Motoring ourselves to death

Policy is often made without realising its implications. The result can be disastrous. Governments, realising that building roads was necessary at first, have gone overboard, subsidising road transport, oil extraction, storage of cars on public highways (parking). The massive social costs rarely enter the calculus. The 1.2 million deaths from road accidents every year are obvious and visible, but there is more:

Noise from rail and road transport is linked to 50,000 fatal heart attacks every year and 200,000 cases of cardio-vascular disease in the EU according to the new research published today by T&E. .... "[T]he lack of decent regulation combined with increased traffic and a trend towards bigger, more powerful and noisier vehicles is literally proving to be a lethal combination for Europeans. Unlike air pollution, which most major European cities are now starting to tackle, noise has been ignored for decades as the problem has worsened and the negative impacts on society have increased" ....

The World Health Organisation's threshold for 'serious annoyance' and onset of negative health effects from environmental noise is 55 decibels. The study found that around 210 million citizens of the European Union are regularly exposed to 55 decibels or more of road noise.... 50,000 heart deaths a year caused by traffic noise, T&E, 28 February

Conventional policymaking can't handle such adverse side-effects (negative externalities, in economists' jargon). It's difficult to measure the effects of noise on physical and mental wellbeing, but it's easy to measure the benefits of a new road in terms of time saved, and to put a monetary value on that time by multiplying it by road users' earning rates. The bias, which we see in so many other policy areas, is against crucial but unquantifiable components of our wellbeing and in favour of those impacts that can be quantified, monetised, and aggregated into something that sounds good, like economic growth. Memo to policymakers: a magnificent transport infrastruture is not an end in itself: it's a means to certain ends. You would do us all a favour if you targeted those ends directly rather than poured taxpayer funds into those schemes that you (and your buddies in big business) think are the best ways of achieving them.