Podcast: Roadkill- Unveiling the True Cost of Our Toxic Relationship with Cars

In this special episode to mark the launch of their new book, Roadkill: Unveiling the True Cost of Our Toxic Relationship with Cars, Professor Dame Henrietta Moore and Arthur Kay discuss the philosophical implications of car culture, as well as the practical impacts it has on your money, your taxes, your neighbourhood, your planet, your health, and your happiness.

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Transcript

Voiceover:
This is a podcast for The Bartlett Review, sharing new ideas and disruptive thinking for the built environment, brought to you by The Bartlett Faculty for the Built Environment at University College London. 

Henrietta Moore:
One of the things that I was very concerned about when we were working on the book together was the fact that cars are restricting freedoms in ways that we often don't recognise.

Arthur Kay:
Jeremy Clarkson and our Formula One driving friend and Dallas are our three unlikely allies on this journey.

Henrietta Moore:
Hello, Bartlett Review podcast listeners. I'm Henrietta Moore, and I'm the founder and director of the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London. And in this episode today, we're going to be talking about cars. Now, cars are the most successful consumer product ever. But today we want to come at this problem of cars from a slightly different angle. We want to talk about them as a way of working through the kinds of challenges, trade-offs, and conflicts that modern living has thrown at us. Our relationship with cars is complicated, but somehow we have convinced ourselves that driving a car is an exercise in freedom. In this podcast, we're going to be discussing how we've arrived at this conclusion, why it might be doing us more harm than good, and what we can do about it. Can we kick the car habit? So to answer this question, we're going to be talking about a new book called Roadkill, our toxic relationship with cars. And here in the studio with me is my co-author, Arthur Kay. So Arthur, welcome. Lovely to have a chance to chat to you about this yet again, even after writing a whole book together.

Arthur Kay:
Well, it's great to be here and to be on The Bartlett Review podcast and fantastic to be talking to my co-author across the table about this important subject. So my background is actually in architecture. I studied at UCL at The Bartlett and then went on rather unusually to set up two different startups. One in the clean energy space and one in sustainable housing. My day-to-day now is taken up with a number of kind of board and advisory roles, including sitting on the Board of Transport for London and also recently joined the Board of the Royal Academy of Engineering. But what I was really interested in working with you and the IGP on was really around taking what can be seen as quite a narrow technocratic issue, like transport policy or why cars and emissions, these sorts of things, and trying to frame it in a much broader, and I think of the story and the philosophy around why we do what we do. Because too often decisions about these things are kind of drilled down into a niche bit of planning reform or whatever it has to be, but we forget the big arguments around, as you say, freedom, around what is a good life and why we should live what we live.

Henrietta Moore:
Yes, because at the Institute, we are interested, of course, in the good life and what a good life looks like. And we're very, very aware that there is no one good life for everybody on the planet, that whatever that good life is, it's going to vary historically and culturally and situationally. And so when we come to discuss something like cars, which are a global phenomenon, then we have to keep that in mind. And actually talking about cars in this complex way is much more difficult. And it can be very easy both to forget the history of the car and also to forget the diversity of the way people respond to the car and all it offers. So let's go back a bit to some of the ideas we had around the history. So one of the questions I know that you're very interested in is this whole question of choice. So if we go back to 1897, the first patent for an e-bike was actually issued then. So perhaps we have less choice now about how we get around than we did in 1897.

Arthur Kay:
I think that's exactly right. I certainly grew up with this myth that there was this kind of survival of the fittest moment for the car that before roughly Henry Ford came along, everyone was having a terrible time struggling around cities, having to go by horse and cart. Every single startup conference I go to, they say that New York is overrun by manure. And luckily, this genius came along and industrialised this process. What we actually discovered as we drilled into the facts behind it was that there was a very diverse and plural ecosystem of different transport modes and ways of getting around, and critically for The Bartlett Review listeners, ways of designing cities that allowed people to live a much more proximate lifestyle. And what happened was not necessarily a survival of the fittest, that the quote-unquote best technology won, but that through a range of industrial strategies driven by what we call the car industrial complex, actually in large part post-Second World War and American hegemony beginning to export this model of urbanism, that actually this diversity has been weaned away. In cities like London and a lot of cities around the world, we're beginning to see this diversity creeping back slowly, which may include things like better neighbourhoods designed for being able to walk and cycle, may include things like e-scooters and e-bicycles. You mentioned the patent from 1897 for the e-bike. We were amazed to find out about our friend Priscilla Norman, who in 1915 could be seen scooting around central London, where UCL is based, around the Bloomsbury campus with her Autoped scooter. Which came in both a hydrocarbon diesel form and also in an electric form. So the e-scooter, and people like Lionel Bird who have been producing them, is not a 20th century Silicon Valley invention, but actually something was made by a German manufacturer during the First World War.

