A slightly abridged version of this article appeared in: Urban Nature 4, 63-67 (1998) To other papers by Robin P Clarke

Impending social and economic collapse due to excessive cars and roads

Robin P Clarke explains that the most important reasons for cutting back on roads and cars are virtually never heard.

Excessive mobility of people and goods leads to loss of jobs(*), crime(*) and (ultimately) to the collapse of civilisation. It is shown that the long-term increase of crime(*) can be attributed mainly to the increases in 'macroaccessibility' and decreases in 'microaccessibility' that have accompanied massive road-building programmes. There is furthermore a gross inequity in the way in which car use is rewarded compared with walking and cycling. A reorientation of policies is needed, including the downgrading of major roads.

*[Note added subsequent to publication: It may be supposed that recent evidence contradicts the notion of increases in unemployment and crime. But more careful analysis shows a different picture. In respect of unemployment, in the UK (and elsewhere) nowadays many more people are occupied for many more years as debt-ridden "students" in the education industry, or are disabled or early-retired. Many others work only part-time. And more fundamentally, the current economic situation is not a sustainable one, but depends on consumption of environmental capital, addictive borrowing, and technological "progress" (such as speeding of computers) which must at some stage come to a halt, whereupon the unemployment will become impossible to conceal.
In respect of crime, violent attacks have increased, and it is specifically burglaries which have decreased in the UK. This is easily understood in terms of greater difficulties presented by anti-burglar technology, combined with the growth of more attractive and respectable alternatives such as dealing in cannabis and hard drugs, and a multitude of con-trick sales activities, all of which fail to register in crime statistics.]

There is quite a long list of reasons why we must reverse the growth of roads and cars and associated developments. But the most important, most imperative reasons have rarely if ever been heard to date.

The most important reason is that excessive mobility of people is demonstrably a major catalyst of crime and social breakdown, leading inevitably to total collapse of society. Almost as important is the massively stupendous violation of rights of non-motorists that is entailed in providing for supposed rights of motorists. Thirdly, far from being necessary for economic well-being (1), excessive mobility of goods causes unemployment, inefficiency and divisiveness (2).

This reflects the considerable gap that has grown between on the one hand the ideology that has been heavily promoted by big business for its own convenience, and on the other hand the understandings developed by independent investigators over several decades.

Excessive growth

According to the propaganda of big business (usually by implication), growth is what we all want, namely more and fancier motorised gadgets, more speeding around the globe to ever grander millenium domes, and so on. Strangely, following decades of such growth people have become less happy, not more so. They sense that something is wrong but mostly are not quite sure what. But to independent thinkers this disenchantment comes as not at all a surprise.

Firstly, as Leopold Kohr (3) explained forty years ago, this growth consists increasingly of unpleasant non-consumer secondary products, such as factories and fuel depots. Secondly, even when consumer products are produced, their negative effects tend to outweigh the positive. Two examples most effectively illustrate this sickness of mega-capitalism, namely the pavement-cleaning machine and the garden vac. The former replaces men sweeping with brooms, with machines that greatly degrade the street environment with their loud noise, and prevent the operator from civilised interaction with surrounding people or getting useful exercise in the process. The garden vac replaces the reliable garden rake with something with which to continue annoying the neighbours after finishing with the flymo and before moving on to the hedge-trimmer. Again a healthy, arguably pleasant task is converted into a noisy, unpleasant chore in the service of big business profits.

What underlies these examples is what we may call the principle of "using a motorised sledgehammer to crack a nut". We all know that sledgehammers are foolish things for cracking nuts, so why do we allow ourselves to be governed by this madness?

The answer can be found by considering how to get rich in our society. A person earns far more per hour by selling expensive hi-tech things (cars, garden vacs) than by selling cheap things (bikes, rakes). So a great amount of effort goes into selling the expensive, inefficient motorised sledgehammers and little into promoting unprofitable "nutcrackers". This is not the market working, it is the market going mad (and with subsidy from taxpayers).

Another characteristic of the motorised sledgehammers is that they have heavy externalities (noise, pollution, despoilation of resources) which are imposed mainly on others than the purchasers and producers (4). How many airline-industry directors choose to live at the ends of runways, and how many roads-lobby directors or CEOs locate their homes alongside motorways?

