This was the week the UK government tied itself in knots over its definition of extremism. Here’s hoping any commitment to tackle ‘the promotion of an ideology based on violence’ leads to an effective campaign against road danger.
As a society, we’ve become so inured to road danger, deaths rarely make the news. Writer George Monbiot explained to us how, as a society, we tolerate a level of killing by cars that we would not put up with in any other area.
“If you want to kill someone, the best way to do it is in a car because you are highly likely to get away with it. One of the reasons is that people are being killed by cars all the time. We tolerate a level of killing by cars that we don’t tolerate in any other area. If as many soldiers were killed in combat every year in UK wars, we would be up in arms. We would be outraged. Horrified. Astonished. We would demand government action. But when it comes to people being killed by cars, we just accept this as part of the ordinary course of life, and death. Well, it’s about time we stopped accepting it.”
Psychologists describe the cultural blind spot that makes people apply double standards when they think about driving as motornomativity.
The unconscious bias in favour of cars is explored in our documentary, Stop Killing our Children. The 40-minute film reveals how road danger damages us all, whatever our age and however we travel, and questions our collective blindness to both its cause and remedy. The film is narrated by the BBC’s John Simpson and features interviews with Chris Boardman, Dr Rachel Aldred, Dr Ian Walker, George Monbiot and the founders of the Stop de Kindermoord protest movement.
The ethical choice
The ETA was established in 1990 as an ethical provider of green, reliable travel services. Over 30 years on, we continue to offer cycle insurance , breakdown cover and mobility scooter insurance while putting concern for the environment at the heart of all we do.
The Good Shopping Guide judges us to be the UK’s most ethical provider.
Doug M
Not just any cars, but especially SUVs, which are larger and much heavier than standard saloon cars, and therefore much more likely to result in death when hitting a person.
These started with an ill-judged decision in the USA to subsidise (via taxation of some sort) vehicles which could be used for farming. The manufacturers saw the opportunity to promote these vehicles for general use and the US government didn’t dare upset the consumers by changing the rules!
We now see these monsters which are too heavy and too wide for our roads. They give their occupants a false sense of security, but are a threat to anyone or anything that they collide with.
edmund white
Till we treat road deaths as what they are, murder, and the courts sentence accordingly, we are unlikely to see things change