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The Indelible Automobile

Kendra Pierre-Louis | Thursday 5th November 2009

Ever since Henry Ford rolled the first model T off of the assembly line, the automobile has shaped how countries have moved people and things. Items and people that were once moved by horse and buggy, and then later railway have increasingly been moved by cars and trucks. The highway systems of the US and Western Europe have become the model by which many developing nations shape their own transportation policies with cars and their necessary roads symbolizing progress. Even China is losing its status as the world's "bicycle kingdom" as the emerging middle class increasingly forgoes clean and energy efficient bicycle transport in favor of the car and Chinese government policy follows suit.

But the automobile as the primary form of transport is a highly unsustainable pursuit. The contribution that cars make to climate change are well documented, but even if cars did not have a negative effect on the climate they are still not the ideal form of transport.

There is sadly, a high human cost associated with driving. According to the NHTSA Fatality Analysis Reporting System roughly 35,000 Americans are killed annually in automobile accidents. Worldwide auto accidents take 1.2 million lives a year, a number that rises to 2 million per year when the effects of car related air pollution are taken into consideration. It is not only those riding in vehicles for whom cars pose a risk; pedestrians and bicyclists are often the unwitting victims of auto accidents.

In addition cars are expensive. They are often the most expensive item a household owns apart from their home. When one factors in the cost of gas, insurance, maintenance and repairs it becomes easily understandable that the average American family spends 17% of their income on owning and maintaining a car. This is more than the average family spends on food. The high cost of car ownership, in a society that requires cars to go to work, to go to school, to move, means that it both requires a middle class income to comfortably possess a car and that it a car becomes a barrier towards attaining middle class status. This barrier is twofold. First, if one does not have a car it is difficult to secure employment, and secondly, if one is poor and has a car a larger proportion of their income has to go to maintaining their vehicle. In short, in a society that bases itself around auto transit, the car acts as a sort of regressive tax.

As a development paradigm, this is problematic. The way a society moves, helps to shape that society. And a society that is dependent on the personal car is one that says it doesn't value children, the elderly, the poor, or the disabled. This is bad enough in developed countries which have the resources to mitigate some of the worst effects of car transport (school buses for children, special transport services for the elderly and the disable), but in developing countries in which the majority of citizenry are often poor and below the age of 18 this is a transportation policy that prioritizes the needs and the desires of the affluent few at the cost of the many. There is an increasing shift on this priority on a local level to move from a focus on car transit to mass transit, but often these efforts begin when a car culture is already entrenched. In countries that are only beginning to develop their infrastructure those of us involved in Sustainable Development should be aware of our innate bias towards the car and investigate and develop other infrastructures that are friendlier to the planet, to the easily disenfranchised. Infrastructures that do more than just shuttle us around, but also bring people together.

In other words, we need to recognize that the automobile problem is not simply a carbon problem, it's a social one.

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