Cars and cigarettes

I frequently find myself reading the comments section in a newspaper or TV network website after a bicycle story. Whatever the news, whether a gain for cyclists, a loss, or an outright tragedy, some person will almost certainly write in and demand we get with the program, notice what century we live in, and embrace the advantages of the personal automobile. Whether these people say so or not, their position implies that law and road policy should have no consideration for those of us who wilfully and stubbornly refuse the great gift of the automobile, and instead merely impede serious people with real errands and jobs by self-indulgently using our bicycles in public.

In reply, I have this to say: almost all the arguments for conformity that drivers now make, smokers could once have made. The argument that public policy should cater to the majority? The year of my birth, a majority of adult men smoked. "Serious" people smoked. People of all walks of life claimed they could not get by without smoking, just as many people now claim they cannot get by without driving cars. Motorists claim they should get special consideration because they pay excess taxes: smokers paid, and pay today, substantially more in taxes than people who have avoided addiction to nicotine.

Yet governments never brought themselves to promote smoking, never managed to justify any major programs for "smokers only". And they did not, could not, do so because they recognized, tentatively at first and then more strongly as data accumulated and doctors grew more adamant, that smoking causes harm. Today, increasing evidence suggests that an inactive, car centred lifestyle leads to many of the same debilitating and life-shortening conditions that smoking does.

To bring this around to the beginning: you cannot ask me to get with "the program" of car dependence if getting with that program will manifestly cause me illness and shorten my life. If you choose car dependence, good luck to you-- but your right to your chosen way of life does not extend to inflicting harm on me, or to demanding that I inflict it on myself.