Roads

There is no romance of the road here. The mythical holy roads - Highway 61, Highway 50 (the lonely highway), Thunder Road, Pacific Coast Highway - they all belong to another place. From an early age the roads here mean only one thing and it's not freedom; it's commute. Roads here are pure utility.

Possibly somewhere in the highlands or where the west meets the Atlantic it doesn't mean this, but everywhere else it does.

Non renewable finite resource commuting.

Hours upon hours frittered away. Concrete rivers running through the chaotic urban morphology. The thing is no one planned this, its jumbled and doesn't connect and goes the wrong way. A landscape constantly over written with a better idea, but the old one is there too, to complicate.

But still we churn out the cars, and we love the trap and we hate the trap because there was no other choice. Petrol prices, and insurance premiums and speed cameras and the endless traffic and still we continue mainlining because what else were you going to do.

Motorways are no freeways or highways. No motel, roadhouse, hitchhiker, hobo blues here. Only grey rain spray and traffic. Constant freight truck tailback.

Always surprising how many people are going somewhere in the same direction at the same time as you. Regardless of time of day, or the road, always someone going somewhere. So much so, that if you drive a road and see no one else it stands out in memory, you wonder what happened. But then you read that most journeys are less than 3 miles, and most people really aren't going anywhere. The towns and offices and shops must be empty because everyone is on the road, but they are not, where is everyone going?

Bundles of people travelling the same way, their time geography coalescing - so many space time paths heading the same way and forming the same prism over and over again. Work, home, shop, work, home, shop until you disengage.

The loneliness of the long distance driver.

Driving is almost always done alone, commuting in a car almost exclusively alone. (Commuting on a train or bus is also done alone, you happen to be sitting next to hundreds of people you never talk too). In the vehicle, its you and the radio. We distract ourselves with the radio. Listening to the radio and it seems most people driving are also listening to the radio, telling you where they are going, how long they've been traveling, with constant travel bulletin updates, even though it makes no difference to your journey, you are not turning back. How many people only listen to the radio in a car? Radio and driving, the perfect couple. Turn the radio off and you are alone, just you and the car and the background white noise. A modern day moving meditation if you so wish.

Stop projecting forward to the destination and see what happens.

The occasional indicator click and windscreen wiper swipe punctuate the monotony of the journey.

Then there are those communal driving experiences, the long drive, the big trip. When map reading was essential before sat navs made us all lose our sense of direction. The art of the long distance conversation, sporadic and interspersed with nothingness, miles and miles of it, long spaces, silence and then observation, it becomes a rhythm; hypnotic. In the other cars, the same is happening. The road treats us all the same.

The prosaic motorway conversations to ease the boredom - 'whatever happened to Little Chef?' 'You only see Burger Kings in motorway services these days' 'Why is the coffee so expensive?' 'Should we stop for a coffee?'. And then you stop and there are thousands of people like you, but they can't be like you, but they are all stopping at the same time, on the same road and possibly with a destination almost the same as yours.

The country roads. Surprising how little you can see from these roads. Again ancient relics of cart tracks that became roads,but were never meant to be roads. Organic tunnels running through a field mosaic that mostly you can never see, occasional breaks from the curtain and you see the landscape. Most of it isn't urban or suburban, it's still rural. And as you glimpse from the motorway, you see most of that is rural too. Underneath the engine drone there is the sound of nature. Albeit managed nature. There is still hope.

The road, it seems almost eternal now, as if it always was thus and always will be. And the romance is only ever in your head. The North circular and the M25 and the M1 - no one is going to write a song about them. But everyday the utility road delivers something somewhere.

These roads were never made for this. The tarmac melts in the summer, it crumbles in the winter with the frost thaw. Everyday the constant rumble breaks them down. The road markings wear out, the drizzling rain blurs them, every year more signs to confuse you.

Now trains, that's a whole different story.