Car driving as inverted quarantine and the sensory response to collective threats: challenges for public transport

ABSTRACT

Attempts at changing individual car use behavior towards increased use of public transport have so far largely failed. This paper will argue that the continued rise in individual car use needs to be understood as part of an overall trend towards protecting oneself instead of protecting the environment, i.e. an individualized sensory response to an omnipresent collective threat. The car industry serves this trend perfectly with features that turn cars into “cozy” cocoons that protect passengers from the dangers of the outside world. Although the Covid-19 pandemic has fostered this trend, it has been inherent in the resistant nature of cars for decades. Thus, today cars are increasingly used for their sensory aspects related to safety and protection from an infectious, dirty, and violent outside world. This trend is supported by highly individualized cushioning and comfort factors that make cars “special places.” Any strategies for promoting alternative forms of transport thus need to consider these sensory developments when creating incentives for people to travel by train, bus, etc. instead of driving cars. The paper ends with a few speculations on how public transport could be made more attractive given the current role of sensory perception in car driving.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobility
• inverted quarantine
• car use
• collective threat
• sensory threats
• sustainability

Introduction: car cultures and peak car

“Here in my car

I feel safest of all

I can lock all my doors

It’s the only way to live

In cars”

From Gary Numan’s Song “Cars” (1979, Beggars Banquet)

Cars belong to everyday life and are an integral part of world culture. European and North American lifestyles and cultural life would be impossible without cars, and it is likely that this also holds true for many other areas of the planet (cf. Jeekel 2013; Miller 2001; Borden 2013). The overall trend towards more cars has hardly changed in recent decades even though it is well known that cycling and public forms of transport are normally less energy intensive in terms of everyday usage, except for in some European cities (Wittwer, Gerike, and Hubrich 2019). This seems surprising at first, since overall it is believed that the average public transport energy use per person can be some three to six times lower than the respective values for individual car use (Kenworthy 2018). Besides the issue of energy efficiency, dependency on individual car ownership has also been criticized for contributing to traffic congestion, climate change, environmental pollution, and causing safety issues. The transformation towards more sustainable societies therefore calls for novel forms of public transport beyond individual cars (Gallo and Marinelli 2020; Rau and Scheiner 2020; Wentland 2017). While electric cars have been hailed as a new breed of vehicle that could surpass petrol-driven cars on safety, running costs, performance and design, they are increasingly questioned with regard to their overall energy efficiency in comparison to conventional combustion engine-driven vehicles (Berger and Jorgensen 2015; Buchal and Sinn 2019; Kalghatgi 2022; Towoju and Ishola 2020). The debate has also raised concerns around the emissions created during the manufacturing process of electric vehicle batteries as well as the overall energy efficiency of internal combustion engine vehicles in comparison to electric vehicles (cf. Khandelwal and Chavan 2023; Albatayneh et al. 2020; Spaven, Liu, and Baghdadi 2022). After all, all forms of transport come with unintended social, ecological, and economic side-effects, rebounds, and trade-offs, in which advancements in technology and practices in one area are causally linked to impacts in other areas (Sonnberger and Gross 2018). The least one can say is that the increased usage of electric cars is not reducing emissions as much as was hoped for due to, for instance, increased emissions from producing ever-larger batteries.

However, despite known risks, emissions scandals, high fuel prices and maintenance costs as well as claims of “peak car” and the recent Covid-19 pandemic (Goodwin and van Dender 2013; Focas and Christidis 2017; Gross and Sonnberger 2020; Horta 2020), car sales all over the world have surged to some of the highest levels on record, and indeed the year before the pandemic saw the highest number of individual car sales on a global scale.¹ Furthermore, the pandemic’s effect on the tourism industry changed the role of the car in terms of leisure mobility (Butler et al. 2021; Cruz et al. 2022; Hanam et al. 2021; Yang, Honggang, and Hannam 2022).

