Warning: Driving Kills

By Andrew Simms, Resurgence. Posted November 12, 2005.

I don't drive. But my life is dominated by cars. They are around me and inside me; I breathe their fumes every time I walk along a road. As a child I breathed in their glamour and persuaded my parents to buy me countless toy cars.

The first car our family had even looked like a big toy. It was called a Standard Penant. Disturbingly I can remember its number plate more easily than my family's birthdays. When it was sold I mourned the window stickers from Welsh campsites that I had lovingly put on the passenger side window. Freudians have a term for how people invest emotion into inanimate objects. It's called cathexis. It happens a lot with cars.

Now they are everywhere I look. I dodge between them going from any one place to any other. I shout over them to have a conversation walking down the street. I wake up to their sound systems in the small hours as they park or drive by my house. Places that I love have been divided and paved over to make way for cars. Until a new traffic system was introduced to my home town in Essex I could cross into the town center by walking over a road of two lanes. After, I had to cross about 13 lanes.

A car showroom now sits at the corner of that junction. One time I walked past and there were large posters in the window advertising the latest "retro" model of car produced by the manufacturer Chrysler. As I stood outside, the windows picking up reflections of a bleak landscape -- a spaghetti mess of traffic lanes and vulnerable pedestrian islands -- the posters nevertheless invited me to "Buy your soul," by purchasing the PT Cruiser. Dr Faust was at work.

Cars cover and suffocate our lives but somehow their dominance is also strangely invisible. Our unique adaptability as a species has enabled us to acclimatize to their staggering "everywhereness," and not see it as odd. Were the car a disease it would be an epidemic. Yet, spellbound, we embrace the great destroyer and design our lives, communities and countryside around it. We welcome cars into our lives when, rationally, we should be emblazoning them with public health warnings in the same style as cigarette packets. Driving can seriously damage your health, or Driving Kills.

In the century since the first recorded fatal traffic accident, the car has claimed 30 million lives. Traffic accidents are now predicted by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies to become the world's third most significant cause of death and disability by 2020. The World Health Organization estimates that 1.2 million people die on roads each year: similar to total fatalities caused by malaria.

Where the unsustainable use of fossil fuels is concerned, nothing is more symbolic than the car. If attitudes towards the car were to change, in much the same way that attitudes towards smoking already have, we might reasonably conclude grounds for hope in the face of the ecological debt of climate change. The opposite is also true.

So deeply is the car built into the organization of society, the running of the economy and the construction of our own identities, that a change in attitudes towards it might signal public readiness for action on climate change. Action that is finally commensurate with the scale of the problem.

The car has not simply stumbled into its current iconic and dominant status. History's biggest red carpet has been rolled out for it. Like a spoilt young prince it was born and brought up with an economic silver spoon in its mouth. Margaret Thatcher, as prime minister when I was growing up, told us we were living in a "great car economy." Roads and car parks were built for it at public expense. Competition, like the railways and trams, had already been deliberately run down in its favour.

In Britain the Beeching Plan, devised by the engineer and chairman of the British Railways Board, Richard Beeching, between 1963 and 1965 paved the way, metaphorically and literally, by shutting down a huge portion of the railway network. His contribution to pulling apart a more environmentally friendly transport system earned him a knighthood.

In the 1920s most significant towns and cities in the United States had their own electric rail systems: the famous streetcar. There were 1,200 separate systems with 44,000 miles of track. The car company General Motors (GM) made a loss in 1921 and feared that the car market had hit a wall. Its answer was to target the street and urban railways with a range of strategies to put them out of business and increase the market for automobiles. A special unit was set up within the company and it was disturbingly successful. Former US Senate Counsel Bradford Snell writes: "GM admitted, in court documents, that by the mid-1950s, its agents had canvassed more than 1,000 electric railways and that, of these, they had motorized ninety per cent."

Adapted from Andrew Simms' new book "Ecological Debt: The Health of the Planet and the Wealth of Nations" (Pluto Press, 2005). Andrew Simms is policy director of the New Economics Foundation.

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