LONG AFTER HORSES BECAME ANACHRONISMS, THE AUTOMOBILE WAS STILL A MARSHALLIAN IMPROVEMENT.

A year or so ago, I thought I'd take a ride.  "I suspect, though, that the horseless carriage offered a more favorable tradeoff of mobility against injury and death than personal transportation with a horse did."

Now comes Spiked's Brendan O'Neill, with a more pungent observation.  "The unique freedom of car-driving is being pummelled by bourgeois anti-modernists."

Never mind that the motorcar, in Thatcher- era Britain, still offered that favorable tradeoff.

Back in the early Eighties, two things revolutionised my mum’s life. The first was the appearance, nearby, of a vast supermarket. A gleaming metal-and-glass citadel of cheap, fresh produce. Imagine – bread, milk, fish, meat, fruit, veg and treats all under one roof. It was the stuff of a housewife’s dreams. The second was her first car. The rush of liberty she got from her wheezing, second-hand Ford Cortina is likely unimaginable to the 21st-century mind. Everyone has a car now, if not two. We take for granted being able to zoom everywhere, anytime, rain or shine. It was different then. The motorcar was no ordinary convenience – it was the great liberator from slog.

It's a concatenation of Marshallian improvements he's noting; the motor car, yes, as well as the one-stop supermarket with a car park and a freezer aisle. No more schlepping the day's comestibles home from the market stalls on the high street.

It is hard to describe to people who have grown up in the era of Amazon, Deliveroo and near-universal car ownership just how much time women would spend traipsing to shops. The number of woman-hours lost to filling the larder – yes, it was mainly woman-hours back then – was extraordinary. I remember it (kids were always in tow, for where else would we be?): first to the fishmonger, then the butcher’s, then the greengrocer’s, then the bakers, lugging your acquisitions in bulging bags as you went. Saturdays were almost entirely given over to shopping, on the high street a couple of miles away. But then came the supermarket, and the Cortina, and everything changed, utterly. My mother gained a whole new day of the week. She finally had Saturday.

Yes, I remember those sorts of Saturdays as a kid, even though we had a car, it was one car for the family, and it might have been to the shoe store for school shoes, and the meat market, and a few other places. Milwaukee was more spread out than most British cities, and even then ridership on the trackless trolleys that served the various shopping streets was declining.

His focus is primarily on the class snobbery of today's metrofexuals.

In the warped narrative of the motorphobes, car-owners are part of ‘the privileged’. This is nonsense. It is not prohibitively expensive to own a car in the 2020s. No, the true ‘privileged’ in this clash are the pyjama classes, the upper-middle-class movers and shakers who can work from their plush apartments and who are so time-rich that they’ll happily do what people like my mother hated doing: skip from small shop to small shop, buying artisan loaves here, Duchy sausages there. Nothing better speaks to class privilege these days than hatred for the car and love for the ‘15-minute city’. It is a kind of bourgeois mimicry of the plain lives people led in the era before cheap food and mass car ownership. Only with the risks and pressures removed. The 15-minute-city elites know that if they don’t make it to the trendy butcher’s on time, they can always call on some put-upon member of the precariat to deliver them a £20 dirty burger for dinner. Believe me, it wasn’t like that in the Eighties.

His conclusion? "Every assault on the car should be understood as an assault on our autonomy, and should be resisted as such."  There's some truth to that, and yet, treating the roads and parking spaces as productive assets and pricing them accordingly still makes both political and economic sense.