Against this background, this article will pinpoint culturally held assumptions, beliefs, and practices of the system of automobility related to the individual sensory dimension of driving that are overlooked in many debates. I will argue that it is exactly these cultural and social issues that make cars – whether electric or combustion engine-based – seem superior to other forms of (public) transport in the eyes of many if not most people. By making this connection, I invite the reader to think more sociologically about mobility; to see mobility as being accompanied by a whole host of cultural and sensory experiences (e.g. visual, olfactory etc.). The next section will briefly introduce the notion of “inverted quarantine” in order to conceptually frame the argument that the continuous increase in individual car use needs to be understood as part of a major trend towards a desire to protect oneself from a dirty and threatening outside world. This will be exemplified by the issue of how security and safety are perceived while driving and traveling, as well as the tendency that cars today are homes away from home and increasingly designed to be protective shells (e.g. Sport Utility Vehicles). In the outlook section I explore a few ways in which incentives for alternatives to individual driving could move forward without simply copying the advantages that car ownership and usage have today. By so doing, the article complements extant psychological and medical research that emphasizes physical dimensions and also encourages a shift towards treating sensory experiences as cultural and social in the sense that, for instance, feelings of disgust are not always simply a physical reaction to something poisonous, but can equally be a reflection of social norms and negotiated standards of purity or cleanliness (cf. Douglas 1966; Shove 2003).

Inverted quarantine: protecting oneself instead of protecting the environment

For some people cars are just a necessity, something that gets them from A to B. But often they are much more than that. They can also be about aesthetics, emotions or sensory responses to driving, as the many studies on feelings for cars have shown (the two classic pieces on this phenomenon are Sheller 2004; Kent 2015). This is an important point given that basically all attempts at changing individual car use behavior towards increased use of alternative forms of transport have so far largely failed. By using the concept of “inverted quarantine” (Szasz 2007) also as a sensitizing concept, I will argue against the overall notion that cars are status symbols that merely support the status quo and are on the way to becoming phased out (“peak car” et al.). To do so, I will trace some of the sensory, aesthetic, hygienic, and more generally the cultural and social forces that give rise to precautionary car usage in the sense of cocooning oneself from the rest of the word (Bijsterveld 2010).

In his book Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves (2007) Andrew Szasz conceptualized individualized consumption as a way of shielding oneself from pathogens (e.g. toxic air pollutants). This shielding is done by, one the one hand; strategic decisions on where to live and where (not) to go, and on the other hand by buying bottled water, water filters, organic foods, as well as “natural” and “nontoxic” household or personal hygiene products. These activities of inverting quarantine, Szasz argues, will become more important than political activities in relation to protecting the environment more generally. Szasz’s thesis is that consumers behave in this way because they believe that these activities and the products they buy will help shield them from toxic substances in their environments. I will use this argument and shift it into the context of individual car usage and public transport where the presence of others is increasingly seen as toxic and worth avoiding, a phenomenon that has been amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic as well as public debates on terrorism and harassment on public transport. The case of car usage fits into Szasz’s argument, which frames people as prioritizing their own well-being at the expense of the greater good. However, there are also differences. After all, not all car users deliberately choose to drive a car. Instead, in societies with government programs and subsidies for electric vehicles, some people have become convinced that carbon-neutral motorized individual mobility is possible. Hybrid or electric cars carry this exact promise, so there is plenty of evidence that protecting the environment is one of the motivations for people to buy an electric vehicle (EV) – even if they also buy EVs in order to continue their existing mobility habits and feel like they are saving the planet at the same time (Ryghaug and Toftaker 2014). More importantly, when the concept of inverted quarantine is applied to cars, the entire outside world is turned into a hazard that needs to be “contained.” In this way, mobility practice needs to be understood as a personalized form of protecting oneself. Car driving as inverted quarantine is powered by increased skepticism that public transport, which involves contact with strangers in public places and transport systems, can provide protection from diseases and nuisances. It is a trend fostered by feelings of fear in public that are exacerbated by debates on harassment and robbery as well as generally infectious diseases on public transport such as trains. Norah MacKendrick (2018) argued that precautionary consumption is a tactic for navigating everyday toxins; similarly, today’s drivers seek refuge in their cars because they are not confident that they can sequester their bodies from harmful substances and threats outside of their vehicles. In the following I will thus explore how and why car drivers and the car industry today respond to narratives of threat and try to manage their exposure to the violent and infectious outside world.

