THE GUARDIAN

And the car-people have had it, at least if the papers they read are any indication.

Drivers desperate to put their foot flat down are ripping out speed cameras, just as women flung themselves under horses to secure the vote. Meanwhile, the latest proposals from Alistair Darling, the transport secretary, have produced a molten lava stream of editorial protest. The Sun denounces "yet more pettifogging rules and financial penalties, handed out by jobsworths" which imperil Britain's traditional love affair with the car. The Mail and Express have seized on a single tragic road death to argue that the real problem is not ordinary decent drivers but ... yes, illegal immigrants without insurance or driving licences. The Daily Telegraph compares traffic wardens to shoals of barracuda.

It is always possible, of course, that all this is simply the reaction of journalists whose London homes and car-parking privileges at work make them particularly vulnerable to the growth of traffic management. But so many angry articles in so many papers suggests editors feel they are on to a strong, provocative issue readers will relate to. Perhaps they are right. Are we coming to a tipping-point in the struggle between the car and the state?

To anyone who lives in urban Britain, it is obvious that the growth in legal curbs and fines for motorists has been huge. In the main cities, traffic wardens really are everywhere. The new powers proposed by Mr Darling will give them the right to issue fixed penalties for another 20 minor traffic offences, which have nothing to do with parking, such as clogging up yellow boxes or making u-turns where they are banned.

The sense of a war between motorists and government is heightened by the sub- military uniforms and by the admittedly aggressive behaviour of a few wardens. They are often paid by results, and so have a strong motive to issue fines. But they are hardly living high off the profits they make. They are fairly low-paid, often from minority groups, simply doing their job. Yet on radio phone-in shows, traffic wardens are denounced as "stupid" or unable to grasp the explanations given.

As in any war, homemade propaganda takes grip. To read some of the coverage you would think traffic wardens only booked frail old ladies trying to visit their grandchildren for the very last time - never double-parking louts in white vans, or fit young women with sports cars. Speed cameras only catch cars rushing to maternity wards, or people five miles an hour over the limit on empty roads - they never catch the rest of us going too fast, and risking accidents, because we're simply impatient. The latest self-righteous myth is that speed and parking fines are only imposed as another means of revenue-raising: they are not fines or penalties, they are just another Labour tax.

This has a particular resonance because cars have become the ultimate expression of where the private and public realms collide. They are about social status and a secure, enclosed, air-conditioned, musically enhanced space of your own; when the state fines, films, clamps and tows away, it is bearing down in an intimate way. About that, the Sun is absolutely right. An attack on the car is an attack on a curious kind of love affair.

It is curious because it is so dishonest. Cars are sold to us on a ludicrous premise and we still seem to fall for it. Think of the ads. Either they are zooming and twisting along empty roads far away from any most of us are likely to use - roads in the Scottish Highlands, New Zealand, or Arizona. Or they are cheekily nipping and bouncing through touristy city-scapes - down renaissance steps in an Italian hill-town, perhaps, where there are just enough colourful pedestrians and scooters to make dodging them fun, yet never quite enough other cars to stop you dead in a maddening jam for 20 minutes.

Compared to real driving these are computer-game fantasies. Real driving is cheerless lane-hopping on a grossly overcrowded motorway as the rain beats down and you're late for work. Real driving is endless confrontations about who will back off in crammed rat runs. Real driving is inch-by-inch jerking forward in another bewildering, inexplicable jam, or shouting at contemptuous, glaze-eyed fellow motorists who refuse to let you in. Real driving is the condition of being furious with everybody else for doing the things you do too. But this you don't get in the TV ads. This is not what Jeremy Clarkson discusses on Top Gear.

The problem is that we are in love with a distant, false memory of the past - a place where we have access to safe and comfortable cars, and to empty roads, a place where "motoring" happened. The real Britain is quite a small place, a narrow island full of affluent, busy and mobile people, criss-crossed by roads of all sizes, and yet we are so addicted to buying and driving more cars that these roads are - frankly - full up. Parking has become expensive and difficult not because of Alistair Darling or traffic wardens, but because there is always too much tyre and too little kerb. Build more kerb, more road and new tyres will be there, it will be just as bad.

This addiction is something most of us now need, because of the shopping and working habits that have grown on the back of the car economy. But we also know it kills large numbers of us, directly in accidents and indirectly through pollution. It is probably a major factor in climate change. And it cannot go on this way.

The government is to blame, and governments before this one, but not for introducing speed cameras and giving traffic wardens more fixed-penalty powers. It is to blame for not facing up to one of the greatest issues of our age, and creating a political strategy for moving slowly away from endless traffic growth and towards a more balanced transport system. This is difficult. But as Ken Livingstone has shown in London, and some continental countries have demonstrated, it is not entirely impossible. Planning, investment, cycleways, trams, constant financial pressure on private cars ... it has to be progressive and relentless.

Oh yes, and the traffic wardens, too. The best thing the rest of us can do is accept that for all the daily frustrations, obeying the laws of the clogged roads is better than ignoring them. Fines are fines, not taxes, and the laws of the road are sensible, not tyrannical. If Mr Toad is raising the flag of revolt, Mr Toad should be squashed.

jackie.ashley@guardian.co.uk