I'm not a bike guy. I don't know what brand my seat is. I think my gears are Shamano. (That's a brand, right?) I think that's how it's spelled. I'm not going to look it up. I saw it on the window of a bike shop once. I think that's what I have. I just use my bike to get around and to get my kids around. It's just a tool for me. That's pretty normal here in the Netherlands.

I've done some hacky repairs on bikes, not because I especially care about bikes but because I especially care about autonomy. I don't like being controlled. If someone can lock me in, control my ability to fix my main mode of transportation, they can control me. I use open source software for the same reason. My instinctive hatred of cops comes from a pretty similar place.

I'm not a bike guy. I'm an anarchist. That's where I'm coming from in this text. I'm not here for the bikes. I'm here for the liberation. And it is specifically to anarchists that I am speaking. If you happen to be a bike person and also an anarchist, great. You're not alone. I hope this lines up with your existing critique, or helps you fill out your critique, of car culture. If you happen to be a bike person and not an anarchist, well… I'm working from a set of assumptions you may not agree with but enjoy the ride. If you are an anarchist who does not already identify motosupremacy, the enforcement of the motorcar as a form of transit at the exclusion of all others, as an oppressive system and a structural component of the interlocking systems of oppression that we oppose, well, I have some words for you to read.

Why are we not “free” to own cars?

I'm inclined to just point at The Social Ideology of the Motorcar and walk away, but I won't. I will dump the first few sentences here before moving on though:

The worst thing about cars is that they are like castles or villas by the sea: luxury goods invented for the exclusive pleasure of a very rich minority, and which in conception and nature were never intended for the people. Unlike the vacuum cleaner, the radio, or the bicycle, which retain their use value when everyone has one, the car, like a villa by the sea, is only desirable and useful insofar as the masses don’t have one. That is how in both conception and original purpose the car is a luxury good. And the essence of luxury is that it cannot be democratized. If everyone can have luxury, no one gets any advantages from it.

Last time I started digitally yelling FUCK CARS into the void, in response to some nonsense or other, someone called me a fascist for “imposing my beliefs on them.” I think that's worth talking about, because bullshit arguments like that carry way too much weight around here.

So let's change the frame for a bit.

Why not slaves? I mean, why don't I have the freedom to own other people? You fucking know why. If you don't, I do not understand why you're reading this. Anarchists oppose hierarchy. We oppose systems of oppression. We oppose coercive authority. You can't own a person without using coercion. So that's pretty much off the table. The same is true for the wage system, since it's also a system that relies on coercion. (Sorry, not sorry, capital “L” “Libertarians.”)

But that's easy. We all agree on that. (We fucking better all agree on that shit.) Of course, you can't own people. That's obviously fucked up. Let's move on to objects.

What about the means of production? Yeah, just kidding. (Anyone coming from the bikes, not the anarchy, is gonna be really confused right about now.) Let's try something else.

Why not private jets? Fuck no, because of climate change, right? Of course. But let's pretend it's possible to have non-polluting jets. There's still a geometry problem. Jets are big. Everyone having one takes up a lot of space. Even if we skip the whole “someone has to pilot it” and assume that everyone has a pilots license, even small jets are very large. OK, so not everyone is going to want to fly their own jet, but even if a significant portion of the population wanted one that's just a lot of physical space for jets. They also take a huge amount of maintenance. Small planes crash all the time. What about cleaning those crashes up? What about flying near cities? There are a lot of people who aren't near an airport. Do they get their own runway? How do all those people land? We would have to build a lot more airports, and have a whole lot more flight controllers. How do we maintain all of that infrastructure? What about the noise? There are so many problems.

That's kind of why flying cars are always promised on and never delivered. They're a terrible idea that could never work.

When you start thinking through the logistics, even a bit, it just couldn't work. The thing is, cars don't really work either. It is economically infeasible to build a society around cars. Ignoring climate change, ignoring all the people killed, ignoring all the other problems, it's just logistically impossible to sustain. That's why it's collapsing.

Roads are expensive to maintain. They are so expensive that they simply aren't maintained for poorer communities. When they are maintained, they are often maintained at the expense of other things, like clean drinking water. Cars need parking. Parking decreases density. Decreased density decreases the tax base, but it also pushes up the cost of maintaining utilities because you need more of them. It wouldn't matter if you were using taxes or community labor, Capitalist, Communist, or Anarchist, at a certain point there's just more work than resources or time and the system collapses. This is what's happening all over the US. This is what happened in Flint, and why their water was poisoned.

