There's no hiding. The cars are much cleaner with lower emissions. We have industrial pollution laws so auto shops have to safely dispose of waste. We don't leave burnt out cars on the roadside. You can add chaos to anything to make that thing look bad.
Also I hope you see the irony in your comment starting with
> I've been driving around Africa for almost three years now
Reducing all those malaria deaths, etc did wonders.
But hey, it might be that pollution.
Keep thinking for a few more seconds until you realize how much impact cars had in connecting people, rural areas, people to health facilities.
Do you believe child deaths are prevented by people walking with sick children to hospitals, or medicine being distributed on camel backs?
https://www.worldstagegroup.com/life-expectancy-in-africa-in...
Why do you think the automobile is responsible?
What makes you think I do?
I wrote that the positive contribution of automobiles should be considered and not denied. Why do you think distribution of malaria medication and child care was not improved by automobiles widely used in medical care and logistics?
His argument is to move towards electric mass transit, Which clearly won’t work everywhere. In fact, it won’t work in most places.
I think they must be having one of those nerd arguments.
Using coal for electricity, for example, helped change the world, and had positive effects, but we want to move beyond that.
Reducing the need for automobiles is definitely worth the effort. That doesn’t mean we will illuminate them of course, by a long shot.
I see tens of thousands of vehicles belching huge clouds of black smoke, idling for hours at a time with nobody inside, or stuck in soul crushing traffic. Just the other day it took a hour to drive five miles with tens of thousands of vehicles packed in.
It's also really easy to see the direct environmental impact - any place that does oil changes or repairs tires is surrounded by a huge patch of jet black earth where the waste products are simply tossed on the ground. Used tires are piled high, and crashed or burnt out vehicles commonly litter the roadside. In the first world we hide all of that from sight, sometimes I think it's better to have it out in the open so we can be more aware of what is really going on.