run immediately behind each other or leapfrog one another, creating long gaps with no buses. This is minimised with small buses that proceed to the next set down stop once the seats are full, reestablishing spacing.

Car Sharing/Clubs - A form of local self-help organization where neighbours pool their resources to buy, garage, clean and maintain only one car amongst many households, booking in advance and paying for their individual usage of the car. Posited as an alternative to the car culture it's actually a bogus alternative as it is a marginal activity of stable, middle-class, homogeneous neighbourhoods in Europe and North America; which is all it ever will be. One is splitting hairs to distinguish this cutesy middle class "social enterprise" from ordinary car rental, perhaps differing in hours of accessibility; but most car-clubs can be expected to devolve into simply all-hours car rental companies once the social novelty wears off and the stresses of collective enterprise take their toll. Good as an indicator of people's will to reduce their car usage, it's effectively meaningless in car traffic reduction, like voluntary car rental, its impact on traffic reduction is self limiting; once traffic declines, driving becomes more attractive and is resumed by many.

Cargo Cult - Melanesian phenomenon dating back to the 19th century; stone-age cultures amazed by the bounty modern shipwrecks yielded or later planes dropped or crashed with during WW2 ended up burning their food gardens as sacrifices to please these god's of "Cargo" and attract them to send a ship or plane; some then starved. All speculative booms and busts have the same irrational logic; almost any concept of divine providence is effectively the same thing.

Carpetbagger - American term dating from the immediate post civil war years 1865-75. They were agents of Northern businesses and solo confidence men (lackeys in their own land, evidenced by their lack of even a proper suitcase, instead carrying a bag made of carpet) who rode the charisma of victory by going South and were appointed to positions of authority to lord over and advise the rebuilding and restructuring of the devastated economy of the South. This profitable practice is a standard feature of American capitalism to this day, most recently called Economic Hit Men. The weapons industry is just the start of the US Military Industrial Complex; engineering, logistics and infrastructure firms and consultants move into the "reconstruction" phase following the US' every successful military adventure.

Car Pools - Another form of social enterprise imagined by middle class utopians as a way of reducing traffic. A group of people take turns to drive their car, typically to and from work, and pick up or drop off the other members of the group en-route. Obviously, if everyone did it, it would reduce traffic. Equally obviously, everyone won't do it because it is the worst of both worlds, as private transport one loses autonomy and privacy, as public transport it only runs once a day! Both this and car clubs are ineffectual because they are grounded in private logic. This is logic where one provides for one's social subset, and can forget the rest, palliating one's conscience, perhaps in the expectation of moral pay-off, whilst around one the problem snowballs. It functions on an assumption of limited responsibility where anything or anyone one doesn't like can be excluded or expelled; so it never actually deals with any objective problems in the world, only a subset of any problem. Thus expelled problems propagate, and the more monetary gain the private solution requires the more of the problem gets relegated to "externality". This logic drives the entire capitalist/privatizing world and is fallacious in the public domain as it presumes exclusion and expulsion as solutions to problems. The public sphere must include and provide for everyone and everything, absolute liability, and those who cannot be accommodated are not expelled but incarcerated. Only such catch-all logic can solve problems inherent in the structure of the civilization, such as the environmental and social disasters of automobile ascendancy.

Carriageway - A road regarded in its whole width, carriageway can be divided into traffic lanes, and these can be individually regarded as laneways. Carriageway does not include walkways or the areas which in Australian common parlance are called "nature-strips"; but in officialese are termed "reservations", i.e. areas set aside for future road widening.

Concept of the Car - A personally autonomous land motor vehicle capable of holding the self and some family or occasional companions, large enough to act as a cart for most of the materials required in human life or tow a trailer that can contain an even larger proportion of human life's requisites. The internal combustion engine is not essential to the concept, nor is metal, rubber or any particular material, wheels probably are but hovercraft could fulfil the concept; size and "death zone" are inherent to the concept as are unnatural speed & inertia and consequently collisions where that inertia is converted into destruction. Collision avoidance requires systemic control, abolishing autonomy and violating a fundament of the concept.

Contingent - Dependent upon some other variable, "iffy".

Conurbation - Multiple urban centres that have been linked by sprawl into the one urban mass, sometimes called a megapolis.

