Roadkill
Description
Explore the financial, social, ethical, and environmental impacts of our obsession with, and dependency on, cars. Learn how to change the way we use them.
Roadkill: Unveiling the True Cost of Our Toxic Relationship with Cars, by Professor Henrietta Moore and Arthur Kay, explores the philosophical implications of car culture, as well as the practical impacts it has on your money, your taxes, your neighborhood, your planet, your health, and your happiness.
While the car has been marketed as a symbol of "freedom", the authors convincingly argue that it has limited the flourishing of our cities and restricted our choices. How can we fix our toxic relationship with cars? The authors offer a new way of thinking that promises to multiply your choices, improve your city, and expand your freedoms.
Inside the book:
- Jaw-dropping, real-world examples of the human and monetary costs imposed by cars, including the fact that cars have killed 60 to 80 million people since their invention, more than the deaths of WWI and WWII combined.
- Philosophical arguments explaining how car-centric cities restrict the freedoms of drivers and non-drivers alike.
- A catalogue of ideas and approaches for urban designers, transport planners, policymakers, and mayors.
- Practical recommendations for all contexts: for you, your family, your neighborhood, your town or city, and your national government.
- Critiques of the myths around electric cars and autonomous cars, providing readers with a comprehensive understanding of the implications of this emerging frontier.
- Ideas on how we can re-frame our relationship with the car? The authors recognize they can be useful machines, when used intentionally, and thoughtfully invited into our lives.
- Over 45 figures, original illustrations, diagrams, and colour photographs.
Roadkill is a persuasive and illuminating call to action for city dwellers, drivers, environmentalists, urbanists, and policymakers-anyone interested in practical ways to improve your life and expand your freedoms.
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Persons
HENRIETTA MOORE is the Founder and Director of the Institute for Global Prosperity and the Chair in Culture Philosophy and Design at University College London. Her work is focused on new economic models, Universal Basic Services, artificial intelligence, environmental degradation, decarbonization, displaced people, and the gender pay gap.
ARTHUR KAY is an entrepreneur, urban designer, and advisor building solutions for sustainable cities. He is a Director at Innovo, and the Founder of Skyroom, The Key Worker Homes Fund, and Bio-bean. Kay is a Board Member of Transport for London (TfL), the Museum of the Home, and Fast Forward 2030. He is an Honorary Associate Professor at UCL Institute for Global Prosperity.
Content
Chapter 1 Light at the End of the Tunnel 1
Chapter 2 The Road to Freedom 11
Chapter 3 Time and Money 23
Chapter 4 The Great Love Affair 37
Chapter 5 Health and Happiness 49
Chapter 6 Who's in the Driving Seat? 67
Chapter 7 Electrifying Change: Techno-futurist Visions I 81
Chapter 8 Cyber Capitalism: Techno-futurist Visions II 93
Chapter 9 Paving Paradise 107
Chapter 10 Taking the Con out of Convenience 121
Chapter 11 The Car in the City 133
Chapter 12 A Prosperous Society 149
Chapter 13 Imagine: Roadmap for Change 159
Chapter 14 New Forms of Freedom 179
Appendix A Crib Sheet of Solutions 185
Appendix B The True Cost 203
Appendix C Timeline of the Car Industry 209
Appendix D Human Versus Cargo: Similarities and Differences 213
Appendix E List of Interviews 215
Appendix F Recommended Further Reading 217
Notes 219
Acknowledgments 273
About the Authors 275
Index 277
Praise for Roadkill
"Long gone are the days when the automobile expanded possibility and choice. Now, thanks to its ever-increasing demands for space, speed, and time, the car has reshaped our landscape and lifestyles around its own needs. It is an instrument of freedom that has enslaved us. Many books have skirted the edges of this tragedy, like blind men groping at an elephant; Roadkill may be the first to expose the entire beast, in the flesh, in the round, so that none may mistake its enormity."
-Jeff Speck
city planner and author of Walkable City
"Eye-opening and engaging, Roadkill reveals why our love affair with cars is toxic-and how we can break free. Packed with startling facts and human stories, this book will change the way you see every road, parking lot, and traffic jam."
-Professor Kongjian Yu
Dean and Professor at Peking University College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and "Sponge City" Inventor; Author; Founder of Turenscape
"Bold, urgent, and utterly necessary. A must-read! A powerful wake-up call to anyone who thinks greener cars will solve our crisis. Roadkill dares us to imagine a world beyond the car-not just a cleaner one, but a fairer, freer one. Henrietta L. Moore and Arthur Kay don't just critique the status quo-they map the road to fundamental transformation."
-Professor Carlos Moreno
Author of The 15-Minute City, Associate Professor at the Paris IAE-Panthéon Sorbonne University, Scientific Director ETI Chair
"For too long, the debate on how we use cars has been warped by extremes on both sides: those who perceive cars as the ultimate paragon of freedom and those who condemn anyone who wishes to drive in one as selfish and bad. This important and enjoyable book moves the debate forward by asking the simple question: When do cars increase freedom? And when do they diminish it? In doing so the authors map out a wiser route to happier futures and better cities. Anyone interested in the future of our neighborhoods should read it."
-Nicholas Boys Smith MBE
Founder and Chair, Create Streets
"A sustainable future requires radical change. That in turn means strong investment in different ways of doing things and changing our behavior. The result will be a much more attractive path of growth and development, as well as a future. This splendid book makes the point very powerfully through something close to our everyday lives, the car. Original, powerful, and persuasive."
