Is the car too big or is

the garage too small...or do we have too many cars? Might it even be a combination of all these things?

Our state government wants to change the planning legislation and the building regulations to provide for bigger garages.  This is so "people won't need to park on the street because their cars won't fit in the smaller garages".

Cars have grown in size since I was a kitten. The first car my parents had was a "baby Austin". I can just remember this car. It had just enough room for my parents and my bassinet. When I outgrew the bassinet I sat on my mother's lap. There were no such things as seat belts or child restraints. 

We had that car until my brother arrived two years later. I remember my last ride in that car. The Senior Cat took me with him to pick up our "new" car - a secondhand Morris Minor.  We brought it home and the Senior Cat set about repainting it. I was allowed to "help" - by washing it with water.  I can only imagine that painting it was essential. We would not have had the money to spend on anything non-essential. We would only have had a car because, living in the country, it would have been essential to have some sort of transport apart from the train. (The train has long gone.)

That car did us for the next eight years. It was only changed for a secondhand Holden when we went to live in a very remote area. That was a bigger, heavier and sturdier car much more suited to the unsealed roads we then travelled on. Looking back however I know it was smaller than the cars I now see around the city. People have things called 4WD's and SU V's. They are big, some of them are very big. They can apparently go over rough terrain - the rough terrain of urban bitumen. The bigger they are the better they are - or so it would seem. They won't fit into the garages built to accommodate the old small cars. No, you put your "extra" possessions into those.

There are still some smaller cars around. They are often "the second car" because many households have two cars...or even more. That is where the problem really begins to escalate. People begin to park on the street because only one car will fit in the shortened driveway of a "new build"...or they block the footpath...or even do both.

People have children and then...they have cars too. There is a family of mum, dad and two boys around the corner. They have four cars and two motor bikes between them so of course they park on the street. Not much further along is a family with three cars. The same sort of thing continues right along my pedalling route to the library. Near the end there is one house with three cars and a motorbike and they are next to a house with two very big vehicles, a sports car and a boat. Almost no house has just one vehicle...and most of those vehicles are much bigger than anything my parents ever owned. 

The owners of these vehicles, with very rare exceptions, never leave the urban areas. They would have no idea how to handle a vehicle on an unsealed road. So why have they got such big cars? The argument that they are somehow "safer" seems to me more of a reflection on the poor driving skills of the population at large...and a desire for the convenience and comfort of transport of one's own rather than the effort and necessity of using public transport.