Mobility Memories: We all like to travel...don't we?

Memories of mobility can be so strong and emotive.

Did you go on the bus much when you were a kid? 

Ian’s memories of the bus are so positive: access to countryside; a park in the early morning with no-one in it; an Aunty with a dog.  Susan’s are very negative: clutching the ticket in case the Inspector comes on; stifling crowds getting on the bus at the interchange. 

What do you think of when you think about going out in the car when you were a child?

Ian was the first in his family to have a car: it was all bus.  Susan’s memory of car travel is vomit. 

Ian is a confident traveller. Susan doesn’t like to travel: “Maybe these things have coloured my travelling experiences: the worry of having to get a seat and things….”. 

I have often thought about past experiences and the emotiveness of travel and transport: it can be a powerful determinant of choice and behaviour. In fact the making and power of those memories were one of my Golden lessons from the Car Free Family times.  Is travel and transport more emotive than any other experience?  Do transport services and movement evoke more powerful deterministic memories than any other service of product?

I do know that my daughter Tess remembers the seat on our bike very strongly. As an art college assignment about a favourite memory she made a video about our daily bike journey to the childminder when she was little. She is smiling in the video.  So am I.

And when Ian was talking about his brother’s huge walk to work from Middlesborough to Stockton on a road called The Wilderness Road, I could almost see it in my mind’s eye: an early morning walk in the cold dark urban wilderness.  Finding out more – pictures and a poem – didn’t disappoint.

Walking the Wilderness by James Stoker

I walk along the wilderness road
in the footsteps of many before
terrace houses the flyover five-a-side

peaceful but for the low drone
and whoosh of the dual carriage way
broken by the passing of the Saltburn train

I pass the grey wire fences
silent wide road, lost community
bright buses quietly scurry
approaching the old river, tranquil

broken by a noisy speeding car

Jigsaw walls, echoing bridge

From: I Know I am Home: History, Psychogeography, Photography, Art and Musings by James Stoker

Music Credit: Life of a Wandering Wizard by Serge Quadrado

Middlesborough Corporation Bus: https://www.flickr.com/photos/27204054@N07/36404907000