The Dangers of Automobile Travel: A Reconsideration

A bstract .   America's reliance on automobile transportation has attracted the scorn of academics for decades. Automobiles, it is said, are dangerous to life and limb, environmentally unfriendly, and wasteful of space and resources. Moreover, say the critics, automobiles produce inefficient individualistic social behavior that balkanizes communities and shatters the otherwise cohesive nature of American life.
This article examines the costs and benefits of U.S. automobile travel from a historic perspective. First, it compares the safety of automobile travel with the horse and steam-powered travel that preceded it. It then briefly addresses the changes wrought by American automobiles in terms of their impact on American life, economics, social mobility, and ecology. It concludes that the dangers of automobile use are substantially lower than the dangers posed by early horse-driven and steam-driven transportation methods, especially in terms of fatalities per mile. It finds that on a per-mile or per-trip basis, automobile travel is safer than virtually any other means of travel used popularly in U.S. history, and that the other contributions of automobile transportation have been seriously overlooked by transportation scholars.