by Gary C. Gibson

Created on: December 19, 2009

In the United States owning a car is culturally essential. To go without owning one or driving one for years is paradoxically considered unusual. Thus it is that I can write about that topic on this sub-culture page. Being 55 I can sat that I owned a car for just three or four years as an adult in the U.S.A., and found it challenging to live without one.

The basic logic of owning a car was to replace a horse drawn vehicle for farm to market journeys. Because automobiles and trucks were immeasurably superior to horse drawn vehicles for speed and power, and as the United States had the world lead on automobile mass production and oil development it was a felicitous bit of economic grace that ownership expanded all over the nation. Road construction and mechanization were de rigueur. The problem today is just too much of a good thing. The environment is being harmed, the economy is being outsourced because the auto-gas culture is now foreign owned largely, and human health and personal inventiveness are in decline.

Cities today just don't need the presence of cars-yet U.S. cities are jam-packed with them and the air fouled for breathing. Innovative technology substitutions for city automobiles just don't happen-some buses and light rails exist, yet even moving sidewalks such as around the London Science and Technology Museum could find value in major U.S. cities. 

Until the prosperity of the 1990s American hitchhiked not uncommonly if they could not afford a Greyhound or Amtrak ticket. Sometimes people hop on freight trains-and that can be quite dangerous in several respects-I don't recommend it. If without transportation maybe look for work in the transportation industry on a cruise ship, or on a tug boat out of Louisiana. Some go to the free truck driving schools (you must work for the company after graduating for a year or two) if they have a passenger license to get a CDL driver's license. Others have enlisted in the military and go to basic, A.I.T. and probably Afghanistan if they are lucky. Today it would be a good idea to stay in college and get a degree as a nurse or physicians assistant and then work to buy a sailboat to live on.

I rode bicycles about 30 or 40 thousand miles in America over about 15 years searching for paint contracting work and generally sleeping outside in a tent So often I thought of how electric powered ultra-light go-carts or very high-tech sit-down bikes with an extra electric fuel cell wheel motor could have tripled my daily

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