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recap
Humans have a not so brilliant habit. We look at the frontend cost. Sometimes we consider the operating costs, but rarely, or never, are the backend costs pondered. Direct costs are easy to evaluate, however everything caries with it indirect costs, continuing costs, end costs. We may fail to see them, or more frequently turn a blind eye. Seeing the glass half full leaves us ignoring the downsides of collateral damages. This neglect is easy and convenient. The hard work of examining side effects and end-of-life-cycle issues get in the way of progress.
We like to pump up the positives. We prefer to put off the negatives—they can be fixed later. Instead, patches and bandaids are retrofitted to partially ameliorate a few select easy-to-fix issues to keep up appearances, while looking past the big problems that won’t go away. Later, tomorrow, whenever, whatever, we’ll get around to it, too late.
Whoa, that’s a long, long list, and there’s more. And maybe that’s part of the problem. The list is so long, it’s overwhelming.
Cars have not saved us time, in fact, cars have allowed people to live farther from work, increasing the need for roads and adding time to one’s commute. Time wasted in traffic during peak hours is lost forever. Time spent searching for parking is lost forever. And the stress caused by these issues is unhealthy.
The automobile has grown larger, heavier, and higher powered, leading to faster driving. Statistics in the US report pedestrian fatalities increased by over 50% since 2009, attributed to the increased size and weight of popular vehicles. Motor vehicles are literally weapons whether intentionally used in that manner, as they have been, or not.
There are dozens of websites and articles talking about the degradation caused by the automobile, and entire books dedicated to revealing the negative impacts of motor vehicles, particularly singling out private cars. During a contrary search I couldn’t find a single source that praises the world altering consequences of private car ownership. Not one calls out the car as an extreme luxury, or an exceptional privilege. Not one calls it a right, and definitely not an entitlement. Yet, entitlement and right is how most of the first-world thinks of them. That is a gross distortion of reality, a twisted thought process that only sees what it wants to see and blindly ignores the obvious, screaming in our face facts.
Car sales in the E.U. and North America have subsided, some, but in China, India and Brazil sales continue growing to record levels bringing with it more of the same degradation of everyone’s quality of life.
Read the following long list of supporting references—
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/07/cars-killing-us-driving-environment-phase-out
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/11/polluting-cars-killing-us-air-pollution
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/20/cars-cities-land-rover-pollution-urban-spaces
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2024/03/05/all-the-ways-that-cars-harm-our-communities-well-almost-all
https://www.performanceplustire.com/Blog/How-Long-Does-a-Tire-Take-to-Decompose-in-Landfills
Carmaggendon, the book—
https://cdn.bookey.app/files/pdf/book/en/carmageddon.pdf