Henrietta Moore:
We didn't just have e-scooters, but we had electric taxis and it took an awful long time to get electric taxis back again. It's rather a strange thing to discover. But also that because of that, there were writers at the end of the 19th century who were saying, okay, what we need to do is to have a set of distributed charging stations all across the United States so that you can actually drive from the East Coast to the West Coast, charge your electric vehicle on the way and stop off and have nice things to eat whilst it's charging. Which sounds like something that we didn't know we'd invented until we got motorways with. stop-off points on them. So it looks like sometimes when we're thinking about the history of the car that we've lost much of the energy we had around different modes of mobility and we're only getting it back a bit slowly now. And frankly, we've done ourselves a great disservice by designing all our cities around cars rather than around people. And I think one of the things that we talk about in the book is that people very often say, oh, well, you know, that's a done deal. There's nothing we can do about this now because there's so much infrastructure has been poured into the car. How can we solve this problem? Our cities are what they are. They're great sprawling landscapes like Los Angeles. And if you live outside Los Angeles, what choice do you have but to take a car? But I think one of the things that you're very interested in is how many solutions are already coming up around the world about how we can respond in a different way to what looks like that fixed position.

Arthur Kay:
Absolutely. Quickly to touch on the previous point around choice. One of the things we talk about in the book Roadkill is around how even in a place, and this is one of the kind of small things that nudge our decisions. So even in a place like India, where roughly 9% of households have access to a car, or something like a car, I should say, even there, the default option on Google Maps and the way of getting around for a billion Indians is car. So when you say, get me from A to B, it says you're going to drive there, even though only 9% of households have access to it. So this mindset of the default choice being car is built into everything from you know the way our streets are designed to where our houses are built to the way our smartphones tell us how to get from A to B.

Henrietta Moore:
What's really interesting is that many of the best ideas about how to increase the choices available to us for moving around our cities and indeed moving in general are coming from the Global South. Because of course, with less resources, with less car dependency, with the effects of climate change and also the burden of debt bearing down on those economies, people have begun to think, okay, so do we really need to be spending our money on cars? And one of the things we discovered early on is that from Jakarta to Nairobi, people are using solutions which they have been piecing together, which in the past looked like, shall we say, less optimal solutions than those in the Global North, but are turning out now to be much more useful. So, for example, shared services like the matatus in Kenya, which are now, you know, many of them actually green matatus and many of them also available to you by looking at an app or a platform-based set of information to give you access. They're much more like real-time transport, but in more of a social and community sense than what we have here. One of the difficulties in the UK, and I think we talked to many people whilst we were writing the book, and one of the cities that we were interested in in the UK was Milton Keynes. And Milton Keynes has been struggling for some time to get just-in-time transport in place for people because it was trying to respond to the criticism that's often made of public services, which are that they are slow, they're expensive, and they're not organised around you, so they're nowhere near as convenient as the car.

