We all suffer the problems mass motoring imposes on our society: only some of us enjoy the advantages.
Look around you, next time you are out. Our environment has been transformed to facilitate car use, to the disadvantage of pedestrians and cyclists.
Large sections of this forum are about the danger we suffer from motors.
Our Government was harried in the European Court because traffic emissions make the air in our cities are above limits, and in London charges on polluting vehicles have had to be imposed in the Ultra Low Emission Zone..Elsewhere they are free to pollute!
Here is a report from the Dresden Technical University on the external costs of motoring.
https://stopclimatechange.net/fileadmin ... ars_EN.pdf
Summarised in the Guardian.
"The perennial complaint from drivers that they are excessively taxed has been challenged by a study which concludes that road accidents, pollution and noise connected to cars costs every EU citizen more than £600 a year.
The report by transport academics at the Dresden Technical University in Germany calculated that even with drivers' insurance contributions discounted these factors amounted to an annual total of €373bn (£303bn) across the 27 EU member states, or around 3% of the bloc's entire yearly GDP. This breaks down as €750 per man, woman and child.
The report recommends that such so-called externalities be factored into the cost of driving, noting that even the €373bn tally does not include costs from congestion or ill health caused by lack of exercise.
The idea that drivers are "the cash cows of our society" is wrong, the authors write: "On the contrary, it must be stated that car traffic in the EU is highly subsidised by other people and other regions and will be by future generations: residents along an arterial road, taxpayers, elderly people who do not own cars, neighbouring countries, and children, grandchildren and all future generations subsidise today's traffic."
The study, The True Costs of Automobility, accepts that such calculations necessarily have an element of approximation but give an important overall picture. In a national breakdown it says UK drivers accounted for £48bn of costs, second only to Germany, or about £815 per person per year.