There is a thread in the commuter's forum which included an article how the automobile means freedom in the American lifestyle. I posted a response in that forum which seems to be appropriate here as well.
Today that dream [referring to the automobile], while a lot flashier and able to travel faster than many people ever imagined, is still, at its core, about freedom.
I understand the statement above from the posted article, and I can see where most people draw that conclusion. However, this is not the case from my personal experience.
I once had a small pickup which I used relatively frequently, primarily for commuting to work or such. My brother liked the truck and mentioned he may get him one since his car was getting old and beginning to give him some trouble. I told him I had been thinking about trading it in for something else, so if he liked my truck I would sign it over to him and he could simply take over the payments. It was a pretty new truck and I didn't have much in the way of equity in it anyway. In the meantime, I would ride my bike everywhere until I decided exactly what I wanted to replace the truck.
That was five years ago. I still haven't replaced the truck. And if I wanted to replace it, I can afford almost anything out there. I just don't want to.
Shortly after my brother drove the pickup out of my driveway, I discovered something I had not expected. Freedom. Like everyone else, I had always assumed I needed a motor vehicle because I did not see how one could maintain a good quality of life without one. Being without one for a few weeks, then years, helped me to discover that quality of life did not necessarily involve owning/maintaining a motor vehicle. In fact, it opened whole new worlds and opportunities for me. The amount of resources I had poured into my motor vehicles were now being directed to other things such as frequent trips to Europe, flying on a whim to new cities in the USA and Canada for such trivial things as attending a weekend football game, attending more and varied local cultural events, donating animal food to the local animal shelter and giving more contributions to charitable causes of my choosing, and a whole myriad of other things that have been a far more pleasing use of my money than making car payments and covering fuel/maintenance/insurance costs. Of course, this has also meant making the necessary attitude and lifestyle changes to make this possible.
To make my long story short, sometimes I think the automobile is not so much about freedom as much as it's about how much we've enslaved ourselves to it.