Mixing scales, hating cars

We've all done it. The glare. It's when, as a self-righteous pedestrian, you feel that a car has transgressed the boundaries of courtesy. It's when the minivan blocks the sidewalk that we're trying to negotiate with our wheelchair or our stroller. It's when the SUV nudges out beyond the stopping line, so used to going through stop signs with a "rolling stop" that it assumes you won't be needing that right of way. It's when you're riding your bike on the road, obeying all the same laws as cars, and you feel the draught of a car mirror blow past your elbow as a rusted out sedan, in a hurry to get to the mall, can't take the time to wait until there's room to pass you safely, so squeezes past you within a centimetre or two, hoping for the best.

Notice how I've written this. It's the car, the SUV, the minivan that I always seem to blame first. This morning, walking my kids to school, the route took us through a short maze of narrow residential streets. There are only a couple of road crossings we need to make where we're likely to encounter cars. One of them is very busy, teeming with speeding vehicles at this time in the morning. It can take us as long as ten minutes to find an opening to cross. We watch while cars make way for one another, yield the right of way so that cars entering this artery from other side streets don't have to wait too long. But a crowd of schoolkids and their parents, sometimes as many as nine or ten of us, have to wait and wait. The other crossing is quieter, but is sometimes used as an alternative to the main road that runs parallel to our little street. To make it a good shortcut, you have to run the stop signs. This morning, as I stepped off the curb with my kids, a minivan lurched up to the intersection, rolled into the crosswalk and then stopped with a surprised little jolt about halfway through when it realized we were going to cross. I glared at the sidepanels. I glared at the headlights. I glared at the tire. And then, almost as an afterthought, I glared at the driver.

What intrigued me was that it felt so natural to think of the body of the car as an extension of the driver. The vehicle was to blame. Its body was the driver's body. The driver himself, perched inside the temple of glass and chrome, was merely the nerve centre. The ganglion that the car used to control its body functions.

There are psychological experiments that show that when we use a tool, the boundaries of the tool are mapped into our brains as extensions of our bodies. The tip of a screwdriver becomes the tip of a finger. A violin bow becomes a part of the arm. A car becomes a carapace, an exoskeleton but, perhaps because it carries fuel and the ability to burn it to propel itself, the car becomes the being, the engine, and we, the drivers, become something much less...a cog in the gearwheel, a lever in the machine.

One of the problems we contend with in cities is the mixture of scales. Those of us inside cars live on one spatial scale. Those of us on our feet live on another. It's as if we react to that by somehow forgetting that there's another scale inside the car. That human being, perched on the leather throne behind the wheel, is really just another being on the same spatial scale as the the wet spot of bone and gristle that he could obliterate with one badly judged flick of his foot.

I'm going to try to spend more time looking through windows, into cars, and into the eyes of drivers. It won't make a difference to them, perhaps, but it will to me. If everyone did this, I'm not sure we'd need stop signs.