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.”

For a time in the 1980s I lived in Julian, California, a small town high in the mountains east of San Diego. The last town of any size on the road, 22 miles before Julian, is Ramona, an agricultural community with a wide main street reminiscent of “Gunsmoke” and “High Noon.” It’s the last agglomeration of fast-food restaurants and chain grocery stores before the highway heads up over the mountains and into the desert beyond.

There was a chicken farm not far from Ramona, before the road begins to climb in earnest. Eggs were sold from a little shack in a generous dirt pull-off next to the highway. It was a good place to stop, stretch your legs, and pick up some eggs before negotiating the last miles of winding mountain road on the long drive from the populated cities near the coast.

I remember when they installed drive-thru service. It cracked me up, because the farm was in the middle of nowhere, and who was in a hurry to get to Julian? But you could now drive around the back of the shack, buy your farm-fresh eggs like a cheeseburger, and continue along your merry way without ever getting out of the car.

Forty years later, it still seems funny to me. But it was a harbinger of things to come. Two years ago, I wrote about being unable to get a cup of coffee in the lobby of a Dunkin’ Donuts while a line of cars waited at the drive-thru. In Bangor and Rockland, Dunkin’ franchises post signs warning drivers not to block the street when the drive-thru backs up. Meanwhile, inside space and service has diminished as customers opt to wait in a line of cars rather than people.

Dunkin’ Donuts was once a friendly place instead of an ATM for good coffee and cheap food. There was a Dunkin’ in Ellsworth on the corner of Main and High Street, and people would gather before work in the mornings to drink coffee from thick-walled mugs, and to talk with fellow human beings instead of ordering into an impersonal speaker. It’s long gone now, of course, replaced by an out-of-town pit stop a couple miles away with a larger footprint, a smaller seating area, and a wrap-around line for cars. No one arrives on foot, and no one talks to one another.

We live in Drive-Thru Nation now. Banking, prescriptions, eggs – you name it, you can likely get it through a car window. Is this a good thing? Perhaps if you’ve got five minutes to get to work and you’ve forgotten to eat breakfast and you’re willing to wait in your car as if you’re stopped for road construction, it might seem convenient. But why are we all running around in such a hurry in the first place, to the point where we can’t take the time for the small personal interactions that help sustain communities?

From the public expectation of free parking (I prefer to call it “socialized parking”), to the Wal-Martization of towns that once boasted an array of small and varied businesses, the destructive costs of our car-driven lifestyles are both widely apparent and widely accepted.

But what if customers had to pay an extra dollar at Dunkin’ Donuts and the Ramona egg farm to use the drive-thru? Would drivers still flock to them? Or would they take the incentive to re-connect, if only for a few minutes, with their fellow citizens?

The dollars could go toward public transportation, bike paths, downtown green spaces and walkable commercial zones. They could fund infrastructure that steers the incentives away from the isolation of cars toward the inclusion of community.

For the past three-quarters of a century, the United States has promoted cars and built transportation systems almost exclusively for car owners. Business and government have been equally complicit. It’s time to have a national conversation about this, over a cup of coffee that hasn’t been passed through a car window.