Arthur Kay:
Milton Keynes is an interesting example. And for the urban planning nerds who I'm sure are going to be listening to this podcast, is a city designed in the 1960s as a new town by the urban planner Melvin Webber who had a really cool phrase called community without propinquity which basically means you can have a community or friends with people without living near them and the real insight to how he was saying this is going to be possible was through cars and it meant that you could just hop in your car and you could go anywhere and meet any friends and build those communities without being in the in a neighbourhood without having that propinquity with those people. So how do you knit together, how do you reverse that either urban sprawl or that pre-designed car at the centre to mean that people can again get back to the centre. And some of those things which were harder to do beforehand, so walking long distances between buildings is not that easy around Milton Keynes, but things like e-scooters coming back and e-bikes coming back are really helping with that. And also it's very expensive to run a public transit service like a bus route around Milton Keynes because it's very spread out and therefore very inefficient for a bus route and particularly when you have everyone driving already and so this MK Connect piece means that for around 10% of the cost of a typical ride-hailing service like an Uber or a Lyft, and for around twice as much as a typical bus service, so this might be £3 or £4, you're able to get from roughly any point in the city to any other point using a ride-hailing app, you can get on that piece of transport within 10 to 25 minutes typically. So it's an interesting example of how using a bit of transport and a bit of urban planning alongside it, because interestingly, the councillors who were responsible for this app were also responsible for some of the economic development challenges within Milton Keynes, which are around how they can infill and create some greater density in that city as well.

Henrietta Moore:
Yes. And I think what's been very important for Milton Keynes, as for so many other cities around the world, has been this question of engagement with local citizens, asking them what they want rather than imposing it. And I think one of the cul-de-sacs, if you like, that has come about because of our car dependency is the idea that since the car is the apogee of freedom and the apogee of choice, then there's very little incentive to explore other options. But I remember vividly one of the councillors talking about a man who was very sceptical about the whole process of the revision of just-in-time transport for Milton Keynes, but discovered that when he wanted to go to the barber, all he had to do was summon up this transport, which came within 10 minutes, took him to the barber. Then he had his hair cut. Then when he'd finished having his hair cut, as in all good barber shops, he had to have a chat. So he then summoned this communal transport to go back home again, had his little chat with everybody, had a nice sort of morning out, and then jumped on the transport and went home again. And he found that it suited him just fine.

Arthur Kay:
Exactly. And I think that's the point in terms of the community engagement. I know that you and the IGP have been very, very involved in that in both cities in the Global North, but also cities in the Global South. I'd be interested in places like low traffic neighbourhoods, which we're told are deeply unpopular, but when you actually survey residents, would you undo it once it's been done to a neighbourhood? You're getting 90% plus saying they would be very upset if it was undone.

Henrietta Moore:
Well, I think one of the things that the car does is it prevents us from thinking about alternatives because we've positioned it in such a way that it is the most convenient opportunity for us. But actually, it's not that convenient when you can't cross the road to get your kids to school. It's not that convenient when you'll have toxic air pollution in your cities. It isn't that convenient. The latest research that we've just been working with you and I, and we've used for some of the thinking we've done post-writing the book, is that air pollution is now almost certainly responsible for increased rates of dementia. So it's not just affecting your children, it's affecting you and the generation above you. And that isn't really what you would call a convenience.

Arthur Kay:
So how, with those, what I'm going to call kind of hidden costs or things that you can't necessarily see upfront, because in the book, we talk about both the hidden costs in terms of ownership, financial costs. So people typically fixate on the ticket price of a car. Does this costs £48,000 or £24,000 or £4,000, but also these hidden costs in terms of the social costs, the wider, personal costs in terms of your health, happiness, your freedom. How can we help people think about those things in a broader sense to truly account for the true cost of cars?

