Vendor Writing

Car Harm

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  • Parking lots cause inaccessibility, heat sinks, pedestrian hazards. Vast acreage of parking lot stand between a person and their amenities.
  • Cars take up needed space for farming, housing and recreation.
  • Vehicle assaults, road rage and drunk driving are all purely because of the existence of the private car.
  • Pollution from cars kills 370,000 people per year.
  • Noise pollution erodes mammalian (that includes you) mental well being, disrupting mating and sleep patterns of native birds and other animals.
  • Car crashes kill 700 children per day.
  • Sedentary travel causes diabetes, morbidity, insensitivity to pedestrians, animals, plants.
  • Impervious surfaces increase flooding, drought, lowered water tables.
  • Automobility causes 1 in 34 deaths.
  • Since the inception of the private automobile, 60- 80 million people have had their lives cut short by a car. By comparison, 90 million Native Americans were killed by the Cortez campaign. Nine million Jews murdered by the Nazis.
  • Automobility is one of the leading causes of climate change- 23% of global emissions. Yet there are only 16 cars per 100 people on the planet, and a tiny percent of that 16% actually owns a private car.
  • Everyone, plus animals and plants, even remote dwellers in car free areas, are harmed by cars.
  • As usual, Americans are the biggest culprits. The car itself could be said to be causing the lackadaisical response to the environmental crisis- in the United States.
  • Cars have been sold to us as sexy and serviceable. In reality they are the product of corporations outsourcing their costs to the public. If corporations had invested in solutions that work for their workers, including locating themselves on convenient train routes and bus routes, for instance, or ensuring that they placed themselves in a live work neighborhood, or paying for peoples transportation, as part of the cost of getting them to work-
  • If we had spent as much on public transportation as we do on cars, we would have a system that rivals anywhere in the universe.

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