Dead Heart Effect - Where city centres become very corporatised and traffic laden; people and even cafe's and theatres can't afford to or don't want to reside there, so they are bustling in the daytime but cemetery desolate at night and on holidays. It's a waste of infrastructure replicated on a larger scale by the doughnut effect.

Displacement of Affect Psychological term for moving the feeling or sentiment generated by one event onto another, so both emotional responses seem inappropriate. The most common manifestation is someone showing inert unfeeling about something disastrous and then getting histrionic about trivia; but it is the mechanism driving many neuroses, most obviously "obsessive-compulsive disorder". It happens when people are irrationally committed to some object or person, as in religion, or the upset comes from a trusted provider, admired superior or feared source who they feel they cannot attack, or from an addiction, so it is usually a symptom of powerlessness. This is rife in our culture because so many issues destructive of life and the ecosystem are carried forward in greed and economic mania imposed from above, by those who get yay or nay decisions on peoples livelihoods, who most benefit from the headlong economic aggression of the rat race, the rich owners and employers; but any opposition is persecuted almost ubiquitously and imperils jobs and such, so usually the bad feeling is transformed, eventually into more economic aggression or other aggressions like with car driving. In terms of the real dangers facing us this usage of human arousal only to make more money, and more problems, is a mania, and mania is a subset and early symptom of psychosis, the kind of psychological problems which attend typical addiction.

Doughnut (or Donut) Effect.- On its way to and from the car intensive middle and outer suburbs, traffic funnels through inner suburbs and makes them hard to live in because of traffic, noise and concentrated pollution. They become unhealthy for children so those who can do so leave them for fringe suburbs leaving a vacated area that usually becomes cheap rent neighbourhoods where the poor and pensioners live, this wastes legacy infrastructure like schools.
The cheapest way to provide utility and social infrastructure to a city is a radial centric model, one hospital in the centre, pipes and electricity brought centrally and distributed. However in car based cities urban residential areas break up into a doughnut or ring shape which makes radial centrism impossible: people can't come from these fringe suburbs to a centrally located hospital or other infrastructure; pipelines, powerlines etc. can no longer be brought centrally and dispersed; all must be separately delivered to four or five points in the ring. Services already established and capital already paid for must be duplicated again and again at great cost, anything located on one side of the ring is unknown or too difficult to access for people on the other. So the doughnut effect radically increases the cost of running a city in everything from energy to physical artifacts and leads to the deterioration or abandonment of many services, police and ambulance, even garbage collection in some places.
It's another example of the car's fiscal black hole sucking in resources better spent elsewhere. It extends the problem of the "dead heart" of modern cities. Local governments are currently countering it with expensive "infill development" to try and attract well off younger people and boost their rate base, but they'll probably see the same flight and decline because of traffic, and this may speed official enthusiasm for car bans.

EPR Energy Profit Ratio - This is the degree to which an energy source multiplies the energy devoted to its acquisition, i.e. energy value of fuel divided by the energy devoted to its production. It isn't about monetary profit; but energy profit. An EPR of zero means the energy output equals the energy input, e.g. an oilwell that yields enough joule value of oil to smelt the rig and run the drill and transport the oil to where it's used for these purposes, but no more. Oil's EPR has been as high as 60 during the 20th C, and is currently under 20 and falling; the absolute best alternate energy EPR is Hydro-electric at about 11 and a few photovoltaic cells can approach 10, liquefaction of coal to produce artificial oil or gas yields an EPR of about 8. The best non fossil fuel (transport substitute) at the moment is methanol, whose EPR is under 3, Hydrogen's EPR is improving but still a fraction of that of the electricity needed to produce it; and will never exceed that of the electricity (as oil's did, and still does), whose best non fossil EPR is around 10. The bountiful energy of the 20th Century will not be replicated; i.e. 20th C western lifestyles are unsustainable, particularly with regard to transport.

Fiduciary Duty - being responsible with money on behalf of another.

Exchange Space/Interspace - Exchange space is the economic term for space required to be set aside for the transport of persons and goods which facilitates exchange thereof and thus supports economic activity, it is distinguished from storage space, production space and recreation/residence space. In a private building this might mean driveways, loading ramps, corridors and walkways etc. Because it is space set aside from productive use one economic school, of which the capitalism's idol, Adam Smith, was one, holds that exchange space should be minimised to optimize productive space. Recent studies have sought to find optimum levels of exchange space. Country roads are largely optimised exchange space, urban roads should be called interspace, it differs from normal landspace, stretch of desert etc., in that it abuts production, residential or consumption areas but is set aside from either. It is the inflation of urban interspace, roads and carparks, by the car that causes urban sprawl.

