Fuel madness

The strike at Grangemouth is about pensions entightlements. Its the kind of dispute that has grown in recent years - the French train drivers got ripped off in a similar way by the toadstool's government (see below) - and one that is going to get more intense as the crisis rolls on.
Best of Scottish to the strikers of course. This saga also shows the madness of British transport policy and, more generally, the Western adiction to the auto. No I'm not a tree hugger - but when politicians say ""People will have to be sensible and rational. I cannot guarantee that every garage forecourt will have petrol at that precise moment." I can only laugh. People are rational a lot of the time - but not when it comes to cars. The speeding, drink-driving, undertaking, mobile-using road raging frenzy of today's car journeys has arisen through the lack of transport choice. Car adverts present their products as free flowing 'virtual objects' that have open roads before them, governments subsidise road building at the expense of other modes of transport (one motorway layed in Britain recently cost £1000 a yard) and that's even before you get to the question of just why so much movement is required in the first place.

I am no different, I have an irrational hatred of the damned things, as if you couldn't tell, and can't even face learning how to drive, have you seen the madness on the roads lately? I hate being in the passenger seat too. There is a debt to be repaid at the end of the journey, but there never seems the means to pay it. The car taps deep into contemporary notions of what it is to be a modern functioning person. People are surprised, even, horrified when they hear I am 'handicapped' in this self-inflicted way. "But it's so useful", they say. I reply "Ah, but what is 'use'?" in pseudo Socratic way, but it gets me nothing but troubled smiles. It is there as plain as a jumped light, 'You are not a man if you don't drive'. Even the chap, recently, who was speeding through a built up area and ran over a baby and rendered her brain damaged for life, gets a lenient sentence. The aura of the car cannot be seen to be damaged.

I like to keep death of the roads and take the train.