Cars, as the social ideology of the motorcar points out, are a luxury good. Their value comes from the fact that other people don't have them. If a few people have them, it's possible to get places really quickly. It's convenient to park. It's relatively safe (for the people inside). But as soon as enough people have them, the roads become clogged, and the solution is always “just one more lane.”

But it's not just that it doesn't work. It's not just that it's a luxury. It's that this freedom comes at the expense of others. Every car on the road makes it less safe for pedestrians and cyclists. All the resources spent on maintaining fragile car infrastructure are not spent on pedestrian areas, bikes, trains, trams, and metros. The “freedom” to use a car is massively subsidized by society, including by those who don't use cars, either because they don't want to or because they can't afford them.

Cars are one of the most heavily subsidized things there are. Parking places, roads and highways, bridges and overpasses, even fuel, are all paid for by national and local governments, out of the pockets of everyone (including non-drivers) to benefit drivers. Drivers whose existence on the road makes other forms of transportation unsafe. Any freedom that comes at the expense of someone else's freedom is just a form of oppression.

But there are also specific intersections between motosupremacy and other forms of oppression. Aside from that, there are other reasons to oppose cars, beyond what I've already outlined. Let's walk through them, in no particular order.

Cars are Ableist

Every damn time anyone says anything about cars, some motherfucking sea lion charges in and starts barking, “but what about disabled people!” Meanwhile, a bunch of people DM me and say, “yeah, I'm disabled, and I feel isolated/oppressed/generally bad about myself because I can't use a car.” By “disabled” these people invariably mean “people with limited mobility” and completely forget the entire rest of the range of people with visual limitations or cognitive differences that make it either illegal or inadvisable to drive. I, in fact, am one of them.

Like about 10% of the population, I have ADHD. Driving is both extremely dangerous and extremely boring. This is the worst possible type of activity for a person with ADHD. The only way I got through my years of driving was by blasting loud music constantly whenever I got in the car. I'm so glad everyone survived. Not everyone is as lucky as me. I'm also so glad I live in a country where I'm not forced to climb into a giant, people crushing, mobile surveillance units that require legal documentation to operate every time I get my partner oat milk.

But let's go back to those folks with mobility challenges.

When I lived in the rural US, I never really saw folks in wheelchairs. It was almost as though they didn't exist. But one day I was over at a guy's house, and he was in a wheelchair. The house wasn't really accessible. He talked about how he didn't really go out much. It wasn't until much later that I realized he couldn't afford one of the expensive specialized cars that people with his type of mobility limitations need to be able to drive. Instead, he had to rely on other people to get him around.

People with physical disabilities that make them unable to drive can be trapped in their homes in car dominated places like the US. Meanwhile, places that are less car dominated, like the Netherlands, have bike lanes. Mobility devices like electric wheelchairs and scooters can use those bike lanes.

Motonormitivity invisiblizes people with limited mobility, especially if they're poor and rural. It robs them of their independence by forcing them to use cars. Even if there are cars available for people with some disabilities, there are a lot of disabilities that just make driving too dangerous. In the US, people tend to not know that these people exist or how many are in their neighborhood. They do not know about these people, because car culture keeps them prisoners in their homes.

Cars are Ageist

It can be nice to think of “disability” as a thing that happens one day to other people, or as a thing other people are born with. But the thing about ability is that it comes and goes with age.

I remember my grandmother swerving all over the road, before her cataract surgery, before she lost her license for good and needed my mom to move in with her. Before she had to sell her house and move in with my aunt. She could have had so much more independence. At 95, she was still able to walk around and do most things for herself pretty well. She just couldn't drive safely. They all could have had so much more independence.

Old people in the US often don't interact with society. They're hidden in homes. They're shuffled off to care facilities, where they can be safely isolated from the working population, the population who must not be reminded of their own mortality.

Here, in the Netherlands, where mobility devices can run in the bike lanes, elderly people can stay part of society for much longer. They aren't trapped waiting for someone to take them somewhere. Old people can just exist in the world. They can get older. They can look frail and still get around. There are still community living places for elderly people, sure, but they can remain independent for far longer then can be done in the US.

If you're lucky, perhaps, you will get old one day too. What will this be like for you? How will your society treat you? Will you be free to live and safe to move, or will you have to balance your autonomy against the danger that autonomy poses to others? Take a moment to imagine it. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Cars are Adultist

Of course, that ageism is on both sides. Children were some of the first victims of cars, many killed in the streets, as cars took the places they used to play. Americans who grew up in the 50s and 60s tell stories about running around their neighborhoods, freely, outside. But the cars they and their younger siblings bought slowly eroded that freedom for other kids.

I remember my mom getting me a bike. She had some fantasy about me riding around wit