S Sorrensen
Brisbane. Thursday, 9.10pm
Cars wreck cities.
I’m waiting at the traffic lights, the Subaru coughing carbon into the night air. Crossing in front of me, four lanes of traffic are a smudge of red and white: headlights and taillights. Traffic hum penetrates my wound-up windows, adding a bass harmony to Ann Vriend’s latest tune.
A bus rumbles by, mostly empty, a mobile billboard.
Cars are turning our cities into hostile environments. Cars rule. We gave them our cities. Soon, with driverless cars, they won’t need us at all.
Respite for humans can only be found indoors, far from the madding traffic. There, huddled together, we breathe air filtered of car pollution and chilled of the global warmth cars contribute to. Outside, the traffic encircles us, waiting.
I have just been to the theatre.
Live theatre is one of the things I like about cities. I also like the art galleries, the motorcycle shops and the restaurants. I especially like the restaurants.
For dinner, I ate pho ba at a Vietnamese place in West End. Pho, for the uninitiated, is a broth based on a stock made from beef bone marrow. For pho ba, raw beef, thinly sliced, is added to the broth after it is ladled into the bowl. (This is the way it should be done, anyway.) It cooks in your bowl. Pho ga is with chicken added.
Tonight, there was a vegetarian option (broccoli and carrot added) – which is pretty cheeky given that pho has a bone-marrow stock.
Despite the muggy Brisbane evening, I decided to eat on the footpath. (Yes, I used a table. And a chair.) Generally, I like the ambience of the street. I like to see humans using their public spaces. But our public spaces have been invaded.
Cars wreck cities.
Sitting at the table, I watched the traffic. Bumper to bumper. Nissans capable of 200km/hr inched along behind Mercedes Sports and Toyota Camrys. Most cars carried just the driver. These days, everyone has their own car.
Once upon a time, not that long ago, in a place exactly here, a family owned a car. A family. Not every member of that family.
Roads that shadowed the old bullocky tracks can no longer cope with the breeding traffic. Footpaths are being shaved, parks dug up, houses demolished – all to make way for more lanes, more cars.
The Queensland Theatre Company is close to the Brisbane River. You know that because there is a new bridge. The trees that lined the riverbank are gone, as are the old riverside houses. Get out of the way, trees! Bugger off, humans! Cars are coming. Now there’s a bridge. One of many.
The new bridge empties its traffic into an intersection that splits around the theatre, marooned between the two busy streets and a large car park. Windowless walls keep the traffic out.
There is a tree, but it grows inside the theatre complex. For protection.
I didn’t hear the pho arrive. Too noisy. A bloke on a Harley rode between the idling cars, his need for attention much louder than a waiter’s footsteps.
I didn’t smell the pho arrive. The car fumes, strong enough make the streetlights shimmer, smothered all aromas with a blanket of burning oil.
Moving his lips (but I can’t hear him), the waiter placed the steaming bowl in front of me. Yum. It’d been a while. I’ve eaten pho all over Vietnam. I love it. And I’d love to say that the pho tonight was excellent. But I can’t.
The light turns green.
Twenty cars, including my Subaru, move together like an occupying army, like a tide, across the bridge to the next lights.
Windows up, aircon on, Ann Vriend singing, the river forgotten below us.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
