I was returning home from a silly stakeout at 2 a.m. tonight (don’t ask), driving along the wet empty streets of North Vancouver with the radio turned up loud. And there’s something about driving at night, when the road is empty and the surrounding world is sleeping, that is really enjoyable.

The darkness creates a sort of enveloping tunnel around the beams of light in front as the car races ahead. The music, depending on the selection, carries you through the rhythm of the road as it twists and turns. I sometimes eschew the direct route, just to avoid having to stop the car and break the momentum.

I remember when my daughter was younger and she didn’t want to go to sleep, I would gladly put her in the car and go for a ride. Sometimes I would just start driving along the empty highway, cruising in the darkness and let the white noise put her to sleep. It reminds me of my own days as a child when I would get into the car late at night and wake up in my own bed in the morning.

I love long drives. I can sit in a car for longer than most people would find it comfortable. But if I’m in the driver’s seat, I can go for 14 or 16 hours at a time. And I have. When I drove out to Vancouver from Toronto in 2008 by myself, I did Thunder Bay on the first day, Moose Jaw on the second, Calgary on the third and reached the coast on the fourth. It could have been done in three but I wanted to stop at a friend’s house in Calgary so he could show me the city.

Maybe there’s something about my personality, that I can sit in a car and just zone out and drive for hours. It’s that time you can really be alone with yourself without wondering what you’re going to do with yourself while you’re alone. It’s simple. You’re driving.

One of the best night drives exists on the west coast. If you go along the TransCanada into North Vancouver and follow it up to Whistler, you’ll find yourself on the winding, curving Sea-to-Sky highway. If you’re lucky there will be a full moon to illuminate the ocean as you cruise the twists and turns in the darkness of the highway. On one side the shimmering waters and on the other the looming shadow of mountains.

Of course I can’t do that much anymore. I don’t make any money while I’m in school and gasoline on the coast hit $1.30 today. I’m putting gas in the tank in $10 increments, hoping something will happen in the Middle East to calm this mess down. In the meantime I’m using the bus to go everywhere.

I know there are people who love the bus and swear by public transit. I guess it’s effective in an urban area, and it works in a utilitarian sort of way, even though there are times it resembles our public health care system (long waits, unreliable, often poor service).

But there’s nothing like the freedom of getting into a car and going anywhere you want. For all of the talk of global warming, and no matter where you stand on the issue, Canada is a really large place, and if you want to get anywhere in a time that’s reasonably dependent on your own agenda, you’d better have a car. (Public transit is sort of the socialism of transportation, while the automobile is the free market.)

The funny thing is that my car isn’t even very good. It’s a 1997 Ford Escort stationwagon with poor fuel economy. When I last visited Ontario in 2009 I rented a Chevrolet Impala and drove the back roads of the Bruce Peninsula with some real horsepower for once. I cannot honestly say I obeyed all the speed limits.

I had an even older car, a 1993 Saturn, that I lost to the environmentalist laws of the city of Vancouver. It wouldn’t pass the emissions testing, so we had to give it up for scrap. The sad thing is that that baby traversed Canada twice without so much as a whimper. It was a good reliable car and it was good on the gas.

Vancouver is trying to reinvent itself as a bicycle city, as though it thinks it’s Copenhagen or any other European city with a dense population. That’s fine, I guess, except for the fact the city wasn’t designed to be a bike city and it rains too much for more than 5 per cent of the people to want to do it.

But you can’t jump on your bike and decide you’re going to drive to Chilliwack for apple pie. You can’t go tearing along the coastal mountain range at night in the driving rain listening to music. And you sure can’t load the family up on short notice to drive to the top of Seymour and look at the Lower Mainland as the sun sets.

The funny thing is that the two things that most revolutionized the modern world would have to be the incandescent light bulb and the automobile. Both have come under attack for being unfriendly to the environment, yet both are symbolic of the greatest technological achievements of post-industrial civilization. The car brings the freedom of unlimited movement and the light bulb the ability to do it in the dark.

People keep talking about peak oil, a day when this wonderful ride will come to a crashing halt. And some people even want that day to come as soon as possible. To them I’d suggest they go for a nice long night drive and think about what that would really mean.