If someone invented a product that killed as many people as the first and second world wars combined, maimed at least 50mn more each year and swallowed up to 70 per cent of your lifetime earnings, would you want one? Would you ever.
That’s what the car is estimated to have cost us since the first one hit the road more than a century ago, write social anthropologist Henrietta Moore and urban designer Arthur Kay, in Roadkill: Unveiling the True Cost of Our Toxic Relationship with Cars (Wiley, £22/$28). Yet our hunger for them remains boundless. We have one for every five people today, mostly in cities that have been designed around them that, this book argues, could otherwise be safer, quieter and better places to live.
Moore and Kay don’t think cars are morally bad, but they make a compelling case that we are “car blind” to the way we’ve become dependent on a “car-industrial complex” that shapes and constrains our choices. That includes electric cars, which the authors agree are better than fossil-fuel vehicles, yet imperfect thanks to the carbon footprint of their components and their prevalence on streets that could be more vibrant public spaces.