The allegory doesn't work, because cars don't have fictional destinations

This is a guest post from my friend Robert Dorking.

As I cycled up the Dulwich Road to Brixton on my morning commute today, I watched as, twenty yards ahead of me, the cheap silver moped crawled out to the right, past the blinking indicator light. We've seen it a thousand times before -- on the television adverts, and on the back of the bus. The forgetmenot blue Micra turned, of course, and the plastic moped crunched. The rider slid and bounced neatly onto the far pavement, breaking a few fingers along the way. The paramedics arrived only a couple of minutes later, but he had already ignored their advice and was back on his feet.

It is my thesis that car drivers are a fat repellent pulsating parasite on this city. These lazy selfish speedophiles do not just make our streets a more dangerous, stressful and all-round unpleasant place to be, they jeopardise the future of the planet as a whole. The problem is so large and so fundamental that it is difficult to grasp the extent of it. Drivers kill and maim nearly four thousand non-motorists on London roads each year -- a figure small enough that, if one prefers to travel through dark tunnels, one might never even have seen one smashed and lifeless body. But it's a figure an order of magnitude higher than those killed in any terrorist assault on our city.

But whether you have witnessed a driver killing somebody or not, you can bet that drivers are intruding on your freedoms every moment of every day. That dank concrete underpass, this rusty pavement fencing, those fifty yards from St Pancras Church to Euston Station that take ten minutes to walk. The still summer days when you wheeze in the smog and the freezing winter evenings when theCharing Cross Road kettles the tourists and touts until everything boils over. The road through the public park, the ambulance stuck in traffic. Centrepoint, Hyde Park Corner, Parliament Square and St Paul's Cathedral, cursed by the car even when none are present.

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The London journalist Crispin Sunny disagrees with my assessment. He is a champion of this city and a long time activist and campaigner for improvements to its built environment and transport system. He doesn't drive. He cycles everywhere, and he must surely have witnessed the taxi driver who pulls in for a fare without checking what's in the lane to his left. He must have been passed too close for comfort by the great ugly Range Rover that is speeding up the bus lane to pull in front of the car that is stubbornly obeying the limit, just in time to pass the lights as they go from amber to red. He must have been waved through the puddle of blood, glass and oil by the bored policeman while the fire crew cut the roof off the BMW.

But he tells me that my words will be ineffective -- nay, harmful to this cause. My militancy, he says, is alienating the people we are trying to reach out to. Stop calling drivers "parasites", he demands, and start educating them about the need for a safe and pleasant built environment. Eradicating the car is an unrealistic and unnecessary aim: we can achieve a pleasant environment with more zebra crossings and traffic wardens; safety with more sleeping policemen and speed cameras. "Over ninety percent of our city's adult population holds a driving license," he says, "and most of them barely even break the law, half the time. Criticising them for their most valued and cherished possession, the car, and the ideal that it represents, will just turn them away."

I point out that sleeping policemen are ineffective -- indeed, make driving more erratic -- and that most councils don't bother with them these days.

He changes the subject and starts talking about the history of the motor car. "What year was the Model T Ford introduced?", he asks me. I do not know. "That's the problem with you militant cyclists," he says. "You're so ignorant of the historical context of driving. How can you propose to criticise the car when you do not even know how many trim lines were offered on the 1935 Ford Model 48 Roadster? Perhaps if you had ever tried to polish a fan belt, bleed the radiator, or top-up the spark plugs, as I have, you would be a little moreunderstanding."

His driver friends nod wisely. I point out that few drivers would know these facts either, and that it is likely largely irrelevant to their everyday driving experience.

"Not to real drivers," he says. "Sure, an SUV or escort driver might be crass enough to be unaware of the subtleties of his vehicle's history. But a mini orprius, or good old fashioned jaguar driver consider these to be crucial to the understanding of their experience. Volvo drivers understand their importance. You, on the other hand, know nothing of these, and yet you presume to impose a congestion charge, and use fuel tax to fund tube upgrades."

I felt a little bad. When he put it like this, was it really fair to tax drivers to pay for infrastructure?

"You're even ignorant of your own history," he continued. "Cyclists like to think that they are the ethical ones, with their zero emissions and negligiblecontribution to road congestion. But some cyclists break the rules of the road too, you know. Look at you: you still haven't bought a replacement for the front light that you said was stolen weeks ago!"

I had to admit that this was true, though in my defence I protested that it is mid-summer, and so I have done little cycling after dark.

But he continues, finishing with a thought provoking lesson from history. "Hitler was a cyclist," he said, "and look at the crimes he committed in the name of a cyclist society. Stalin, too."

And I thought it about for some time. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps we could all just get along, and seek to improve our safety and built environment together. And then, as the paramedic shone a light into the moped rider's eyes, a southbound Range Rover bumped up over the crashed moped's wheel, buckling it, rather than wait for a clear road to go around. As he drove south, and I set off north for work, I thought to myself, no. Cars are a fat repellent pulsating parasite on this city. Even the ones with perfectly nice drivers.

Afterword: I suspect that this is far less successful than the other pieces of fiction I've been putting together. The accident really did happen, on Wednesday, and I was considering the blogosphere's accommodationism argument (see slightly out-of-date index) at the time, and in the remainder of the journey things blended together to make a great big fail of a metaphor. But which I decided to post anyway -- if only because I felt like ranting about the ugly great parasite that is the car (and taxi). You are of course welcome to comment on where you think it all went wrong -- I'm new to this "making stuff up" business, and here to learn.