When we have been so successful with "growth" that we all have our personal motorways past our front gates, international flights every minute from our back lawns, and 24-hour hypermarkets and leisure complexes just behind all our hedges, will we really be so very fortunate?

Excessive mobility of goods

The big business propaganda says that we need hyperlinks such as motorways and airports for economic well-being and employment. Of course they would say this, because such uglinesses give advantage to big business to the detriment of local small businesses.

Simply consider the facts. Before the motorways were built we had full employment, whereas now after development of masses of hyperlinks even those who have jobs find themselves under great pressure. And the rich-poor gap has widened. This is not due to Labour being out of office for 18 years. It is simply because hyperlinks suck out jobs faster than they create them, and destroy local business jobs and replace them with international fat-cats and limited numbers of McDonald's minions.

The local jobs that go are in great contrast to the mindless, anonymous ones that replace them. Consider the radio soap-opera The Archers, and just imagine the chat with the personnel of the village shop and pub transposed to a Tesco hypermarket or contemporary hyper-pub. The lost jobs are human-scaled, community-based, more efficient, more environmentally friendly, and reflective of local cultural diversity rather than of pretentious marketing by image consultants.

The 1980s and 90s will be viewed by archaeologists as being the age of waste; almost every street now has a skip in it at just about any time, not to mention all the material that goes in routine refuse collections. This waste owes much to the excessively low cost of transporting goods.

Excessive mobility of people

Enhanced mobility of people is self-devaluing. Exotic places lose their exoticness. You can now drive to the Lake District -- to a different set of traffic jams, picnic tables, McDonalds, etc.; you won't find Wordsworth writing about the daffodils there.

A plumber says he cannot manage without his car, because many of his customers are in cities 30 miles away from his one. What he fails to say is that if excessive mobility of people were curtailed, he would get customers in his own city who are currently served by other plumbers driving 30 miles to it. And all that driving time, money and effort (and externalities) would be saved.

But there is a much more serious problem with excessive mobility of people, and this is the most important point of all in this article. This problem is dealt with in the following section.

Excessive mobility causes crime and collapse of civilisation

This section concludes with a startling claim, yet the route that leads us there is not at all speculative, indeed is all too commonsense for some readers.

Over the past forty years Britain has seen a considerable increase in crime, reflected in the development of a great variety of anti-crime measures. And those who think violence has not greatly increased are no longer living in the real world. Many people sense that there has also been a parallel decline in community spirit as evidenced in lack of respect for others and for public spaces, and decline of trust and cooperation. Trusting of strangers declined from 2/3 in the 1950s to 1/3 in the 1990s (5). People know they can now get away with atrocious behaviour in public because the public will not intervene, and witnesses are unwilling to testify.

Over the same period there has been a massive proliferation of cars, roads, and associated developments.

It will be shown here that these trends have not occurred together by coincidence, but because the facilitation of travel, especially car travel, leads in due course to increased crime and social disintegration. And that the contribution is not a minor one but of crucial social importance. Indeed, these reasons alone are sufficient grounds for halting and reversing the entire road-building juggernaut (not that there are not plenty of other sufficient reasons). And that this should be the crucial factor underlying any new policy to reduce crime and build social cohesion and community spirit.

The case is supported by established findings and the evidence of writers and researchers of varying levels of rigorousness and clarity of thinking, but most importantly, by straightforward common sense.

The conceptual basis

We can distinguish between on the one hand antisocial behaviour, roughly corresponding to crime and "being bad", and on the other hand prosocial behaviour, helpful, altruistic, "being good" (we can also identify neutral behaviour but it is not relevant here).

Let us consider the questions: In what circumstances does bad drive out good?; and in what circumstances does good drive out bad?

It is obvious that anonymity or lack of anonymity is a major factor. When people get a reputation for their behaviour this leads to bad behaviour being penalised and good being rewarded. By contrast, under conditions of anonymity, or where people are mutual strangers rather than well-acquainted, then the bad people profit without sanction and the good0 make sacrifices without any benefit in return. Thus anonymity and what has been called strangerness promote crime whereas a community rich in personal acquaintanceships deters and negates it. This is why crime prevention measures often involve means to identification offenders such as cameras and other identification technology.

