Automobile Domination

Fact: Cars have taken over the world. In developed countries they take up the most space and resources, and are the top predators. Have we created our own demise? Let’s look at some of the costs:

Social- People have the freedom to live where they want, and go where they want. However, this means spreading of people and therefore often less sense of community. This also creates a need for more infrastructure (i.e. roads to get to all the places people want to go or live), and even more vehicles to transport the goods people needs to these places. Since more vehicles equals more air pollution, health is another major social cost. Similarly, cars collisions take the lives of many people or cause injuries that send them to hospitals. Outside every house is a death zone for children. Consequently, more rules, regulations, and safety standards have to be imposed.

Economical – the costs of automobiles is enormous. First, there are the costs of manufacturing cars, including paying for the materials, labour, and energy, not to mention safety tests. Along with this is the production of car parts from new engines to tires, to lights and batteries. Next, we need to make roads, bypasses, streetlights etc for the cars. This takes continual amounts of money, energy and labour because roads constantly need improvements as they weather and as traffic levels increase with population increase. There is also the cost for mining oil, refining it and shipping it. Personally, consumers pay huge amounts of money for gas, insurance, repairs, maintenance, emissions tests, and even parking. It makes me wonder why so many people who could use transit choose to use cars, but then again convenience has become a greater commodity than money in our society.

Environmental- it is pretty obvious how cars are polluting the world. They admit greenhouse gases that add to global climate change, and also other toxic pollutants. The waste created by used car parts, materials and by mechanics contribute greatly to the amount of non-renewable items that are being trashed. We are also eliminating huge areas of natural land to make roads for all our automobiles, and increasing the impervious surfaces that don’t allow for natural rainwater filtration and evaporation. This adds to the urban heat island effect, which on a bigger scale adds to global warming with increasing urbanization, as well as increased energy consumption as more air-conditioning is used in hot months.

Overall, automobiles benefit humanity greatly in terms of convenience and opportunities, but severely impact us in terms of personal costs of money, health, and the quality of our living spaces. A reduction or elimination in automobile use, however, is not an easy task to tackle. Our society if constructed with dependence on motorized vehicles. We would have to think about changing our lifestyle first or else we need to create a new personal vehicle that can function similarly as what we currently have without negatively impacting the planet and ultimately ourselves.