Electric vehicles as next generation asphalt nation: Car Harm paper

 -- "Car harm: A global review of automobility's harm to people and the environment," Journal of Transport Geography

Abstract: 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 be impracticable without the replacement of policies that encourage car harm with policies that reduce it. To that end, the paper briefly summarises interventions that are ready for implementation.

In the early 1960s, gasoline station companies had a campaign promoting asphalt (made from oil) road pavements.  Atlantic Imperial Washington DC Metro Baltimore Road Map, 1964, back panel.

Also see the Bloomberg article "EVs Can’t Fix a Global Epidemic of ‘Car Harm,’ Study Finds." The report concludes: 

• In 2019, 43% of people killed by motor vehicles were walking, using a wheelchair or riding a bike. 
• Motor vehicles kill more than 700 children a day. 
• Traffic deaths occur at the highest rates in Africa and Southeast Asia, and, in the US and Brazil, crashes disproportionately kill Black and Indigenous people. 
• SUVs, which make up nearly half of car sales globally, are eight times more likely than traditional cars to kill children. 
• Traffic-related air pollution is linked to circulatory and heart disease, lung cancer, asthma and, according to a cited study, “acute lower respiratory infections in children.” 
• Other car harms include drunk driving, drive-by shootings, carbon monoxide poisoning and, in the US, traffic stops that “are a setting for police violence against Black, Latine/x, and Indigenous people,” they write. 
• Access to oil has played a role in a quarter to half of wars between countries since 1973. 
• The electric car, a juggernaut of the energy transition, “fails to address a majority of the harms,” they write, including crashes, sedentary travel, inequality and cities designed more for cars than people.

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-- "Colombia’s Women-Led Electric Bus Fleet Is Reshaping Bogotá’s Public Transit" Bloomberg
-- "US Cities Are Failing Their Female Cyclists," Bloomberg
-- "The Gender Divide in Transport Is Starting to Crumble," Bloomberg