Numerous studies have shown the "bystander apathy" towards criminals and victims who are strangers, even in public situations where anonymity in its superficial sense is lacking. So it is clear that the more important factor is not anonymity, but rather strangerness, that is the proportion of encounters in which the parties are strangers to one another.

This problem of excessive strangerness is very strongly linked with existence of cars and roads, as will be explained.

The key fact is that strangerness and lack of community are increased by increase of the number of people mutually accessible (e.g. within ten minutes, or half and hour). For example if there were only ten people in Birmingham they would know one another quite well, whereas with 10 million almost all would be mutual strangers.

Likewise strangerness and lack of community are increased by increased interaccessibility of a population. For example if the villages of Warwickshire were populated by walking non-driving locals there would be much less anonymity and strangerness and more community than if the villagers were all endlessly driving around to large stores and such like centres.

To be more precise we can distinguish between macro-accessibility and micro-accessibility (6). Micro-accessibility means accessibility of people within a few feet or yards of oneself, or one's neighbours in one's street. Macro-accessibility means accessibility of people much further away, for example in other towns or countries. It is excess of macro-accessibility that produces strangerness and lack of community cohesion, whereas micro-accessibility tends (in moderation) to reduce strangerness and enhance cohesion.

Large road schemes increase macro-accessibility while reducing microaccessibility (by severance and noise, and increased traffic on local destination roads). Motor vehicles have the effect in general of promoting longer-distance travel while greatly reducing micro-accessibility in various ways. Fellow-travelling walkers or cyclists or bus passengers have more opportunity for interaction in a few yards than fellow-travelling motorists have in a thousand miles. Furthermore, motor traffic reduces micro-accessibility by making streets difficult and dangerous places to walk in, to cross to a neighbour's house or to allow children to walk along (7). In recent decades many residential streets have been transformed from places of community interaction into anonymous space for parking and driving.

Thus, to recap the basic thesis, building more large roads such as motorways increases macro-accessibility among people (and reduces microaccessibility), which increases strangerness and lack of community cohesion, which leaves antisocial behaviour unpenalised and prosocial behaviour unrewarded, and in consequence crime increases while helpfulness, considerateness, trust and co-operation decrease. These common-sense ideas can stand perfectly well on their own, yet they gain further support from empirical findings and from theoretical biology.

Evidence from theoretical biology

A branch of theoretical biology that has gained very wide acceptance in recent decades is game theory, as developed by John Maynard Smith. Its principles are quite straightforward but not very easy to present without extensive reference to diagrams. A good introduction is Smith's 1982 book Evolution and the Theory of Games (8), but it is not really necessary to read this in order to understand the conclusions. As the book indicates, there have been studies such as that of Axelrod and Hamilton (9) which have investigated the conditions under which prosocial co-operative behaviour would evolve or develop. Their conclusions are that there must be repeated interactions between the same pairs of individuals, and either there must be individual recognition or the number of potential partners per individual must be small. Absence of these conditions would produce selfish antisocial behaviour instead. In other words these investigators confirm the commonsense conclusions about strangerness promoting crime and reducing prosocial behaviour. Note how closely their description accords with the reverse of my concept of strangerness: "repeated interactions between the same pairs of individuals, and either there must be individual recognition or the number of potential partners per individual must be small"

Evidence from human society

It is well-known that small island communities have very low crime rates, the recently-highlighted case of St Helena being just one example.

It is also well known that urban areas have much higher crime rates than areas of low accessibility and low strangerness. Obviously this latter is in line with the argument here presented, but of course other factors could be supposed to be involved, such as poverty. Yet even were that valid as a partial explanation, it would not make the preceding arguments any less valid.