"Green Cars" - These are cars which are designed to reduce some of the environmental impacts of standard cars. Usually this is a reduction in vehicle emissions but it can range right up to making the car itself from hemp to reduce the environmental damage of car disposal.

Hegemony - Derived from the Greek word for "leader" it means dominance, usually of one powerful entity over other entities that are, notionally, its peers. A 20thC Marxist definition usefully applied the word to the control of all "presentable" or "realistic" thoughts and worldviews, a hegemony determines not precisely what is thought or done, but the range of things which can and cannot be thought or done. In this way the car culture dominates other transport thinking. In my usage hegemony differs from dictatorship only in that dictatorship is overt, explicit, visible and commits crimes of commission; a hegemony beleaguers alternatives (like presenting one with 4 doors and locking 3 of them) so one "freely" chooses the direction it wants one to go which it advertises as a "free" choice and a vote of support for its decisions, it assaults one's reason by representing any objections in the form, "but you tried the other ways, and they didn't work", it is covert, implicit, invisible and commits crimes of omission. Western democracies, controlled by a limited range of political parties whose agenda is linked to interests of corporate (business, union etc.) sponsors function overwhelmingly as hegemonies, Republocrats, Laberals, Labatives etc. Dictatorship prescribes and coerces, hegemony circumscribes and corrals. Corporate controlled political processes keep car reduction off the agenda.

Infill Development- This is development of space within the boundaries of existing urban infrastructure, as opposed to new fringe subdivision. It is being promoted by inner suburban governments to try and repair their rate crisis by attracting wealthier young people after decades of the doughnut effect. Ironically, as this group are high car users, currently the most successful design of these infills takes a full block and rebuilds the 19th century park square, minus the roads, a multi-storey square of apartments round a large central open space which excludes cars altogether, banishing them to garages under the apartments, with only external access, banning them from the central lawn or recreation area, and from sight of the balconies. This tacitly admits that the worst thing about city life is car traffic in itself; not it's air pollution. In the context of a future car ban infill becomes the whole of urban development.

Infill development 2 - Means exist for using liberated roadspace that don't involve the total demolition and redesign of neighbourhoods with narrower roads, which would demand too many resources and damage too much heritage, primarily by the partial closure of ingress roads to residential blocks and selling the former street ingresses as houseplots leaving a walking and cycle path beside the new plot, and selling block extensions to residents by narrowing the road. Villages blocks thus formed could span perhaps 5 hundred metres between bus roads and be accessible to taxis, emergency and other vehicles by one or two ingress roads. Infill housing expansion is low cost because major infrastructure is already in place, and helps arrest outer suburban sprawl because equal or lower priced housing becomes available within existing city boundaries, thus not incurring the high property costs that follow curtailing sprawl by statute. Liberated car-park plots would provide major infill opportunities without pressure to impinge on current parks and greenspace. It allows local governments more money available for social infrastructure, liberated from the current costs of extending physical infrastructure and maintaining roads, while increased numbers outdoors and reduced through traffic and slower getaway prospects improve security. Such infilling would improve local markets, thus minimizing transport requirements, and lowering public transport per capita cost. Low cost development, for a lower cost lifestyle, may well be crucial in surviving the energy crisis recession/depression without major social upheaval.

Infrastructure - the basic foundation buildings or installations that underlie the operations of an organization, in civilization, this is classically summarized by the words transmission and transportation; transportation and communication constructions, roads and bridges, rail, ports and mailboxes and offices, telecommunication wires and transmitters, pipes and wires pumps and generators for the provision of utilities like gas water and electricity, drains, sometimes the production facilities for these utilities, sometimes social service structures are included, schools hospitals, police-stations etc. The public infrastructure is (or should be) anything that goes beyond the property of any one private owner and crosses public land to another property, this includes all broadcast frequencies. A good old word for public infrastructure is "the commonwealth". Private organizations build their own infrastructure within their property, pipes, computer networks etc.

