Why we tolerate motor-traffic danger and pollution

Partly because we’ve been taught to see it as normal.

In most rich countries, the car’s “freedom to” go anywhere, anytime has been treated as the default. The corresponding “freedom from” danger, noise, and dirty air - especially for people outside cars - has been treated as optional. Yet ethically, those freedoms are at least equal. If my choice to drive fast through a neighbourhood removes your child’s freedom to cross the road without fear, those freedoms are in conflict - and a fair system should reconcile them so everyone enjoys an equal share.

You don't need to be familiar with Kant’s principle of equal freedom to acknowledge that people should be able to walk to school, wait at a bus stop, cycle to the shops, or use a mobility aid without being exposed to significant risk or toxic air. However, today, we don’t guarantee that freedom. We design for the smooth flow of motor vehicles, then ask everyone else to stay alert, wear bright clothes, take the long way round, or simply stay home.

Business-as-usual, by design

We tolerate the harms of motor traffic for a mix of reasons:

• Normalisation (dubbed "motornormativity" by environmental psychologist Professor Ian Walker) . A century of street design, advertising and media framing has made heavy traffic the accepted norm - even when it frequently results in death and injury. Collisions are still called “accidents”, as though nobody chose the speeds, street widths or vehicle designs that made them likely.
• Individualised blame. Traditional road safety focuses on “bad drivers” and “careless pedestrians”. That lens obscures the system choices - speed limits, junction design, vehicle size/weight, street priorities - that predictably generate danger and pollution even when most people follow the rules.
• Diffuse harms, concentrated benefits. The benefits of driving (speed, convenience) are immediate and personal; the harms (injury risk, pollution, noise) are spread across other people and over time. Politically, that makes change look risky and delay look safe.
• Path dependence. Once schools, shops and workplaces sprawl apart, “the car is necessary” becomes a self-fulfilling truth. The more we design for driving, the more driving we get.
• Power and incentives. Carmaking, road building and fuel are powerful sectors. Meanwhile, the costs of road danger and ill health fall on families, the NHS, local councils - actors with less lobbying clout.

Back in the 1970s, Dutch roads were as car-choked and hostile as our own. Then Stop de Kindermoord happened - literally “Stop the Child Murder.” Women, many of them mothers, led the charge, their fury fuelled by a grim toll of child road deaths. Their first president, Martje van Putten, helped galvanise the strength of feeling into action, forcing the Dutch government to give road safety the attention it deserved.

The result was cycling infrastructure that is awe-inspiring for we Brits.

When we spoke to Martje van Putten, she explained how the early changes to Dutch town planning involved engineering out risk.

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Engineer out the risk

A fairer approach starts by spreading responsibility across the system. That’s the core of Vision Zero - a radical approach to road harm reduction pioneered in Sweden in 1997 which built on many of the principles promoted by the Stop de Kindermoord movement. It's a systematic approach that includes:

• Managing kinetic energy at the point of conflict. Where people mix with traffic, speeds must be low enough that crashes aren’t fatal.
• Designing forgiveness into streets and vehicles. Safer junctions, protected crossings, protected cycle tracks; vehicle fronts that are less lethal; tech that prevents the crash rather than merely punishes it afterwards.
• Prioritising those most at risk. Design around the needs of those at greatest risk such as children, older people, and people walking, cycling or using mobility aids. For example, the Dutch design cycling infrastructure to be suitable forages 8-80.

This is not anti-driver; it’s pro-people. We already accept limits on one person’s freedom when it harms others in countless areas of public life. Road traffic should be no different.

Talk of “freedom to drive” often ignores “freedom from” danger and pollution for everyone else. But freedoms are only legitimate when they can be enjoyed by all at once. A street where you can drive 30 mph past a primary school at home time isn’t a street where an eight-year-old has an equal freedom to cross safely.

Today’s rules permit one freedom at the expense of another - and because the victims are less visible (kids, older people, low-income communities on busy roads), the imbalance persists.

We can choose differently

Road harm is not inevitable. When cities lower speeds, build safe crossings and protected bike lanes, tame junctions, curb the biggest and fastest vehicles where people live, and make short trips easy without a car, injuries fall, air quality improves, noise levels drops, and more people - especially women, children and older residents - feel able to move around under their own steam.

The question isn’t whether we value freedom; it’s whose freedom we design for. If we take ethics seriously, we stop treating road danger and pollution as the price of modern life, and start treating safety, clean air and everyday mobility as rights. Then the policies follow: safe-by-design streets and vehicles, speed management where people are, planning that brings daily needs closer together, and accountability that sits with the institutions shaping the system - not just with the unlucky individual in the last link of the chain.

We put up with today’s harms because they’ve been made to look normal. We move beyond them when we admit they’re a choice. And once we see them as a choice, we can make a better one.

"The city is where people come to work, raise families, walk in the evening. It is not a traffic corridor"
‍John Norquist

We know what it takes to build healthy and safe cities; there's an abundance of wisdom and experience out there. The reason we tolerate the child deaths, air pollution and huge financial burden caused by motorised traffic isn't a lack of knowledge - it's an absence of political will.

Our documentary called Stop Killing our Children (named in honour of the Dutch protest movement) examines 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 crowdfunded 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 movement amongst others.

Many thousands have seen our film already. It makes for tough viewing in parts, but please watch it and share as widely as possible.

Stop Killing our Children from ETA on Vimeo.

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The ethical choice

The ETA was established in 1990 as an ethical provider of green, reliable travel services. Over 35 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.

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