driving in circles

Sometimes I promote walking in its own right, and sometimes I assume that if I beat up driving enough, walking will emerge as the winner. I realize that a more popular tendency is to posit a corrective for every driving evil: green cars to reduce pollution, green power to replace fossil fuels, local energy to reduce importing, bigger roads to reduce driving time.
The essential nature of the car, however, is rarely challenged. And the nature of the car is to move us huge distances daily. We want, apparently, to keep moving. We're like shopping addicts who take a lower interest rate as an opportunity to spend more. Each solution sees us driving more.

The problem of this approach, allowing each advance in automotive technology to allow us to drive more, is this: when we drive more, we create a social world that is described by a larger radius. In other words, if the new interstate system allows me to move from mile 10 from the city's core to mile 15 (the current average commute is 15 miles), I have increased my driving distance by 5 miles, or 50%. The social world described by my doing so, however, goes from a circle with a radius of 10 miles to a circle with a radius of 15 miles. The area of the social world has increased from about 300 square miles to about 675 square miles - over 100%. I'm not prepared to say what the right size for a social world is. But I think there are many people who feel relationally starved, socially ungrouped - they lack a sense of the tribe that cares for them.

There is, it seems to me, only one thing to do about the car's tendency to take us away from a sense of home: use it less. In other words, live in the world that is described by a pedestrian or bicycle scale.