Henrietta Moore:
Well, I think the first thing is that we need to think about a different approach because every time we get regulation in this area. For example, the French government decides that it's going to put up the price of diesel in order to be able to pay for the green transition. The immediate response to that is widespread protests across the country from people who say, well. We have to use our cars to get to work. We can't pay this increased price in diesel. And why should we be paying for the costs of transition? So what that does is it's set up in people's minds the idea that not only is this transition really difficult to do, but it's not being driven by them. And in fact, it's likely to be detrimental to them. Now, what we do in the book is we look at lots of examples around the world where people have taken a different view. People have got together as a community and said, actually, we need to do something about this situation. We need to make our cities more livable. We need to take back the streets. We need to come up with some new ideas. So, for example, going back to Los Angeles again, which we've mentioned a couple of times already in this podcast, what local people have done is to use the back alleys between the houses in Los Angeles, so not the main streets, green those back alleys, plant things in them that actually mean that they can control flooding better, they can reduce air pollution, they can produce a walking, pleasant environment in what were otherwise quite unpleasant, in some cases, back alleys. And they can move around the city on an alternative pathway. And this is something that people are really enjoying. And coming together there, you have not only the local planners, local city planners, but also what you would call civil society organisations. That's local organisations who get together to pursue a particular kind of cause, plus the local residents. And it's when you bring people together with different perspectives that you get new ideas. And when you have new ideas, you can have new solutions. And when you have new solutions, then other people can see how you can buy into them. So one of the things that we do in the book is to set out a different kind of philosophical framework. We ask really three questions. One is, what should I know? What are some of the facts about cars and the harms they cause? Many people, for example, on the street in London know that we have air pollution in London because they're coughing all the time. They probably don't know that it's exposing them to greater risk of dementia though. There are questions about what kind of information is out there and how is that information dealt with? But then there are questions about what can I hope for? So what can I do? And those questions are very rarely answered in most, shall we say, decisions about government regulation or city planning. People aren't actually asking local people, well, what can you hope to do? What could you do if you got together? And the third question we ask is, what should I do? So, once you know this, once you have got together with others, then what should you do when you come together? Now, we have had a few jokes, of course, at our expense about this. What should I know? What can I hope for? And what should I do? Somebody said it was best applied to their local football team. But that aside, I think it moves us into a space where we can begin to see that ordinary citizens in their home areas and where they're based can start to get together and ask themselves those kinds of questions. And they don't have to wait for others to come with a fully formed blueprint solution, which it then turns out that they don't like.

Arthur Kay:
Yeah, and that framing I found very, very helpful in terms of thinking through some of the challenges and opportunities of this. Because one of the things when writing the book was everyone assumed that both this was a book about environmental activism, about how do we frankly turn everyone into cyclists or how do we turn everyone into driving electric cars, which we can come back to in a bit in terms of some of the complexities and challenges there. But also that everyone assumed that we're going to be saying that all the answers happen to be in Copenhagen and Helsinki and Amsterdam, these nice, rich, Nordic, wealthy, prosperous cities, not in other places. So some of the most inspiring examples, we've already touched a little bit on the Global South and the massive opportunity that exists there in terms of, frankly, stealing some of the amazing solutions that are already happening in places like Nairobi or Outer Mongolia, where it happens to be, and applying them in cities in the Global North, but also unlikely cities in places like Texas. So I definitely didn't think when I set out to write this book with you that we'd be looking at Dallas, Texas as an example of what could happen in terms of innovation to manage cars. But an example that I think is really cool and would suggest, again, the nerdy planners amongst us to go and have a look at is the Dallas Southern Gateway Cap Park. And what this is a two different communities with a large highway running through it that was built in the 1960s.

Arthur Kay:
And this highway is one of those classic Texan highways, about 10 lanes across going in either direction, but completely split this suburb of Dallas down the middle. And what they've actually done is retrofitted a park over the top. So imagine building a massive, wide, long bridge over it and then built a park over the highway, which reconnects those communities together, creates massive economic prosperity because you can use it as places like cafes to sell things and to build some smaller roads for cycling. Across to be able to join those places together as well - again Dallas was definitely not top of my list of places to go and search for solutions, no.

Henrietta Moore:
Absolutely not I can imagine but I think the issue here is what can be done in cities. And quite often when we're asked about this, where people say, well, you know. You absolutely have to have a car in certain places in certain countries in the world, particularly the United States, perhaps the United Kingdom, certainly bits of, say, rural France or rural Italy or rural Spain. If you need to get to work, you need to have a car. So one of the things that we did in the book is that we were very clear about this. So this is not a book about finger wagging, nor as you say is the kind of green book where we're just saying to people eat your greens right it's not that kind of text. What we're saying is that there will be always circumstances in which you would need to use a car so you might want to go away for a seaside holiday with your family you don't want to take all your luggage plus the cat plus the dog and the budgerigar and everything else on public transport you want to be able to get in your car and go. But those are not the same thing as saying you should everywhere find people who are individually owning a car because a car is actually stationary most of the time. So we live in this fantasy world where when we think about a car, we think about it moving incredibly fast. And there was recently an interview with a Formula One driver or at least aficionado, that I heard on the radio. Saying that actually he thought that cars should be restricted and should only be driven by Formula One car drivers and that everybody else should get out of their car and stay off the road, which is an interesting point of view. And I'm not sure this would be deeply popular to those who regularly protest against measures in cities for controlling traffic for various kinds of reasons.