Security and safety of mobility

Against this background it appears safe to say that security and safety may become lynchpins for the mobility strategies of the future. Infectious diseases, as the Covid-19 pandemic has so forcefully shown, may, however, be just one among many other elements that amplify the sensory experience of individual car driving as a strategy for cocooning oneself off from the world around us. After all, it can already be shown that despite a belief among (idealistic) social science researchers in the end of the combustion engine-based car system or even the idea of “peak car,” the current discourse on safety in public spaces including public transport has led to changes in the perception of mobility in favor of individual driving (Hoffmann, Weyer, and Longen 2017). As with the many enthusiastic pronouncements of peak everything (Heinberg 2007), for each of these pronouncements there are as many counter-indicators as there are indicators. Right before the pandemic started, and in contrast to the rather romanticized discourse on the end of individual car transport, psychologist Rüdiger Hossiep spoke of a renaissance of individual driving in urban areas due to safety issues in public places.² In particular young women, says Hossiep, who so far have used public (sub-) urban commuter railway systems, are tending to switch (back) to small cars in everyday life; and this trend is only just beginning and has actually been amplified during the Covid-19 lockdown period when the individual car became even more important and public transport systems of all sorts lost ground (Eisenmann et al. 2021; Moody et al. 2021).³ A survey conducted by Volvo Car USA shows, for instance, that with Covid-19 the idea of safety in cars has even taken on new meanings so that many car owners look at their cars as homes to provide secure protection from infectious diseases more generally.⁴ In short, the pandemic seems to have turned cars into almost an ideal type of what Szasz (2007) once theorized as “inverted quarantine.” In other words, people drive cars because they believe they can ensconce themselves in a cocoon that protects them from the dangerous and contaminated outside world.

Individual cars thus present a form of protection for individuals to defend themselves against issues ranging from (sexual) harassment, infectious diseases, or terrorist threats, as much as they are a means to avoid smelly trams and noisy buses. Looking at the socio-economic context of automobility, the argument can also be expanded by broadening the scope to less wealthy countries in the world. In many places worldwide, driving in the protected, insulated space of a car is not just a question of sensory pleasure or the feeling of safety. In addition or alternatively, it can also be a reaction to high crime rates in dense or urban areas, significantly less developed public infrastructure, a much higher exposure to pollution, and a higher chance of unpleasant social encounters in rough neighborhoods or on public transport (with a significant gender component at play here as well).

But even when it comes to less drastic examples, studies have shown that even the simple search for a seat on a public bus can be a reason for people to not choose public transport or at least seriously consider changing to a different mode of transportation (O’Dell 2009). More generally, according to a recent Forsa survey 82% of all Germans do not want to live without a car and more than half of all Germans would rather pass on a pay rise or a job promotion than to live without a car. For 62% a car is even more important than a TV. These observations correlate well with the fact that before the Covid-19 crisis hit the planet car sales surged to the highest level on record.⁵

Cars are an integral part of world culture, so the dependency on individual car ownership needs to be scrutinized with a focus on culturally held assumptions, beliefs, and practices of the system of automobility (Redshaw 2017; Seiler 2008). For some people cars may be just a necessity. Although cars are occasionally ridiculed as status symbols, this actually hasn’t really been the case since the early 1980s. Less than 10% of all car owners report that their car has anything to do with status.⁶ Cars can be as much about aesthetics as emotions or sensory responses to driving, or even playful speculation on how car manufacturers plan what cars to develop in the future (Gross 2019). Cars can be homes away from home, bastions of private space, safe places (“cocoons”), escapes from predictability (Hagman 2010; Pearce 2016; Brodsky 2015; Gross 2020), tools for creating beautiful events, a means for meditation and regeneration, places to enjoy music, an expression of style, a way to test oneself or simply a thing that can be fun in and of itself (Labelle 2008; Krebs 2012; Bijsterveld et al. 2014; Steg 2005; Wells and Xenias 2015; Zeller 2022). Transport planning and current political strategies to change and influence car driving patterns, however, have often overlooked these cultural dimensions of the car system. Planning in public transport has instead mainly focused on transport routes for which there is critical demand as well as on the price of public transport, rail accessibility, the frequency and availability of trains and buses, punctuality, and the speed of travel time. The sensory aspects of mobility and public transport appear as a crucial but largely overlooked element in attempts at making public transport more attractive to a wider range of people, which would consequently increase the use of more energy efficient forms of transport more generally.

