2. The total parking area in NYC adds up to TWELVE Central Parks.
3. Cars are a leading cause of death by accident in the world.
4. Driving a car for 1 hour reduces your life expectancy by 20 minutes.
5. They emit toxic fumes and greenhouse gases.
6. Car tires shed microplastics, which might be even more harmful than the toxic fumes they emit.
7. This article.
Now please tell me, what tolerance do these glorified killing machines deserve?
Surely driving a car for 60 minutes ought to reduce your life expectancy by something like 59 minutes, at least -- much like anything you do for 60 minutes.
I'm not just trying to be funny, there's a point here: you'll say "yeah, but it's 20 minutes more than otherwise" and I'll ask "so what is this otherwise?"
Obviously, if you compare to riding an ultralight airplane for 60 minutes, I think the car is going to be better – especially in bad weather. So what's the comparison for this number?
If you're just comparing demographics, I'm forced to point out that correlation is not, in general, direct causation. We might just be observing something else that happens to affect both car usage and life expectancy.
(To be clear, I'm doing this to find the steel man of your argument. I dislike car-centric infrastructure as much as anyone, but I wouldn't want to use weak arguments.)
> So what's the comparison for this number?
In one column you have the age a person died, in another one you have the estimated time they spent driving during their life. Not a rigorous proof of causation, but I mean... which part of the dataset would you like to be in?
Depending on situation, this might be acceptable to some when no other option takes less than 133% more time. But it is something you should definitely take into account. It is also kind of unfair to interpret it like this because cars can screw up traffic for other vehicles too, like traffic jams hinder public transport in my city on a regular basis.
If that were true, a child born with a life expectancy of eighty years would be dead by age forty. Life expectancy is measured in terms of projected age at death, not years remaining to live. An ordinary benign activity should not change your life expectancy very much, almost by definition.
I would not expect a child who drives 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — from birth — to live much past the age of forty.
If, on the other hand, you commute one hour per day for five days a week for twenty years that works out to about 217 days or just under 2/3 of a year of lost life expectancy. Is it nothing? Absolutely not. But it’s not as absurd as it would seem.