The cost of the car by Ian East

A newspaper story about an American woman who found herself trapped in a suburb designed around the car after losing her driving licence due to a diagnosis of epilepsy set Ian East on the road which led to this book.

Dr East, who lives in Islip, sets out, as a physicist and engineer, to bring scientific analysis to bear on the price society pays for its love affair with the automobile and the supposed freedom it brings, rather than indulging in a green rant with a prescriptive conclusion listing things we must do.

The cost takes many forms. The book details the congestion, the carnage, the harm to health both from pollution and the decline in exercise, the way communities are now planned with the needs of the car, rather than people in mind, the hot topic of climate change and the car’s dependency on fossil fuel.

Dr East draws on personal experience, looking at the changes wrought by ever greater car use on the Thames Valley village where he grew up, where people walked and cycled locally and used trains to venture further afield, or seeing the university department he worked for moved to a site seven miles out of Oxford, forcing him to use a car again after four years without one.

The Oxford Transport Strategy comes in for criticism, particularly its reliance on the bus as a replacement for the car in the heart of the city. Dr East says OTS “has achieved little more than to exchange one polluting motor vehicle for another” and that the sheer number of buses on the roads acts as a deterrent to pedestrians and cyclists in a city once synonymous with the bike.

A thought-provoking book, which should make people sit up and look at ways to wean ourselves off auto-addiction.

(Open Channel, £12.95)