Social and Economic technology - 5.2. Social Impacts from a Sociological point of view.
Rural Mobility - What Does it mean today?
Living in a rural car based economy.
The ideals of village life and a village based culture are currently looked upon with envious nostalgia. This is because it offers something to the participants that clearly we were intended to have. It has been destroyed by advances in industrialization, and a pressure for large scale centralization, which back then made an economy more efficient. Following this, the car based economy has produced an expectation for individuals to be prepared to move about without a second thought. This 'freedom to move' applies from travelling vast distances to obtain an item of shopping or a dental appointment, to a willingness to move house to a completely new area in order to step up a single rung in a jobs career ladder. This has spiralled into a vicious circle. Car travel is no longer a freedom in the countryside, it is a painful unavoidable necessity to live. Yet it is not inclusive. The young, the old, and special needs people are more and more excluded and made helpless, and discriminated against by it. It is also economic madness. Retailers are no longer local, yet there is a disproportionate cost, both in man hours and in the direct car cost to move goods and services that last distance from the retailer to where they are needed. It just does not make sense.
The vicious circle of travel creating a need to travel further and faster is not sustainable, as exasperated by the roads crisis. Artificially propping up 'public transport' is not a solution. There are fundamental intellectual reasons why people just do not want to travel that way. The solution is to invest in ways of obviating the need to travel in the first place.
Most important, too much mobility destroys any sense of identity. There are identity replacements, such as football team allegiance. It is very debatable if these really are satisfying basic anthropological needs. It is known that too much identification with, and devotion to, a work environment completely cut off from family causes family break up. This scenario is most often created as a result of a lack of any satisfying identity within home activities much more than instinctive workaholicism.
The influx of 'English second home owners' are accused of destroying the culture of traditional Welsh strongholds. Neither artificially selectively fixing the price of the housing, nor masses of negative legislation to artificially enforce a minority language is likely to have any impact on this, other than to raise ethnic tensions. The way to solve this problem is for the Welsh to fill those houses with their own grown up children and their families. The whole basis of the culture would then change from the transitory atmosphere of the car based economy into exactly what they are really trying to achieve. Similar, but less well defined observations could be made about most other geographic areas of rural culture. Yet it stands to reason this can only take place if the younger generation is not put at a standard of living disadvantage by staying with their cultural identity.
Whilst a long motorway journey, or even a traffic jam, may appeal to a sense of 'freedom', it is not real enjoyment to a real freedom at all. It is the most irritating and highly regulated activity ever routinely performed. Yet where the traveller is going rarely has any inherent quality over where he/she is coming from. Travel freedom is a relative concept. The distance travelled is dictated by the ability to do it, and the need to do it follows from there. Nobody needs to live in England and daily commute to Australia. Nobody really needs to live in one place and regularly have to travel to another place even fifteen miles away.