Comment 37489

By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted January 27, 2010 at 14:27:47

Cars kill a really impressive number of people. The last statistics I saw said four times as much as war worldwide. They make cocaine, handguns and unprotected sex with strangers look safe by comparison. Car accidents alone are a leading cause of death for most demographics, and that's not counting air pollution, physical inactivity, industrial accidents (mining, smelting, automaking, refining, roadbuilding etc) or oil wars.

The really important point here is that even if cars emitted nothing but steam, the vast majority of these deaths would still take place. Smog kills relatively few people compared to car accidents and inactivity, and most pollution/emissions would still take place in producing the vehicle (which for most cars causes more pollution than its entire lifetime of tailpipe emissions). Roads and parking lots would still need to be built through sensitive natural areas (or does the Red Hill Expressway not allow plug-in hybrids?), cities would still sprawl out of control and working families would still be spending tens of thousands of their hard-earned dollars on cars, fuel and infrastructure.

It's also worth noting that few or none of these side effects occur on anything like the same scale with any other form of urban transportation.

"Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century." — Lewis Mumford

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