Cars reach a dead end: the carnage must stop

THE horrendous deaths of 10 people – eight in Donegal and two more elsewhere in the country over the past weekend – highlights the enormous social costs of the car in society. It also demonstrates a huge hypocrisy that permeates society when confronting the issues and contradictions that surround car culture in general.

To quote Rex Weyler, in his web article Cars, Corporations and Society: “The car is one of the prime forces of destruction on our planet, among the most harmful social design decisions in history – inefficient, deadly and toxic.”

In Autogeddon (1991), English poet and playwright Heathcote Williams described cars’ trail of death and devastation as a “humdrum holocaust – the third world war nobody bothered to declare”.