In reality, various findings indicate that poverty is not a sufficient explanation of crime levels, and that accessibility is the more important factor:

1. Rising crime during the sixties and seventies coincided with reduced poverty and reduced inequality of wealth;

2. Poverty in the 1930s did not produce a crime wave;

3. The past 30-40 years have been characterised by increased crime and social deterioration contemporaneous with increased accessibility due to roadbuilding and car proliferation;

4. More recently, increased rural accessibility has been accompanied by spreading of burglaries and other crime to rural areas;

5. Clinard's comparative investigation of Switzerland, in the 1978 book Cities with Little Crime (10) further indicates that accessibility is a major factor and that poverty is not.

Clinard observed that crime was much greater in Sweden than in Switzerland even though it had the same high level of affluence, and had likewise had 150 years without wars. What did account for the low crime rate in Switzerland was the very local orientation of the Swiss, and urban areas being kept predominantly relatively small. Clinard concluded that cities should be of no more than 250,000 or perhaps 500,000 inhabitants and that local government at the level of about 5000 persons should be heavily emphasised. Of course, Clinard was not thinking about whether or not roads should be built, but it is clear that his comprehensive study supports the role of accessibility and lack of social cohesion as major factors in crime.

Clearly if we are to follow Clinard's prescription, then rather than enhancing links between London and Manchester we should be breaking them both into smaller conurbations. In 1971 Clinard was awarded the Edwin H. Sutherland Award for Distinguished Contributions to Criminology.

In the course of presenting the above points as objections to the Birmingham Northern Relief Road in 1995, I encountered the evidence given by another objector, who has been a police office for 18 years (11). He detailed how the building of a motorway access to his area had resulted in a substantial rise in burglaries and other crime, and that in numerous cases there was evidence of the role of the motorway in facilitating access and escape.

Arnold Toynbee, author of A Study of History (1934-1966) (12), identified 27-odd civilisations, all of which had already failed except for the remaining one, Western Christendom (as it was once) (though of course Islam and others are far from dead and buried yet). Toynbee concluded that the breakdowns were not due to outside attack or environmental pressures, but due to internal disintegration of the social fabric. Factors leading to this were excessive mobility and accessibility, the anonymity of mass society, an overgrown megastate such as the Roman Empire (now the EC), and proliferation of antisocial against prosocial.

Judging by the rate of social deterioration over the past forty years of roads and car proliferation, the EC will not last even a tenth as long as the Roman Empire.

Given the extent to which the various findings accord with the commonsense logic, our conclusion should be obvious -- not merely an end to all further road-building as of now, but also moves to substantially reduce the roads network.

We must get rid of the motorways before they get rid of us.

Other essential principles

The transport problem on land is not deficient public transport, nor deficient cycling or walking facilities. The problem with cycling is excessive motor vehicles. The problem with public transport is excessive vehicles making the expedition to the bus-stop as pleasant as a walk on the moon. The problem is excessive motor vehicles. It will be explained below why it should not be desirable to invest heavily in public transport or in token lanes and crossings for non-motorists. Not only should it be sufficient to heavily address head-on the problem of cars, but it is simply inexcusable to do otherwise, as will be explained.

Brute Injustice

A phrase that has recently become commonplace is "direct action". But in extreme constrast to the heroic altruistic direct actions of opponents of Westminster-imposed uglinesses, there have for many years been direct actions of a sociopathic selfish kind on our roads. It is not without reason that the street parties so intensively monitored by our roads-lobby-regime-police-state have been called not "Claim the Streets", but rather "Reclaim the Streets". This because our streets have been forcibly stolen from non-motorists by the selfish brutal direct action that has killed thousands of people every year merely for being in the public streets.

Why do pedestrians wait for the hoped-for gap in the traffic rather than expect the motorists to let them across? And why do parents train their children to give way to motorists? And why do motorists drive on the assumption that non-motorists are to blame if they get in their way? Is it because the non-motorists have agreed to some contract with the motorists? Or because non-motorists agreed to grant this priority through some democratic process? No, it is simply the result of selfish brute force direct action by murderous motorists.

But because motorists earn big profits for big business, the Westminster regime has been happy to turn a blind eye to this massive injustice. Whereas one death in a train crash causes a multi-page media witch-hunt, 3,500 deaths on the roads merely generate small reassuring yearly reports of 'even fewer deaths'.