ITS Intelligent Traffic/Transport Systems - These are traffic management systems implemented primarily by traffic authorities. They range from systems currently used such as monitored traffic flows with traffic lights manipulated to maximize flow, to proposed computerized systems which control all arterial roads and remove the driving of the car to automatic systems until one want's to leave the controlled road. ITS's are either common sense interim management praxes at the lower end to futile techno-fantasy at the upper. Imagine a controlled highway, all cars lined up close to each other moving at the most safe and efficient speed and you have ... a very inefficient and expensive train! Even cars driven onto a train and driving off at stations would be more fuel and space efficient. Many at the techno-fantasy end of the spectrum betray the fixed idea and monomaniac fetishism bred and fostered under car culture hegemony.

Littoral - Of lands and waters on and near the seacoast, typically rich fishing and fish breeding areas.

Mercenary - It originally meant soldier of fortune or gun for hire, mercenary behaviour encompasses any action for monetary gain done without scruples, sensitivity, consideration of another or care as to what is damaged, this includes violence and murder. This is the natural attitude of a minority of people but not a majority behaviour except where the cost of living exceeds available income.

New Urbanism - A largely American based movement among architects and town planners. It strives to create better urban environments with better walking, natural areas and sometimes energy footprints by designing spaces for these activities and minimizing cars by controlling traffic flow with street design, sometimes it resorts to almost 19th century house spacing and square design. It takes a line of least resistance with regard to the car hegemony, eschewing car bans often in favour of "traffic calming" devices such as winding roads and roundabouts and often complete car permeability of neighbourhoods to minimise any particularly heavy traffic flow along one road. It has had some short term successes with residents who opt in to their subdivisions; but the neighbourhoods can be expected to be overrun by car parks and widened roads within a generation.

Personal Cars - Official statistics persist in calling them passenger vehicles; but the average is about .3 of a passenger so they're called personal cars here and this more accurately expresses their owners subjective possessive relation to them. The ambience of selflessness imbued by terms like "passenger cars", and "family cars" is an utter misrepresentation of their usual usage.

Poly-pharmacy - An illness caused by too many medicines. It arises from the uncalculated and untested interactions of the many different medicines some people use, each tested in itself but untested in combination with all others.

Regulation - (also regular, register, registration, registry) emerges from the Latin root, rex, regis, Regina, meaning king or monarch, inherently implying both external coercion and a unified authority imposing a standard. It has been humanity's only successful defence against tragedies of the commons.

Riparian - Of the area in and near a river.

Right of Way - The conventional term to describe the space in front of a car which need be vacant in order for there not to be a collision, describable as an area so long and so wide, e.g. 60 metres by 3 metres for a largish car moving at 60kph. Right of way once meant crossing rights, it's been adopted by the car hegemony to retain an illusion of respectability by being redolent with "rightness"; but I prefer a more empirical term, "death zone", a reserved area that is usually a permanently reserved tarmac road, stripped of vegetation, habitation or productive use and only crossable by people and animals, and garnering a toll of animal and human casualties. Any fast vehicle of course needs a death zone for its functioning; reducing the number of vehicles is the only way to minimize landspace devoted to death zones.

"Smart Cars" - This tag represents a whole variety of improvements to the basic car, from fuel regulation, auto-turnoff to navigational aids to proximity sensors to help avoid collisions, all made possible by computerization. They can reduce the fuel consumption and mitigate traffic jams by monitoring traffic flow and recommending a less congested route. All up, they are expensive and their impact upon reducing the car's environmental damage is marginal because, unfortunately, they can't create a car smart enough to fold into a timewarp with a microscopic portal or travel and park in hyperspace instead of the street.

Transpiration - Water evaporating from leaf surfaces, like perspiration this has a cooling effect.

Urban Sprawl - It's necessary to distinguish this from urban growth. Many cities in the 3rd world are growing because their population is increasing; largely this isn't sprawl, despite geographic expansion, it's growth. Sprawl is the quotient of geographic growth that is higher than population growth. Most first world cities are not growing at all in population, yet continue to grow in area. Some argue sprawl is independent of the car, as some "sprawl" tendencies were visible along train lines before the car, but this was no such thing, merely small, medium density townlets around train stations. The car is the biggest cause of low density sprawl, because of it's space demand, road and parking amount to 40% of all urban area in Australian and American cities, and 50% of new development. On most national maps cities should not be represented by symbolic dots in countryside, but as visible areas of tarmac.

 

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