The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically one of them not being worth all the bother.  On Earth - when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass - the problem had been with cars.  The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm's way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another - particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish.


 

'It's a strange thing,' said Arthur quietly, 'that the further and faster one travels across the Universe, the more one's position in it seems to be largely immaterial, and one is filled with a profound, or rather emptied of a...'
'Yes, very strange,' said Ford.  'Where are we going?'

i may be paranoid, but i'm no android


 
 

'I ate the biscuit.  I ate it very deliberately and visibly, so that he would have no doubt as to what it was I was doing.  When I eat a biscuit,' Arthur said, 'it stays eaten.'
 

[bet you thought i forgot that :)]