This is far more the case in poorer countries.

The average modern person, by one calculation, spends more than 1,600 hours a year to pay for their cars, their insurance, fuel and repairs. We go to jobs partly to pay for the cars, and we need the cars mostly to get to jobs. We spend four of our sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering the resources for the car. Since the average modern American, by one estimate, travels 7,500 miles a year, and put in 1,600 hours a year to do that, they are travelling five miles per hour. Before people had cars, however, people managed to do the same – by walking.

Despite the widespread harm caused by cars and automobility, governments, corporations, and individuals continue to facilitate it by expanding roads, manufacturing larger vehicles, and subsidising parking, electric cars, and resource extraction. This literature review synthesises the negative consequences of automobility, or car harm, which we have grouped into four categories: violence, ill health, social injustice, and environmental damage. We find that, since their invention, cars and automobility have killed 60–80 million people and injured at least 2 billion. Currently, 1 in 34 deaths are caused by automobility. Cars have exacerbated social inequities and damaged ecosystems in every global region, including in remote car-free places. While some people benefit from automobility, nearly everyone—whether or not they drive—is harmed by it. Slowing automobility's violence and pollution will …

Last year, the World Health Organization reported that traffic fatalities had increased by 17 percent in Africa over the past 10 years, even as they fell 5 percent overall worldwide. Road crashes are now one of the top causes of the deaths in a continent contending with plenty of other public health challenges.

The rise in traffic crashes may partly reflect Africa’s economic growth in recent years. “Part of the reason for increased fatalities in Africa is the increase in the number of vehicles on the roads,” Nhan Tran, who leads the WHO’s safety and mobility unit, told the Guardian in December. “People who were not able to afford a vehicle 10 or 20 years ago can now buy one. Africa has seen a big increase …

That’s because a lot of us suffer from a malady called “car brain” — though Ian Walker, a professor of environmental psychology at Swansea University in Wales, prefers to call it “motonormativity.” This is the term coined by Walker and his team to describe the “cultural inability to think objectively and dispassionately” about how we use cars.

Think of it like “heteronormativity,” the idea that heterosexual couples “automatically, but inappropriately, assume all other people fit their own categories,” but for cars.

Walker noticed that people tend to have a giant blindspot when it comes to certain behaviors associated with driving, whether it’s speeding, carbon emissions, traffic crashes, or any other of the vast litany of negative external effects that result from a culture that caters to automobile …

Elite projection is the belief, among relatively fortunate and influential people, that what those people find convenient or attractive is good for the society as a whole. Once you learn to recognize this simple mistake, you see it everywhere. It is perhaps the single most comprehensive barrier to prosperous, just, and liberating cities.

This is not a call to bash elites. I am making no claim about the proper distribution of wealth and opportunity, or about anyone’s entitlement to influence. But I am pointing out a mistake that elites are constantly at risk of making. The mistake is to forget that elites are always a minority, and that planning a city or transport network around the preferences of a minority routinely yields an outcome that doesn’t …

"the car was not an object of emancipation but of servitude. I could do nothing without my car"

One of my pet projects: Create a friendly, free, open sourced, Car Media PC.

Concept of effective speed in comparing between cars & bikes. A bike is much faster if all time costs taken into account

In modern cities, the equivalent of “winding up the spring” is the time spent at work earning the money to pay for all our transport costs. For pedestrians, this time is virtually nil. For cyclists it is minimal. For car drivers, the time spent earning the money to pay for all the costs of cars is usually much greater than the time spent driving. Get news that’s free, independent and based on evidence.

Motorists may think they are saving time with their cars when it takes 20 minutes to drive to work, compared to 30 or 40 minutes on a bicycle. However, motorists might be spending …

We spend 4.4 BILLION USD on petrol subsidies a good percentage of this goes to private car owners. http://wp.me/p1mEVR-5O WTF??

WHO: Eritrea is home to the highest concentration of road deaths, followed by the Cook Islands, Egypt and Libya http://is.gd/X4wfao

لو نزلت في يوم الصبح رايح الشغل ملقتش عربيتك تحت البيت ممكن تعمل الاتي:

Full size Volvo made of Legos