If someone were to push their way barging past you at a Downing Street reception, would you consider it bad manners? But if someone barges straight at you in an armoured killing machine at 30-plus mph, that somehow isn't bad manners?

The rights of non-motorists have been brutally infringed for decades. It is not a matter of clamping down on sacred rights of motorists. There is no reason why this gross injustice and indecency should not be radically halted as from now, by effective action rather than PR appeals to reduce speed (why not appeal to muggers, rapists and burglars to stop being so naughty too?).

Why should we not bring civilised manners and common decency back to our public places? And why should not motorists be made fully personally responsible and fully personally liable for the danger they impose on others?

Zero INtolerance

There has been much advocation of the principle of zero tolerance as an anti-crime measure. Rather predictably, zero tolerance is not applied to motoring offences, but only to actions of pedestrians and cyclists. Not only are our laws grossly biased to the convenience of motorists (bull-bars not prohibited; dangerously dull colours not prohibited; dangerously speedable cars not prohibited from sale unlike harmless vitamin B6), but also such laws as there are are minimally enforced. It has become established as "acceptable" for speed limits to be broken, and for parking on pavements, verges, yellow lines, and at junctions and crossings to be ignored. It is common for vehicles to have excessive output of smoke or noise or drive without lights in darkness. And motorists use their horns mainly as public nuisance door-bell subsitutes.

The police have extremely biased attitudes. For example, when a person obstructed cars passing a no-entry sign a policeman threatened to arrest this upholder of the law then waved the cars through. On another occasion, police driving past a no-entry sign in non-emergency conditions insisted that that was acceptable. Police cars can regularly be seen parked on pavements.

Such a massive inversion of zero tolerance in respect of motoring offences must surely have a massive detrimental effect on respect for laws and civility in general.

If the cost of proper enforcement is huge, then the taxation of motoring should be correspondingly hugely increased to pay for it.

Equity

The "polluter pays principle". It is a matter of natural justice and appropriate correction of inadequacies of the market that the full costs of externalities should be imposed on motorists at the earliest possible date. A grossly conservative estimate is that a trebling of the taxation of motoring would be required. But this ignores massive externalities which almost certainly justify increasing the cost of motoring by a factor of ten, simply as a matter of natural justice and market correction, not as some special penalty on motorists. The nature of these externalities has been well-described in the opening pages of the recent book by Christian Wolmar (13). They include the social effect on residents of areas blighted by traffic, whereby they can no longer interact naturally with their neighbours, and whereby children are deprived of the right to go out without constant parental chaperoning. And the massive obstruction by motorists that takes place every hour of every day in this country, which prevents walkers and cyclers from using the supposedly public roads.

It is clear that massive financial and non-financial demands must be imposed on motoring, because it is simply inexcusable to do otherwise.

It has been claimed that increasing the cost of motoring would disproportionately disadvantage people with low incomes. But the poorest people cannot afford cars anyway. And insofar as there are persons with low income who are dependent on cars they can be granted allowances for this, just as they can get allowances for various other requirements. Increasing the cost of motoring would generally be to the advantage of the poor. Appropriate use of non-financial measures for car-restraint would further help in this.

A positive agenda

It will be clear from the above that the question of whether sticks rather than carrots should be used to motivate motorists is misguided. Rather the need is for removal of a great overdose of carrots, and the imposition of a merely neutral regime would greatly shift the motivation away from car use.

Furthermore, there are very positive aspects to such a change against motoring. It would constitute a great liberation not only for children and other non-motorists, but also for the many people forced into motoring, such as parents who would no longer feel obliged to fetch their children to and from school and act as their escorts in general.

Other positive "carrots" could involve other effective measures to make streets more acceptable for walking, cycling and being there, and assistance to local businesses, organisations and developments that minimise transport demand.

And there is no reason why those who walk, cycle, or stay at home should subsidise the less desirable, less efficient modes that are public transport.

The massive proportion of our time and income that is currently wasted on car transport could be put to great use in improving the quality of life.

