ABSTRACT
On the drawing tables of automobile design visionaries, mobility problems were solved decades ago. It is not difficult to sketch the abstract lines of a future car that makes no sound and uses no fossil fuels, does not emit greenhouse gases, needs little room for manoeuvring and will not cause any serious accidents. Such a car would be built out of light materials and powered by solar energy. But its realization would come at a price: speed. The car of a sustainable future could only drive a maximum speed of 60km/h (37mph) instead of the 120km/h (75mph) we take for granted.1
In car designs for a sustainable future, progress takes the form of slowness, and this is precisely the reason why it is highly unlikely that it will ever make it from the drawing table to the road. The reason is not that it is technically impossible to build one, but that nobody would want to drive it. The obstacles of a slow car are not technical, but are social, psychological, economic and cultural. Speed is a dominant and pervasive value in Western culture. Other than time and space, however, speed as a concept has not yet been systematically theorized in social and cultural theory (Peters 2000).2 In this chapter, I analyse speed in relation to travel and different notions of travel time.
