Can you imagine a world where owning a car is frowned upon? Can you imagine your kids ashamed of being brought to school by car? Can you imagine your relatives telling you “you should quit, it’s a really bad habit”? Still sounds unrealistic, right? Like it or not, this is the world that we should try to reach as soon as possible.
For starters, a reminder that no, a car is not an indispensable part of a human’s body. Humans can’t live without a heart, a brain or a liver but they can perfectly live without a car. In fact, they have done so for thousands of year and a lot of people still do. Cars colonized most of the world only recently. If you absolutely need a car for work for instance, it’s just because society “decided” at some point that everybody must have a car and therefore people should drive to work. Tomorrow society could “decide”1 the opposite, the vast majority of employers and employees would just have to reorganize and carry on.2
The car was definitely a great invention and brought a lot of benefits to society, but the cost of mass usage has clearly outweighed the advantages in the past few decades. For society, it’s way past time starting the rehab. Without even talking about its huge contribution to climate change, the car as we know it cannot be redeemed: the air pollution caused by road traffic is responsible for at least 7 millions deaths a year in the world, among them half a million babies,3 lung cancer for non-smokers, its toxic particles are found in the lungs of unborn babies, road accidents are the main cause of death for children… It’s a sad paradox that some people reject stuff like GMOs or new vaccines because they believe these to be harmful, but few people listen about the clearly demonstrated harm caused by cars. Naturally cars are so integrated in people’s lives, so convenient, so loved; they are symbols of independence, of freedom; driving is like a superpower. Needless to say, it will be very hard to change people’s views on the topic.
Smoking used to be fully accepted by society, often even encouraged: smoking was cool; offering a cigarette was basic politeness, like holding a door; smoking was tolerated everywhere, from restaurants to schools and even hospitals. one wouldn’t even ask permission before lighting a cigarette in a closed public space. A person who didn’t like being around people smoking would have been considered annoying, intolerant, unpleasant. Western societies took their time, but they eventually succeeded in changing people views on smoking. They did so progressively: restrictions or bans on advertising, relentless tax increases, bans in public places, mandatory public health messages on the packaging, and finally standardized packages to reduce the commercial appeal to a minimum.
First step is admitting the problem, but societies are still in denial about the car. Most people do not want to face their addiction, they do not want to be reminded that their habit has serious consequences. Of course taxes should be fiercely increased on cars and gas, but it’s also about reversing decades of positive reinforcement: car accidents and their causes are the only damages that have ever been seriously addressed (and it was mostly about adopting safer driving practices, not about promoting alternatives to driving). The fact that children are much more likely to develop breathing disorders due to car pollution is never emphasized, for instance. Everybody knows that smoking causes cancer, but governments are not eager to inform people about the health issues caused by cars. This is willful blindness, and in a few decades from now, societies will judge our current behaviour harshly. A reasonable plan would start here: properly inform people. Make it mandatory for a car buyer to know the estimated number of people killed every year. Require mandatory stickers on cars, like “this vehicle causes cancer”; the cute “baby in car” sticker should be replaced with a more honest “baby killer”. It’s outrageous that car makers can still advertise their products given what we know about the health and environment damages.
People are often proud of their car. This is due to the society culture, but also in no small part to marketing: cars are still designed with all kinds of modern esthetics, fancy shapes and joyful colours to make them look appealing, friendly, racy… It goes without saying that car makers want people to be addicted to cars: they want people to have at least two cars in a household, they want them to buy a car for their child as soon as they reach the legal age.4
Whenever restrictions or taxes about cars are debated, car proponents always emphasize that people use their car for work, to go to work, that they need it to travel with their family. In other words, they emphasize the fact that cars are needed and useful for many people. They use the fallacy that since some usages of cars are justified, there should not be any restriction of any kind applied to cars. Let’s break this fallacy apart and start by addressing the marketing around cars: if the point is the usefulness of the car, there’s no need for all these fancy designs and options. No need for air conditioning in cars, for instance. These things are not necessities, they are conveniences meant to make people enjoy their car as much as possible. So let’s set the terms of the debate like this: cars kill babies; design and advertising cause cars to be used much more than strictly necessary; so car usage could be drastically reduced simply by restricting marketing; defending one’s right to a high level of comfort despite children dying is an uncomfortable moral position to hold, even for marketing experts.
It’s obvious that some car usages are necessary in society, we need ambulances and fire trucks. But let’s stop pretending to confuse the really needed usages with the dispensable ones: the majority of car usage is made of people driving by comfort or by pride, for fun, or to save a bit of time. People drive simply because we usually choose the path of least effort, unless there is a good reason not to. There are already many good reasons not to, but for now we still prefer to play dumb.5
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Society is more likely to “reluctantly learn to live with” rather than to really “decide”, but this doesn’t matter. ↩︎
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By the way, this might not be as unlikely as we think: if a major geopolitical crisis involving one or several major oil-producing countries happens, the price of oil would quickly rise and most cars would become economically unviable within a very short period of time. ↩︎
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One can only assume that people who are against abortion because it “kills babies” don’t use a car, do they? ↩︎
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People easily forget that previous generations often had only one car for the household. ↩︎
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I’m aware that this text is not really well written, but I think I’d rather express this stuff in a clumsy way than not at all. ↩︎