-Professor Lord Nicholas Stern
Professor of Economics and Government at the London School of Economics, Chairman of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, Author of The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change
"Vroom Vroom. This is a beautifully engineered, high speed, elegant, fully customized demolition of our self-destructive and often irrational love affair with the car."
-Laurie Taylor
Sociologist and host of BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed program
"This beautifully written book illuminates our collective social life by treating the automobile as a window into the complexities of convenience, sustainability, planning, and freedom today. It also offers a sophisticated menu of solutions to the problems produced by our automotive fetish."
-Dr. Arjun Appadurai
Anthropologist, globalization theorist, and author of The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective
"This fascinating, inspiring, and important book elegantly unpacks the illusion of freedom we have been conditioned to associate with cars, despite their well-rehearsed harms. In the authoritative hands of Henrietta Moore and Arthur Kay, Roadkill takes us on the ultimate road trip to see how fairness and freedom are undermined by our fatal attraction to cars. Critically, they show us how freedom and fairness are being reclaimed in towns and cities around the world so that cars no longer dominate our landscapes and choice of travel, breathing life back into our communities, bodies, and planet."
-Professor Dame Theresa Marteau OBE
Director of the Health and Behaviour Unit at Cambridge University
"Humans and cars-it's sold as a love story, but this exposes the crime scene hiding in plain sight: car dependency is killing our cities, our climate, and our choices. Roadkill is a manifesto to reclaim our streets, our health, and our collective future, inviting us to imagine a world that's fairer, freer, and far more human."
-Hirra Khan Adeogun
Co-director of Possible and the Car Free Megacities program
"Cars are the most successful product ever made-they are also a crucible for all the challenges of modern living. In this fascinating book Henrietta Moore and Arthur Kay take us on a rich journey through philosophy and history to examine why we choose to love our cars and what bigger freedoms and pleasures-from good housing to a corner bakery-this love precludes. Enjoyable and thought provoking, this book raises wider questions about what ideas get adopted and how, and whether we can re-imagine the policy making process from the ground up."
-Hilary Cottam OBE
Author of Radical Help: How We Can Remake the Relationships Between Us and Revolutionise the Welfare State
"Provocative, enlightening, and deeply relevant, Roadkill is essential reading for policymakers, urban designers, environmental advocates, and anyone seeking to understand-and transform-the systems driving the climate crisis and inequality."
-David de Jong
Author of Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties
"Roadkill forces us to confront the profound ways car dependency shapes our lives and offers a way out should we so choose to."
-Hayden Clarkin
Transportation engineer and planner, aka "@TheTransitGuy"
"Roadkill is refreshingly open about the costs of freedom that cars provide, how different people are benefitted and harmed, and ultimately, raises big moral questions facing transport in the 21st century."
-Dr. Pete Dyson
The Bicycle Mayor of Bath, Author of Transport for Humans
"I love this book. A beautiful mix of philosophy, science, public health, and activism. A blueprint for a better world."
-Dr. Chris Van Tulleken
Physician, television presenter, and author of Ultra-Processed People
"Our cities desperately need to change to be better for people, and our minds badly need to change about cars if we really want better cities. This book makes the compelling case for a mindset shift about car dependency and the myths we've been sold about freedom. It pushes the right buttons with readable, persuasive evidence rather than lazy ideology, and it shares better visions that would actually work. If reading it doesn't change your mind, you just don't want it to change."
-Brent Toderian
City planner, global advisor on better cities, and former Chief Planner for Vancouver, Canada
"This timely book by Henrietta Moore and Arthur Kay reminds us that cars and motoring are not a fundamental and necessary part of the human condition, but rather a recent choice which has more negative side effects, unintended consequences, and downsides, than anyone could have foreseen when the transition to the internal combustion engine was ignited. Traffic deaths, road rage, air pollution, congestion, global warming, obesity, lost productivity, segregation, respiratory diseases, blighted locations, and noise nuisance are just some of the unwanted consequences of our addiction to motoring. People have rights. Cars don't. This book offers us the chance to reassess the evidence, and switch course from the risks and dangers of roadkill to the manifold co-benefits of street life."
-Professor Greg Clark CBE
Urbanist and host of The DNA of Cities podcast
"Why our addiction to private automobiles is driving us into a dead end. Our high-octane road movie will end badly. Roadkill plots better routes for all life on Earth."
-Professor John Elkington
Ambassador from the Future, the "Godfather of Sustainability," co-founder of Environmental Data Services (ENDS), SustainAbility and Volans, and author of Green Swans and Tickling Sharks
"Roadkill is the book we need now. It tears into the wreckage of our car-dependent culture and lays out a bold, clear-eyed vision for a better way to live and move. Essential reading for anyone who cares about the future of our cities."
-Professor Richard Florida
Author of The Rise of the Creative Class
"Kay and Moore's book Roadkill is a huge eye-opener and a must read for policymakers, practitioners, and citizens alike who care about freedom, inequality, health, climate, liveable cities, and the sustainability of the planet. They brilliantly and convincingly articulate the central role that the car-industrial complex has played in bringing us to a crucial tipping point in the planet's history. You'll never look at your car again in quite...