Arthur Kay:
But I mean, to add to the list of unlikely supporters, I mean, one of the people we quote in the book is, ironically, Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear fame, who frankly agrees with the Formula One driver. He says, today's young people, he wrote this in the Times earlier this year, Today's young people see the car as an unnecessary expense. And in London, that's almost certainly true. So we're not arguing that the car should go the way of the dinosaurs. We're saying the car is an amazing thing to use for certain uses, but we have moved it from the sign that was invented for very specific use to now it works here, so let's use it everywhere all the time. So very crudely, there's a world of opportunity in terms of different ways to move around. Let's take advantage of all those opportunities and all those choices and use the car for the very specific purposes that it's sometimes needed rather than always. And Jeremy Clarkson and our Formula One driving friend and Dallas are our three unlikely allies on this journey.

Henrietta Moore:
We do have some unlikely allies as well as many critics, of course, which is good. It's a good thing to have critics when you write a book. But one of the things that I was very concerned about when we were working on the book together was the fact that cars are restricting freedoms in ways that we often don't recognise. And one of those is that at the moment, most people around the world are experiencing some kind of cost of living crisis. There's a huge uncertainty in people's lives and people are struggling not just to pay for their housing, but even to pay for their mobile telephones or to pay for their medical prescriptions or to pay for their energy. And this is something we need to look at. How can we improve the quality of people's lives? Well, one of the things to bear in mind is that. If you decide that in Paris or Milan or Barcelona or New York that you're going to put up a new building, you will almost certainly, under the planning regulations, have to put into that building or close to it some space for parking cars. Now, effectively, in terms of the way that the pricing is done for the construction of that new building, this means that everybody is paying in their housing costs for the price of garaging a car, which most of the time isn't going anywhere. Now, this is hugely expensive. So the car's actually driving up our housing costs right across the world. And that's something that most of us don't realise, that we could actually run our cities in a different way and reduce the cost to us of the way that we're living.

Arthur Kay:
I mean on the space issue I mean we give over a vast amount of space to cars I mean, the stat I think both of us were completely blown away by was that in America today, there's more space allocated to parking. So housing for cars, as we call it, than there is housing for people.

So, which is an extraordinary place that we've literally put the priorities for cars above the housing for people. And in a city like London, which some people see as relatively anti-car, but it's still pretty pro-car in the scheme of things, roughly 80%, according to Transport of London, of our city is taken up, of our public space is taken up with car parking and car infrastructure. If we now look at it in terms of the economic cost I mean we again, perhaps a bit unlikely for people who think of picking up Roadkill, but we start off our third chapter by quoting a personal finance guru called Ramit Sethi who's written a book that sounds a bit like a con which is called I will teach you to be rich but in that he talks about the choice to become a car owner because it shouldn't be seen as a default but should be seen as a choice in this book he calls car debt or car loans or auto loans as they're called in the US, the secret wealth killer, because they've ballooned. They're invented very cleverly at the beginning of the car industrial complex by General Motors in 1919, I believe. And it's gone on to become one of the most successful financial products in history.

Almost, I mean, a vast amount of the profits from car manufacturers is in fact from car debt, car loans. And the car itself is almost a vehicle, no pun intended, through which to sell this financial product. Today, Americans have accrued roughly $1.6 trillion of car debt, which makes it, and that's rising every year, which makes it a bigger cost in the US than even the student loan debt. It also means that people are buying, with this car debt and easy access to it, bigger cars, more expensive cars, and those rates. And it's much less regulated than typical debt-like products, and those are therefore going up the entire time. The big reason why we think it's much worse than a traditional kind of asset-backed debt for example like a mortgage is that typically house prices, not always, but typically house prices are much more stable and sometimes even appreciate I think the one thing we all know that as soon as you buy your car and roll it out of the lot it halves in price and that depreciation continues throughout its life so I mean these are now quoting kind of government statistics in the UK if you are a driver, you pay on average $9,400 a year. And that's the cost of both maintaining your car, cost of depreciation within the car, the cost of running your car. So that's $9,400 a year if you're in the UK and roughly $12,745 a year if you're in the US. And these are figures from the respective transport authorities in those two countries. And so if we look at this over becoming a driver over a typical driving period, which might be 40, 50, 60 years. In the UK, that cost comes to a whopping half a million pounds. And the US, the cost of being a driver over your lifetime is $764,000. So these are not insignificant decisions. We argue in the book that becoming a driver is the most expensive financial decision you'll make, more so than what house you buy, more so than a whole bunch of other things. And that's because these depreciate to nearly zero.