Over the past few decades immense damage has been done to our nation's infrastructure, in the form of loss of local schools, shops and work and leisure facilities, and housing located near to such provision. This damage should be reversed by policies to encourage such local provisions. In particular the new concept whereby it is supposedly acceptable for university students to drive 60 miles each day to college should be rejected, with a requirement that all students live locally as do students of Oxford University. And requirements for local provision should be imposed on other institutions where feasible.

The proper role of government in transport is restraint, not facilitation

There has for many years been a presumption that it is the proper role of government to facilitate transport by road, rail, and air, and promote or at least enable the expansion of the associated infrastructure. That presumption must now be absolutely resolutely rejected.

The proper role of government must now be reconceived as imposing proper restraints and taxation on all motorised transport modes in order to compensate for their massive negative externalities, and thereby to prevent the inequity, inefficiency, and environmental, social and economic damage that would otherwise result.

What is needed

The considerations explained above lead to policy requirements such as the following:

1. Reduction of excessive mobility of goods and of people (macroaccessibility), by measures to reduce air-transport, and demolishing of motorways and of other megalinks such as the Severn bridges.

2. In the shorter term, reserve one carriageway of all dual carriageways to non-motoring modes

3. Zero tolerance and effective control of motoring offences:

(a) by more appropriate policing policies

(b) by redesign of infrastructure to make requirements self-enforcing, such as

(d) road designs to cause speeding vehicles to crash into obstacles (research to refine)

(e) these measures used without warning notices so motorists must assume they may be anywhere.

(f) extensive use of speed cameras

4. Prohibiting internal airbags and seatbelts.

5. Removal of the heavy pro-motor biases in the law:

(a) making motorists properly personally fully liable for deaths/injuries caused

(b) appropriately heavy controls on eligibility for driving licences (no under-25 males, or half-blind, or known psychopaths)

(d) sale of fast cars to be prohibited, and automatic speed limiters to be compulsory

(e) polluter-pays pricing of massive externalities, by substantial taxes on owning, driving, and parking (per visit)

(f) maximum speeds of 15 mph urban, 30 mph rural and 45 mph main routes

(g) no free parking on roads, treat cars as pieces of litter

(h) prohibit tinted glass, and prohibit car horns as they are mainly used inappropriately

(i) give effective junction priority to walkers and cyclers

(j) prohibit anti-pedestrian barriers.

6. Enforce cleanness and safety of streets and make them agreeable to walk in, including realistic deposit regulations for glass bottles.

7. Promote and assist local provisions, and halt large developments such as millenium domes.

8. Universities to provide all students local accomodation.

9. Similar obligations on other organisations.

10. Substantial compensation for those living next to traffic nuisance.

References and notes

1. The British Road Federation and other industrial lobby groups have long promoted road-building on spurious economic grounds. Most recently they have come under attack via SACTRA within the UK, which has argued that in some cases building roads may lead to loss of jobs. See Urban Nature 4(1), 1.

2. See Urban Nature 2(2), 47-8.

3. Kohr, L. 1957/1986. The Breakdown of Nations. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

4. For accounts of externalities see Urban Nature 2, 165-6; and 3, 4.

5. Among those aged 30 or under, 56% expressed social trust in 1958 and about 36% in 1990. The data are from the survey done for the 'Civic Culture' study of Almond and Verba and from the 'World Values Survey'. They are briefly reported on in: Hall, P.1997. Social Capital: A fragile asset. Demos Collection 12, 35-37.

6. The key argument about the benefits of 'accessibility' over 'mobility' has a long history in transport planning literature.

7. Appleyard, D. and Lintel, M. 1971 The environmental quality of city streets. American Planners Journal 84-101.

8. Smith, J. Maynard. Evolution and the Theory of Games.1982. Cambridge University Press.

9. Axelrod, R. and Hamilton, W.D. 1981. Science, 211, 1390-6.

10. Clinard, M. 1978. Cities with Little Crime. Cambridge University Press.

11. Birmingham Northern Relief Road Inquiry, objection from R Clarke, no. 010072; objection from R Noakes, no.012260.

12. Toynbee, A. 1933-1964. A Study of History. Oxford University Press.

13. Friends of the Earth. 1997. Unlocking the Gridlock. Friends of the Earth, London.

To other papers by Robin P Clarke