Successful promotion of alternative transport modes needs to be underpinned by better understandings of a seemingly cemented collective preference for private car use. This paper contributes to these understandings and proposes that automobility's dominance can be explained by a series of benefits intimately linked to the car.
These benefits extend beyond those associated with utilitarian factors such as saving time. The concept of ontological security is used to propose that attachments to the private car are underpinned by an innate desire for predictability, autonomy and acceptance in modern lives increasingly characterised by insecurity. Empirical evidence on the journey to work in Australia's largest city, Sydney, is applied to examine the way mobility is practised and inform the paper's central proposition.
Introduction 1. More recently, focus has trended towards the role of the psychological appeal of the automobile, with an emphasis on the way the car fulfils various symbolic and emotional needs for example Steg ; Bergstad et al. The new mobilities literature has developed concurrent to these more conventional ways of understanding automobility's endurance Cresswell This literature often positions the car as instrumental to a socio-technical system, determining not only the way we travel and the spaces in which we travel, but also 'the formation of gendered subjectivities, familial and social networks, spatially segregated neighbourhoods, national images and aspirations to modernity and global relations ranging from transnational migration to terrorism and oil wars' Sheller and Urry : Its proposition is that individual decisions to drive are, in part, underpinned by a culturally inculcated desire for security in modern life which is reinforced through routine practice.
The car as a material object of protection, as well as the autonomous and predictable mobility it enables, appeals to a culturally defined, yet intimately individually experienced, desire for security.
The concept of ontological security is adapted from its traditional use in sociology and psychiatry to represent this attachment. On Ontological Security 2. It provides a secure platform for human agency and flourishing and is often described as a self-maintained protective shell or 'cocoon' used bracket out the uncertainties or risks associated with day-to-day life Goffman ; Giddens The ontologically secure individual maintains a sense of connection, logic and purpose to the different components of his or her life in both space and time.