Henrietta Moore:
I mean, it is having a massive effect on what that country can do. And I think being in circumstances of debt and livelihood uncertainty, the anxiety that it brings and so on, this inevitably cuts people's ability to think about other things. So that is how you might retrain for a different job, why you might go and live somewhere differently, why you might run your life differently. So actually, your freedoms are constrained by the burdens that you're carrying and the combined burden of housing debt and car debt is absolutely crushing people. And I think one of the things that we talk about in the book is the position that we take on electric vehicles themselves, because electric vehicles have a number of attributes, which I think come under this heading of what should I know. So on the first issue, of course, is that they tend to be at the moment, because of the battery weight, actually heavier than other cars. And that means that if they do happen to be involved in any kind of accident or hit any kind of pedestrian, they are more likely to do considerable damage. That coupled with the fact that people right across the world seem to be moving to buying these SUVs, which as you pointed out to me on many occasions are really the same weight as a small armoured car. It doesn't seem to be necessary for everybody to be driving in SUVs, but SUVs are highly favoured. We then have the issue of how do we manage the actual pollution that e-vehicles produce? And I think the third thing about e-vehicles which we need to consider is the fact that at the moment, at least, until we get the battery technology improved, they are lithium batteries, and the lithium is coming from very vulnerable parts of the world. And the negative effects on other people's lives of lithium extraction for the benefit of greening our own lives in the global north is a matter of considerable concern.

Arthur Kay:
Yeah. So in the book, we talk about electric cars and also the incoming role of autonomous cars as well in our cities. And whether, I mean, to frame these, as you correctly say, as binary good or bad is not what we try and do. We try and think of them in a more complex context and particularly, as you say, around the people who we can't see who are impacted through them in the supply chains as well. A lot of this is around what the author Peter Norton calls the Futurama. So this idea that was set out in the 1939 World Fair by General Motors in one of the most popular exhibits there was this idea around really the start of the car industrial complex and around how it kind of introduced this idea of drive anywhere, anytime and the freedom that comes with that. And the car industrial complex has reinvented itself several times roughly in 25-year increments, selling the future that you do need to keep driving but I promise you we're going to mean that there are going to be fewer accidents I promise you there's going to be fewer emissions from it and I promise you it's going to be more convenient there's going to be less traffic jams so kind of congestion death and pollution they've been kind of saying throughout this, just trust us we're about to fix this stuff and what we're facing now is basically V4 of that we call it in the book Futurama 4 which takes us from 2015 to 2040 and that involves things like electric cars; just trust us the pollution is going to be gone because it's going to be electric. We show in the book that it does reduce pollution by roughly 330 per cent but kind of some statistics out of Imperial show that still with electric cars roughly 70 per cent of the well there's zero tailpipe emissions roughly 70 per cent of the air pollution remains because a lot of this from things like brake pad erosion from tyre erosion and dust from the road itself so it still does impact air quality. They say that congestion is going to be solved because these fantastic autonomous cars are going to come around and sort all that out for us just don't worry just buy the next version or subscribe to this next service. And also that deaths are going to be reduced so the fatalities are going to be reduced and that's going to be by moving to SUVs because going to be safer inside your SUV than you are in a little flimsy small car. Pay us a bit more money for that because it's a bigger car and all the rest of it. And also that it's going to be reduced because this much cited stat that 90, don't quote me on this, 92 per cent I think it is of car accidents are meant to have some form of human error in it. Therefore, give it over to the machines, give it over to the AI, give it over to the robots, and we'll sort that out for you. And we don't have time to go into all the detail of these three points here, but in the book, we can break down each of those arguments in two different chapters, which we call the techno-futurist divisions, and I think we do a good job of dismantling them pretty methodically and going through each of those claims and showing how they are really set up to make sure that we keep driving and keep stuck behind the wheel. One of the people we interviewed for the book was the head of autonomous futures at Innovate UK, the UK government's innovation agency, who seemed completely sold on autonomous vehicles as the only route forward for the car industry. And seemed quite surprised to see that there may be any opposition to it. So I'd be interested in how you kind of have approached that and maybe even just conversations with friends about how they see things like EVs and AVs.

