Chances are that you own a car. I do not. In all truth, I may even be called an anti-car activist.
You will find that theme to be recurrent on this blog but for a first look at the problem, I will try to keep things simple and won’t go into details. In order to do so, let’s just review a little history and compare the machine to its owner in their most basic aspects.
When mister Benz patented the first of a long line of prestigious quality automobiles, it looked like this :
That was a gift to Modern Man from the Industrial Revolution and all seemed well. If nothing else, that mechanized tricycle did not cover the paved streets of the time with excrements as horse-drawn carriages did which was certainly seen as a benefit to the pedestrians of yore. The fact that it “pooped” in the surrounding air was not to be considered as outrageous by the general population for a while yet. Many brilliant minds came along to transform this contraption into a sleek and refined means of transportation ranging from the car that sent families on vacation to dreams like Ferraris and the likes.
So why would I complain? Well, here is one simple way to look at it. Cars and humans compete for ground occupation. On the streets, they do so in motion but they do so even more when the former is not in use. So let’s forget about the myriad of glitches that pit one against the other in daily use for now.
At rest, the human body is averaged to a 55 cm wide by 35cm deep rectangle of ground space ( at a given average height of 170 cm unnecessary to our purpose ). I will change those dimensions upward to 60 cm and 40 cm respectively. My reason for doing so is that in all comparisons that I will give on this blog, I find it more honest to over-evaluate numbers and statistics that further my purpose and lower those that go against it which accomplishes two things, namely covering possible mistakes in my research and showing the basic validity of my pretenses to be true beyond the margin of error. In accordance to said principle, I will give you an average for the dimensions of automobiles taken from the four most sold cars at time of writing. Those are the Toyota Corolla and Prius, Ford Focus and VW Jetta.
Widths are 176 / 149 / 182 and 177 cms respectively, again rounded down if only a little.
Lengths are 455 / 448 / 453 and 462 cms.
Averages then give us : 171 cm for the width and 455 cm for the length.
60 by 40 cms comes to a ,24 m2 surface for the human while
171 by 462 cms comes to 7,78 m2 surface for the automobile.
By those measurements, 31 standing humans occupy the same ground space as ONE car!!! WOW! It is however time to correct our formula somewhat. First, because the humans are rectangles and not 50 by 50 cms squares, only three of us would really fit into a square meter of ground. Second standing is a dynamic activity and swaying to and fro comes into play. Allowing for those two factors, we will give the square meter as containing only three persons.
Still, by that figure, a car covers as much ground space as 21 or 22 people, both being at rest. If we now divide the Earth’s human population ( 7.065 billions ) by 3 we would collectively occupy 2.355 billion square meters or 2.355 million square kilometers. We would all fit with elbow room in Algeria alone.
What if we all owned and individually used a car then? Well 2.355 million square kilometers times 22 would bring the area occupied by humanity to 51.810 million square kilometers or about a third of Earth’s land surface.
My question for today becomes : Does that sound reasonable to you?
Until that horrendous possibility arises, please have a good day, Tay.
Links :
http://www.toyota.com/corolla/specs.html
http://www.toyota.com/prius-hybrid/specs.html
http://www.ford.com/cars/focus/specifications/view-all/
http://www.vw.com/en/models/jetta/trims-specs.s9_trimlevel_detail.suffix.html/2013-jetta~2FS.html
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