https://newsletter.climatenexus.org/20240308-sotu-caad-ai-car-harm
Via Climate Nexus:
EV’s Won’t Solve ‘Car Harm’ Analysis Warns: Even if every car in the world were an EV, it would not mitigate some of the most ruinous effects of car-centric infrastructure, a new analysis cautions. The analysis of roughly 400 papers, published in the Journal of Transport Geography, finds “car harm[s]” — everything from the environmental and opportunity costs of road and parking infrastructure to death and injury caused when cars hit people — will continue regardless of vehicles’ propulsion system. Cars kill more than 700 children every day worldwide, they disproportionately kill Black and Indigenous people in the U.S., and SUVs are eight times more likely to kill children than regular cars. “It’s quite a grim paper,” Patrick Miner, lead author and a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh, told Bloomberg. Even as pedestrian deaths in the U.S. hit a 42-year high in 2022, more than half of funding under the 2021 infrastructure law is going to highways. The crises of car harm require policy- and city planning-level solutions, author and dean of the Global School at Worcester Polytechnic Institute Mimi Sheller told Bloomberg, adding that language also plays a key role in how we think about car harm. “You don’t say, ‘A person was hit by a car’,” said Sheller. “You say, ‘A driver crashed into a bicyclist, killing them.’ Make it the active voice. Identify the subject — who’s doing it.” (Bloomberg $)
