Oldjohnw wrote:What a dystopian nightmare! State controlled movement. Big brother if ever there was. Individual freedom and agency removed.
"Individual freedom and agency" .... the prime cause of so many ills, harms, degradations and even extinctions, when awarded to we humans. I suppose anarchy might work - for the robber barons at least. For details, see large swathes of Yankland.
In Cugel Land there will not so much be a Big Brother as a lack of certain opportunities. These lacks will squash the opportunities for "individually free agents" to go about enjoying their freedoms at the expense of a great lack of freedom for various others. For example, none of that Clarksonesque car driving and fetishism at the expense of the freedom to walk or cycle - either literally, because of permanent car-bite to the legs, or figuratively because no one in her right mind would risk walking on the pavement right next to Bill the Yob and his mates having another race in their claptraps. Also, the city dwellers will not be dying so soon of smog. Or having to go to hospital all the time for a lung-fix.
But if all this is a bit confusing - the calculus of freedoms, duties and so forth - I invite you to begin your enlightenment via the arrangement of a taxonomy of "individual freedoms and agencies" into a schema in which the costs and benefits to the various agencies interacting, one with another or altogether, are calculated. If you put it all in a spreadsheet containing weightings to the freedoms and duties, along with the associated harms and benefits, it will be possible to quickly look up those values for various human doings, such as, "Going on a holiday in the car from Pitlochry to Lyons via a ferry". Or, "Driving to the hospital very fast through several towns and villages because it's an emergency".
Who knows what such a cost-benefit calculator will reveal? Well, we can be sure it will reveal that car habits have a very large set of costs and not really that many benefits. Without the calculator, though, the several months of pleasurable driving before you run over little Sally playing inadvisably on the pavement along your route, as you make a phone call, will blinker you to the vast harm-costs of tomorrow with the the small pleasure-benefits of yesterday, today, tomorrow, the next day and ...FIN!
As to the hospital - well, vote for those who will bring back the local ones; or move nearer to one if you need it every other day.
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And here's another perspective on the matter....
Like all fields that are created and governed by evolutionary processes, the cultural field of human behaviours, habits and procedures presents a range of niches within the cultural environment which tend to provide & encourage, or limit & discourage, various possibilities. Moreover, if a behavioural niche that is currently filled by a particular behaviour (such as transporting oneself in a car) is extant, it can prevent the evolution of alternatives within that niche (travelling).
But the corollary is that if that behaviour niche is emptied of the current occupant (travel by car, in this example) this provides the opportunity for alternatives to evolve. Often the evolutionary pace is high, as the environment demonstrates this behaviour-niche very clearly when the previous occupant (car travel, in this example) goes away. Everyone knows it is there.
What would fill the travel-gap, were the cars to be made extinct? It might be bikes, buses, AI electric taxis or something completely different. (I favour trolley buses myself, as they are nice things from my yoof).
But it might be that the cultural niche (lots of travel by humans, all over the place) gradually closes as the humans realise they don't really want to travel all over the place. After all, "here" might now be a lot nicer than "there" if "here" is now car-free.
Cugel
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes