Why Australian Love Cars
There’s no denying it – Australians love cars and travel. As a population, we are engaging with personal transport in a way seldom seen in any other part of the world in the last half a century. It’s defining the way we live, and it’s also transforming how we work and play in parts of the world deeply suited to jumping headfirst into one of the best road trips of your life…
There is a certain sense of history about it – Australia’s road network has inevitably been borne out of its sheer size. It caters to personal transport and the car like nowhere else – US style highways look like country lanes in comparison to the roads you’d be able to find out here…and the population density in some areas is so low even in the towns that a subsidised public transport system physically wouldn’t be viable.
According to this article in the Guardian, there are 53% more cars in Sydney alone than there were in 1976. Often, in large cities the establishment would rather build more roads than they would railways or bus lanes.
You see, the Australian’s sense of freedom is why the car is so entrenched. Personal freedom – the freedom of where to travel, when to go and how to get there – it’s quite fairly deep-rooted into the psyche, and naturally, the car seems the only sensible option. There is a sense of indulgence, and honestly, when you are surrounded with so much space, what else would you want to do but put your foot down?
I’m sure this is familiar, but just to impress the point as to how much we like our cars follow this link
The car industry in Australia might be in a state of flux, but the popularity of the racing scene here and the speed at which people are taking to the road is increasing every year. There is no doubt the car will continue to build on Australia’s foundations, and offer an increasing amount of variety and options of where to travel for locals and visitors alike. As Oliver Milman says, the bracing liberation and the cult of the car is deeply entrenched.
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Regina says:
Now we need compare Canadian and Australian drivers!
November 22nd, 2013 at 1:30 am
Jim says:
Cars are popular everywhere and certainly there are connotations of “freedom” in the popular culture (though how free do you feel crawling along in first gear near a jammed tollway on or off ramp?) but going by the massive rise in the use of trains in our cities and for long distance tourist travel, in the last two decades, so are trains. It depends on situation and availability what people will use. Trains are a far better investment for accessing high density places like the inner city than motorways. Encouraging people to drive down a new motorway to work in the inner city is only going to worsen inner city jams.
November 22nd, 2013 at 8:51 am