The private car is a convenience for its owner, and an ongoing environmental disaster for the planet.
We’ve known this for a long time, of course. Yet because we Americans live in a First World country whose transportation infrastructure has been built for cars, we rarely stop to think in any comprehensive manner about the destructive habits of our car-driven way of life. Those Americans who do care about the environment invest in electric or hybrid cars, as if carbon emissions were the worst of the problems caused by ubiquitous car ownership.
A study in the 1990s by the Heidelberg Institute of Global Health in Germany details how the automobile impacts the environment during all three stages of its existence, from manufacture through its operational lifetime to its disposal. Last year, a new study was published in the Journal of Transport Geography entitled “Car Harm: A global review of automobility’s harm to people and the environment.” Its research and conclusions are sobering.
The study divides the harm done by cars into four broad categories: violence (car crashes and intentional violence such as bombings, drive-shootings and road rage); ill health (air quality, isolation, sedentary lifestyles); social injustice (unequal distribution of harm and access to resources); and environmental degradation (resource extraction, pollution, land use, climate change). It’s hard to argue with the thesis stated in the study’s introduction:
“Cars are the default mode of transportation in thousands of cities, suburbs and towns around the world… While some people benefit from the default position of cars, nearly everyone – whether or not they drive, is harmed by it.”
The study contains some eye-opening statistics. Currently, there are about 2 billion motor vehicles in use worldwide, about 1.3 billion of which are cars. (The study defines a “car” as a vehicle used to transport people and small amounts of cargo, including sedans, SUVs, pickup trucks, vans and taxis.) But those 1.3 billion cars are distributed unevenly among the world’s 8 billion people. Although China now has more total cars than the United States, we own cars at four times their per capita rate. The Netherlands, a small, flat, bicycle-friendly country, has more cars than Nigeria, which has 12 times as many people.
The harm done by cars is also uneven. It falls hardest in places where car ownership is not widespread. Lead batteries from cars are dismantled in poor countries whose citizens lack the mobility provided by cars but nonetheless suffer the harmful effects of automotive lead exposure. Rubber for tires comes from plantations in Liberia where workers earn slave wages so that we can drive to weekend sporting events.
Traffic crashes kill 3500 people per day worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, traffic crashes are the leading cause of death for children over four and adults under 30. Africa has the highest crash death rate per capita, Europe the lowest. In the United States, crash deaths per capita declined in the early years of this century but have since begun to climb again.
Those crash deaths include victims outside of the car, such as pedestrians and cyclists, who have become much more vulnerable with the proliferation of SUVs. A 2023 study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that “pickup trucks, SUVs and vans with a hood height greater than 40 inches are 45% more likely to cause fatalities than shorter vehicles with a hood height of 30 inches or less.”
The devastation wrought by cars is not limited to the cars themselves but is distributed throughout the whole automotive infrastructure. Limited-access highways and their attendant exit ramps, interchanges and service areas consume acres of land that serve no productive purpose and cause problems through chemical run-off and radiation of heat back into the atmosphere. Parking lots, built for the express purpose of temporarily storing cars, are even worse offenders.
None of this is news. We have it within our means to address all these issues. Yet many of us would rather just keep driving and owning cars, and damn the consequences. “The current status quo,” the JTG report concludes, “prioritizes the movement and storage of cars above the safety, health, dignity, and wellbeing of people and the environment. It took just a few decades for nearly every city on Earth to be remade from a pedestrian-centric place to an automobile-centric place. Perhaps in a few more decades, [we] will have once again remade cities – this time into safer, healthier, and more just environments.”