Feels like home: smell, sound, and sight

The sensory dimensions of driving are becoming ever more important. These include feeling safe, feeling at home, smelling a familiar scent, generally enjoying great air quality as well as feeling able to unwind in a private space (among many other things). The after-work hours for many car drivers begin when they enter their car: the car is an extension of the home. Even more so, the private car seems to be related to an idealized “home from home,” that is, a place where one can feel at ease, as it is a confined and private place (unlike public transport). Historically, this understanding of the car as an extension of the home is closely linked to the development of a closed steel body, which made it possible to design cars as personal spaces – especially since the 1950s (cf. Flink 1990).

In addition, as Mallett (2004) has argued, “home” can also be many places, spaces, feelings, practices, and otherwise active states of being in the world ranging from a house, family, haven, oneself, one’s gender, and travelling. In Mallett’s categorizations home is not always a safe or comfortable place where one can be at ease, and is not even necessarily experienced in positive ways. However, even here the car can be more of a home than many “homes,” in that the car becomes a possible refuge from home, that is, a space with even more privacy than in one’s house or apartment, where an individual can control sound, music, smell, temperature and much more. In short, things that might be out of a person’s control at home because there are other members of the household that one has to negotiate with, are under control in a car – at least when used by a single person. In this view, the car can then be rendered a (safe) haven even more readily than other “homes.”⁷

Consequently, public transport or any other alternative form of mobility needs to take these issues seriously in order to compete with more traditional single car-based forms of transportation. Given that the individual car trend is unlikely to wane in the near future, it will continue to influence mobility patterns and policies. In addition, there is a clear trend emerging that feelings of fear in public (fear of infectious diseases, but also violence and being robbed, etc.) will further deter people from using public transport and thus will support individual driving in (allegedly) safe cars. This trend is supported by the current boom in Sport Utility Vehicles (SUVs), which are generally perceived as considerably safer than hatchbacks or sedans, not to mention smaller sports cars.

SUVs, collective threats, and the cocooned car

Sport Utility Vehicles are cars that aim to combine certain characteristics of regular passenger cars, sports cars, as well as (visual) features of off-road vehicles such as classic jeeps. In general, SUVs are perceived by their drivers as safer than standard cars. The reasons are manifold, but the most important one may actually be the simple fact that the height of SUVs makes the passengers feel more in control of driving situations (Mayhorn, Wogalter, and Conzola 2010). However, the sheer size of the exterior as well as the weight (especially of electric SUVs) make SUVs even less energy efficient than “regular” cars. Worse still, some studies have even shown that the size and height of SUVs leads SUV drivers to engage in more risky behavior: women in particular violate traffic law more frequently when driving an SUV (Wallner, Wanka, and Hutter 2017). This perception of safety has led to SUVs becoming an ever more popular choice for families where the higher driving position appears to be a safer option compared to traditional family sedans.

In short, SUVs perfectly illustrate the issue of inverted quarantine. SUV sales have been increasing while at the same time these cars have been linked to more accidents and their collective emissions already represent as much as an industrialized country (Cozzi and Petropoulos 2021). This illustrates very well that there is a trend towards protecting oneself instead of protecting the environment (environment is understood here in a broad sense, that is, including the safety of other drivers and pedestrians).

Consequently and because individual car use is part of an overall trend towards protecting oneself, SUVs may best be understood as an individualized response to collective threat. In classic sociological literature the notion of collective threat is understood as collective feelings among a certain group of people spurred by a perceived threat to their group’s social position. Inspired by the work of Reichelmann (2021), I use the notion of collective threat in the current context to refer to emotional and sensory responses to perceived outside threats such as terrorist attacks, climate change, or infectious diseases.

