Daniel Knowles

A high-octane polemic against cars—which are ruining the world, while making us unhappy and unhealthy—from a talented young writer at the Economist The automobile was one of the most miraculous inventions of the 20th century. It promised freedom, style, and utility. But sometimes, rather than improving our lives technology just makes everything worse. Over the past century cars have filled the air with toxic pollutants and fueled climate change. Cars have stolen public space and made our cities uglier, dirtier, less useful, and more unequal. Cars have caused tens of millions of deaths and injuries. They have wasted our time and our money. In Carmageddon, journalist Daniel Knowles outlines the rise of the automobile and the costs we all bear as a result. Weaving together history, economics, and reportage, Knowles traces the forces and decisions that normalised cars and cemented our reliance on them. He takes readers around the world to show the ways car use has impacted people’s lives—from Nairobi, where few people own a car but the city is still cloaked in smog, to Houston, where the Katy Freeway has a mind-boggling 26 lanes and there are 30 parking spaces for every resident, enough land to fit Paris ten times. With these negatives, Knowles shows that there are better ways to live, looking at Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Tokyo, and New York City.

How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It

Carmageddon

Katy Watkins

Adams's argument was that the endless growth of car mobility was not in fact obviously progress. Rather, it was driven by the desires of the wealthy for convenience, and would come at the expense of the poor.

The Boring Company says that the capacity of the original first tunnel, to the Convention Center, is about 4,500 passengers per hour. By comparison, a single New York City subway station can handle 50,000 passengers per hour in each direction. Musk is sacrificing perhaps 95 percent of the potential capacity of his tunnels. And that figure of 4,500 is actually an optimistic estimate, since it assumes that every passenger is not traveling in a normal Tesla. According to Steve Hill, the president of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, which runs the convention center, the plan is to replace the individual cars with "trams" able to hold up to sixteen passengers. In essence, Elon Musk has reinvented he subway train. Visionary, as I said.

But looking at congestion is a terrible way to measure the need for more roads, largely because using roads is generally free. If you give away something that costs money to provide, you will almost always get more demand than you can ever possibly meet. And if driving is too cheap relative to other ways of getting around, there will always be more demand to drive. That is why congestion is a problem in almost every big city on earth.

Old cities, designed by chance, are safe to walk in. New cities, designed with all of the scientific expertise of an entire profession dedicated supposedly to safety, are far more dangerous. The fact that old cities in America are where driving is safest is proof that improving safety is possible. 

So why do governments and highway engineers not do more? The problem is not that traffic engineers are stupid, though it is tempting to believe. It is that their incentives, created by politicians, are in favor of drivers. Drivers like to be able to go fast and not have to concentrate too much.

The reality is that when you are driving in a built-up area, it ought to be difficult. You should not be able to look at a screen if you are moving, because you should need to focus on what is happening on the road ahead of you. You are, after all, maneuvering a ton or more of metal at a dangerous speed, powered by explosions happening under the hood. Driving in a place where the lanes are narrow and there are pedestrians and cyclists everywhere is really stressful. And ironically, that is why it is safer, because the stress comes from the fact that drivers are forced to concentrate.

According to another study, done by academics at the University of the Andes in Santiago, Chile, one single one-meter-wide bicycle lane can transport 4,657 people on bicycles per hour before any of them have to slow down. A single car lane, which is generally a minimum of three meters wide in cities, can transport around 1,500 cars per hour. So if every car has four passengers, cars can, at most, transport roughly half of the number of people as bikes can in a single lane of traffic. If cars have 1.5 passengers on average, a more realistic figure for cities, bicycles can transport six times as many people. Now in fairness, buses and trains can transport more people than bikes. But they do not go door-to-door, and you have to invest in them. By converting roads to bicycle lanes, however, as Paris has done, cities can instantly increase the capacity of their road infrastructure sixfold at essentially zero cost.

The problem is not cars themselves. It is privileging cars over any other form of transport, so that they are not a luxury or an occasional necessity, but rather something that we are forced to rely on, day-to-day. The problem is building our homes and our cities in such a way that pavement, rather than people, comes first.

It was Gustavo Petro, a mayor of Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, who argued that “a developed country is not a place where the poor have cars, it is a place where the rich use public transportation.”

Ultimately, only transit systems that serve a majority, rather than a minority of the rich, will help alleviate poverty without ruining the planet we live on. I say this sincerely, but reducing the number of cars on the road is not just about climate change, or about urban mobility. It is about justice too. Cars are engines of inequality, because, put simply, we do not have the resources for everyone to have their own.

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