Still Truckin’

Anti-car sentiment, even visceral car revulsion, has become fashionable for the urban and educated. For example, Jacob Bacharach, a novelist and New Republic contributor, recently tweeted that “the automobile is the drug at the very root of American rage and cultural dissolution” and that “driving is a synthetic opioid whose users’ rewired minds mistake dependence for freedom and physical and psychological misery for pleasure.” This feeling is overrepresented among those who staff London newspapers and New York magazines. Is Appleyard’s sense that the car’s day is done just groupthink, then, a journalistic cliché?