Carmageddon

We have gotten so used to the domination of cars that we have forgotten how unpleasant the consequences are. We talk about traffic like we talk about the weather, as though it is something natural, outside of our control, to complain about but not to fix. We call car crashes ‘accidents’ as though they are not preventable. We shrug at pollution, even when it leaves our children coughing their guts up after PE. One 2019 study showed that living next to a main road stunts lung growth in children by up to 14 percent.

The car industry gets, for some reason, insanely good press. Its own propaganda has been incredibly effective. People remember that Volkswagen invented the Beetle, intended to be a car for the masses. They tend to forget the idea was Adolf Hitler’s. Similarly, they remember that Henry Ford paid his workers enough to be able to afford to buy a Model T. For some reason they seem to forget that he also sponsored some of the most virulently anti-Semitic propaganda in American history and lobbied against America’s entrance into World War II. Big Pharma, for all of its flaws, literally sells and develops drugs that save lives, but it generates far more protesters than ‘big auto’. Perhaps it is because the car industry provides good, well-paid, unionised jobs. But then, so too do oil companies.

Car manufacturers are really not much different from the oil industry or Big Tobacco. They will, if it helps the industry, sponsor dodgy research. They form lobby groups and sponsor astroturf campaigns. They will bribe and cheat their workers. Indeed, around the same time that the Volkswagen gassing scandal was being revealed, it also came out that the firm had repeatedly paid cash bribes and even brothel trips to union representatives. That is something other manufacturers have done for years. They also stymie the press who look into these scandals, while providing endless freebies to journalists who write positively about cars. It is, frankly, a crooked industry. Like many.

[...] Walking and cycling are not only convenient, and often cheaper, but they are also much healthier than sitting still behind the wheel of a car. We live in increasingly sedentary societies. A 2010 survey by the Centres for Disease Control found that 38 percent of Americans say that they have not walked for more than ten minutes at a time in more than a week. At a typical walking pace, that means more than a third of people have not walked half a mile in a week. The average Briton walks only around half a mile per day to get anywhere (so, not counting walking from the sofa to the fridge), or 181 miles a year, according to the Department of Transport. That is down by 83 miles since 1986. And so it should hardly be a surprise that we are getting fatter. Around 28 percent of Brits are clinically obese, and another 35 percent are overweight. In America, 41 percent of people are obese, a figure that is higher still in states like Texas or Iowa, where almost everybody gets around by car.

Driving everywhere is not only making our cities ugly and polluted, it is also making us fatter. It is easy to moralise about that, but it is mostly not because people are lazy that they do not exercise enough. It is because they follow the incentives society creates. And those incentives are to drive everywhere, rather than to walk. Our ancestors did not spend much time in the gym, or even eat especially healthy diets, but they stayed slim because their day-to-day habits involved walking. It would do us good to rediscover that.