The car industry serves this trend perfectly by producing cars that are like cocoons to protect passengers from the dirty and dangerous outside world and making those cocoons into individualized spaces for immersive experiences, so that even everyday car use leads to a sense of occasion and drivers feel that something special is happening to them in their car while they’re driving. This includes individualized odors so that each driver can choose their favorite scent in the car during their journey to ensure the fragrance of the interior matches the drivers or the passengers’ mood and current preference. What’s more, many scent systems can also clean the air in the vehicle while releasing one of several fragrant aromas. This further amplifies the inverted quarantine effect, as the individualized elimination of bad odors and improved air quality assuage fears of infectious diseases and malodors associated with public transport experiences.

Such features are often accompanied by individualized heating as well as cooled seats (standard in many middle-class cars today already), a champagne chiller, heated and cooled cup holders, biometric secure stowage, pop-up tweeter speakers, lumbar support systems as well as full-fledged massage seats and individualized lighting. Unlike in public transport, where finding a seat at all can be a challenge (cf. O’Dell 2009) – not to mention a clean and comfortable one – many cars now have memory seats that not only make it possible to electrically adjust the seat settings, but can move the various elements of the seats into pre-set positions at the push of a button (including mirrors and other items). This can be especially important for cars that are shared with other drivers. Until a few years ago such features were mostly found in premium brand cars, but these days they can also be ordered for less pricey models.

The newest developments of self-driving cars that are capable of moving safely with little or at least only occasional human input may be another case in point. Such cars represent a further threat to one of the major advantages of public transport such as long-distance trains, which currently many people prefer to individual driving because they can use the travel time for work on the computer or for paperwork (for a critical assessment see Weber and Kröger 2018). As a future technology, autonomous driving is predicted to have an enormous impact on the automobile industry, but especially on the way people perceive driving when it can even deliver some of the things that so far only trains or buses could do. Needless to say, it is not only premium and luxury manufacturers that follow these sensory strategies in designing their cars, but basically all manufacturers – even those that traditionally have focused more on a low price tag and less on luxury and sensory issues. Given that many of the luxury features formerly restricted to premium manufacturers have trickled down to compact and subcompact cars as well as mid-size cars over the years (such as heated seats and individualized air conditioning that were developed in the 1980s and are now standard in most cars), it appears quite likely that sensory features such as those mentioned above will soon become standard in small cars too.

Car manufacturers increasingly promote the tranquility of their cars’ interiors, while at the same time sound designers develop technologies to make cars sound better for the driver as well as the passengers (Altinsoy 2015; Cleophas and Bijsterveld 2012). Electric vehicles in particular have become a test bed for designing sounds for both the driver and passersby (e.g. Melman et al. 2021). Thus a part of what was once regarded as noise is now deliberately developed for the interior of the car as something that makes the driving experience superior by enabling the driver to choose from many different synthetic sounds that the car “produces.” This again supports the thesis above that car driving needs to be increasingly understood as inverted quarantine: a self-defined form of protection from outside influences. Using a cocooned car is an attempt to claim control over transient and unwieldy issues that pervade the mobility landscape.

Outlook: a trend and a few (informed) speculations

In summary, I think it is fair to say that any strategies towards more sustainable forms of transport and less energy wasting forms of mobility need to consider these sensory and emotional developments when coming up with incentives for alternatives to individual driving. This means that it will be impossible to simply copy what cars do for people and transfer it to public transport. Trains and buses should not be treated as competitors to individual cars. If public transport planning is only reacting to developments in car development and not developing its own unique features, it will become increasingly difficult to convince people to refrain from individual car usage given the current trend of a general sensory response to collective threats. In the past, one way for public transport to compete with cars has been related to the ability of passengers to use travel time in a variety of different ways (cf. Urry 2002; Watts and Urry 2008) that would not be possible inside a car, even if it is driven by a chauffeur or self-driving software. In some cultures car companies compete with public transport by making it easier for backseat passengers to make better use of their travel time. For instance, premium cars produced for some Asian markets (especially China) can differ significantly from the regular models, with much greater design focus placed on the backseat area of the car, because the practice of hiring a driver is more “normal” in many of those cultural contexts. However, although car use practices differ across cultures, the perception of cars as a “safe haven” and of how much of a cocoon they actually are may have crucial overlaps globally. In addition, the densification of working time has fueled car-based commuting, with chauffeured cars now serving as mobile offices that offer functions that cannot be found on most forms of public transport (e.g. privacy, good connectivity, etc.). This trend certainly complements and potentially amplifies the inverted quarantine issues discussed above (e.g. when one considers data protection issues, etc.).⁸

