The net result is that London rush-hour trafic averages about ten miles per hour; in Tokyo, cars average twelve miles, and in Paris, seventeen. Indeed, riding a Victorian technology in central London—the bicycle— during peak hours is faster than traveling by car.43 By comparison, the average daily travel speed of thirty-three miles per hour in Southern California, where there are probably more miles of freeway than anywhere else in the world, may seem impressive. However, as a result of a much lower population density than European cities, the advantage of speed is ofset by the much longer distances required to travel to work.
The irony is that a horse and buggy could cross downtown Los Angeles or London almost as fast in 1900 as an automobile can make this trip at 5 p.m. today. Similarly, the speed of air transport has a wavering history. Whereas by 1958 travelers were going five hundred and fifty miles per hour in a Boeing 707, today we go no faster than in 1958 but rather slower due to the need to conserve fuel.44
I noted above how destructive car speed is in terms of road deaths worldwide. It is also a major cause of environmental pollution and international conflict in the imperial pursuit of fossil fuel. What is less remarked on are the ways in which the dominance of automobiles can lead to slow-down. The incongruity of the private car is that the accelerated mobility achieved in the “conditioned atmosphere and internal music of this windowed shell” is predicated on the sedentary human body.45 Rather like the experience of surfing the Internet at a computer screen, the driver is both stationary and mobile at the same time.
In afluent societies where the automobile dominates, the car is deeply entrenched in the ways in which we inhabit the physical world. In redefining movement, the car contains contradictions, as Virilio warns us, speed, gridlock, and a sedentary lifestyle. Indeed, the car is profoundly implicated in the recent finding that much of the world’s population is physically inactive. According to the medical journal Lancet, this increases the risk of many adverse health conditions, such as cancer and diabetes, and is therefore a major public health issue.46 Worldwide, it is estimated that physical inactivity causes 9 percent of premature mortality, or more than 5.3 million of the 57 million deaths that occurred worldwide.
Time and Motion
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