Henrietta Moore:
Well, I think that without being technophobes, what many friends worry about is that we have far too many cars on the road as it is. And life couldn't really be improved by having them all being autonomous. They'd still be there. And so one of the things that we say in the book is that what's important is that we actually reduce the number of cars that we have on the road. It doesn't matter whether they're electric, whether they're autonomous, whether they're anything else. The car raises these big issues precisely because it asks us to think about not only what responsibility do we have for ourselves, but what responsibility do we have for other people? And do we have any responsibility for other people who are very, very distant from us? So, does it matter that we're destroying the life of indigenous communities in the Atacama Desert because we want to have green vehicles? I rather think that that does matter to most people when they have time to reflect on it. I think that people don't want other people's children to have carbon particles in their bodies because we all want to be able to drive anywhere at any time. I think we can make new choices and I think we should make new choices for ourselves in the 21st century.

But then the question comes of people probably understand most of that evidence already. They might not know all of it, but they certainly understand all of it. And so why do people keep driving? Well, I think for me, one of the reasons why people keep driving is because they're not being actually offered the choice. The idea that the car is convenient is fine if your idea of freedom is that you want to be able to drive anywhere at any time and park outside a shop and then go in and come out again. And if that's your idea of freedom, then, of course, that's something that you're going to be feeling strongly about. But I think that the issue here really is about what is freedom? So is it freedom not to be living in an environment where you're suffering from air pollution? Is it freedom not to have communities divided by 19 lane highways? Is it freedom not to be imposing restrictions on other people's quality of life? And I think those kinds of freedoms, which are the freedoms of the 21st century, are more important. But I'd be very interested to hear what you think about this question of why it is that people apparently continue to drive, even though much of this evidence is already out there.

Arthur Kay:
I think a large part of it is around the data, as you say. I certainly found out stuff writing this book that I had no idea beforehand and the level of it as well. So maybe a quarter of this book is around, as we say in the subtitle, unveiling the true cost. So trying to quantify these things in financial terms, but also in terms of our health, our happiness, and a range of other contributing factors to that. I think when we're talking a bit earlier about travel in the Global South, the real opportunity there is that there are cities through lack of economic prosperity a large part of people do not have access to cars and therefore are making those you know in India you know we're talking about earlier. 91 per cent are making the, maybe not proactive choice, but are making their journeys by active travel or public transport. But that's driven by economic prosperity, a lack of economic prosperity. The opportunity exists, as we've seen in parts of rural Africa, where mobile banking rates are actually higher than they are in places in the Global North and have leapfrogged some of the quote-unquote rich developed societies. I think a similar opportunity can exist from a transport and infrastructure perspective if these huge megacities in the global south can actually leapfrog some of the quote-unquote rich western cities like London.

And they'll be way ahead and not make that what we think is a big red herring by investing what will be trillions of dollars in car infrastructure in order to build the highways, maybe the electric charging points, the filling stations, all of the infrastructure required to build it. And they'll be ahead of the game in terms of thinking ahead what prosperity looks like in the 21st century and providing the plethora of amazing ways of getting around the city that may include the car but not be only the car.

Henrietta Moore:
So, Bartlett Review Podcast listeners, thank you for being with us on this journey. We've enjoyed our conversation. We hope that you have enjoyed it too. Roadkill: Unveiling the true cost of our toxic relationship with cars, you can find out all about it by going to getroadkill.com. You can follow Arthur and I there. You can follow The Bartlett on the usual UCL channels. And we hope that you will pick up a copy of the book and that you will enjoy it. Arthur, thank you for being with me today.

Arthur Kay:
Thank you very much for having me.