High cost of car addiction

AFTER watching the RTÉ Prime Time television programme on the scourge of tyre dumping in Ireland (May 17), it brought home yet another dimension of the consequences of our car addiction.

Like all addictions, car addiction has short-term benefits or “highs” but enormous long-term social costs.

The list of consequences is extensive – from the horrible spectre of road carnage, to critical climate change problems, to wars over oil, to environmentally damaging oil spills, to mindless traffic congestion, local air quality and health issues, to blighting our countryside by dumping used tyres and clapped-out bangers – not to mention the enormous physical cost of accommodating them on roads, as well as providing ever more space for them in towns and cities.