I think another way to incentivize people to take trains, and here perhaps especially long-distance trains, is to develop unique sensory alternatives to individual cars. In other words, trains should not only become safe spaces with possibilities for shielding oneself from other passengers, but also, and more importantly, take a completely different approach to more successfully compete with cars. Perhaps a first step could be to advertise the cleaning processes of buses and trains that make them remarkably clean spaces, complete with fresh or purified air to support passenger health. Promoting the cleaning of buses and trains will make them more appealing and also help to mitigate people’s fears about dirty public transport environments. Furthermore, this could make trains more attractive in comparison to cars given that, after all, private car owners need to clean their cars themselves or pay for cleaning services.

Other sensory points of difference to individual cars could include, besides the already existing restaurant facilities on trains (from full restaurants to smaller bistro benches and tables), hairdresser or barber services on trains, massage therapies (that is, professional massages, not those from massage seats like in cars), sporting activities like gyms and perhaps even (digital or real) fitness trainers in a workout carriage,⁹ or other activities that cannot be done in cars but are (so far: at least theoretically) possible on trains. At least activities that can be temporally planned such as haircut appointments and workout classes could make trains more attractive in comparison to individual forms of car transport. Since an increase in public transport systems seems essential for energy efficiency and emissions reduction strategies, public transport must be designed by overcoming physical and, as this paper aimed to show, cultural and especially sensory barriers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthias Gross

Matthias Gross is Head of the Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig and, by joint appointment, Full Professor at the Institute of Sociology at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. Together with Linsey McGoey he is editor of the second edition of the Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies (2023).

Notes

1. For these and other such data and analysis, see: https://carsalesbase.com/ or https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/size-of-the-vehicle-fleet/size-of-the-vehicle-fleet-10.

2. An Interview with Hossiep (2018), available at: https://www.motor-talk.de/news/-ein-bmw-x6-ist-wie-ein-dicker-kokon-t6415208.html (in German).

3. It should be noted that Covid-19 also gave momentum to the cycling movement (e.g. Nikitas et al. 2021; Buehler and Pucher 2022), but at least some of the reasons for this may be similar to that of the increase in car usage, i.e. to be protected from other people and thus infectious diseases.

4. Survey: Cars are a Safe Haven for Americans Amid the COVID Pandemic: https://www.media.volvocars.com/us/en-us/media/pressreleases/275996/survey-cars-are-a-safe-haven-for-americans-amid-the-covid-pandemic (last accessed March 5 2023). For similar data for Australia, Europe, Asia Minor and different transition-economies see https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/docs/modal-shift-transport-trends.pdf (last accessed March 5 2023).

5. See for an overview: https://www.forsa.de/. A summary of the study can be found here: https://www.motor-talk.de/news/undenkbar-ein-leben-ohne-auto-t6404730.html (in German).

6. See again the interview with Hossiep at: https://www.motor-talk.de/news/-ein-bmw-x6-ist-wie-ein-dicker-kokon-t6415208.html.

7. For more detailed debates on the sociology of home beyond the idea of a fixed place of residence, see for instance Anderson, Moore, and Suski (2016), Boccagni and Kusenbach (2020), or Kasinitz (2013).

8. Indeed, staying at home to work, extending one’s senses through technology, and by so doing avoiding public spaces altogether may constitute the ultimate inverted quarantine (and a perfect route to reducing emissions and energy usage through mobility) – a fact that has been highlighted during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, in the context of this article I focus on the overall effect of such things as pandemics on mobility behaviors and not on the potential ideal way to reduce ecological footprints at all costs.

9. Although the idea of introducing sporting activities into train carriages was shortly mentioned in a 2017 press release issued by Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s national railway company, the most recent information on future interior design and changes and the company’s goals to modernize and improve the passenger experience do not mention such features at all. See: https://www.deutschebahn.com/de/presse/suche_Medienpakete/Neues-Design. Perhaps this was changed due to fears that such scenarios will reduce the capacity of trains and make them economically inefficient.