President’s bulletin: April 2024

Motonormativity

How much we build the world around the motorist has raged for over a century. But I sense a pivotal moment with our car loving culture. The car has given immense freedom of movement to many over several generations.

Everyday five people are killed and 82 seriously injured on the roads in the UK. The numbers prematurely dying or suffering serious ill health due to poor air quality due to vehicle emissions are in the thousands.

In 2020 a landmark Coroner's Report made Ella Kissi-Debrah the first person in the world to have air pollution cited as a cause of death. England’s CMO Sir Chris Whitty has warned of the dangers from particulates caused by car tyres and brake wear, when giving evidence to the Commons environmental audit committee.

The car has grown in size and weight, particularly SUVs, generating tremendous kinetic force at relatively low speeds. Those being in an accident with a car at speed are much more unlikely to survive and the amount of land taken over for use by the car is enormous. Yet a car spends 96% of its time parked. Henry Graber has written extensively on this. Violence and even deaths occur over parking spaces and road rage. The examples are innumerable. Normal thought process has been distorted for movement on highways to “car logic” and not for the reason highways, especially in an urban environment, were constructed. We talk of “vulnerable” road users and not about fast and heavy vehicles as “dangerous” road users. Consideration of the car as a very serious public / environmental health issue needs a total readjustment. But there is a reluctance to do this, why?

Professor Ian Walker, an environmental psychologist at Swansea University is the lead author of a study showing how British people appear to have an in-built acceptance of risks and harms from motor vehicles that they would not accept in other parts of life with potentially widespread repercussions for how policy decisions are made. Such is the cultural ubiquity of these assumptions, described by the researchers as “motonormativity”, that politicians are less likely to try to tackle issues such as pollution from vehicles, poor driving, or speed limits. Terminology is expressed in vehicle freedoms as seen by “the war on motorists”.

In Paris restrictions are being placed on SUVs, supported by a democratic vote. In Barcelona car free “superblocks” are being created. Initial resistance to these changes turns to welcome acceptance as communities are created from car free streets and all the other numerous benefits that accrue from better air quality, increase in businesses and active travel by residents.

Driving a car is a privilege not a right. The current “debate” to overturn the 20mph speed limit in built up areas in Wales is an example of “special pleading” for the motor car. The Welsh Government must be applauded for this innovative public and environmental health initiative. The debates are ongoing elsewhere on ULEZ, Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, cycle lanes and so on. So much has been expounded recently on cars one would think it is a matter of life and death, it is.

Board, meetings and careers

A Board meeting took place on 26th April. We had a busy agenda, and the Chair will report on this. I am grateful to the Executive Director of Environmental Health for our regular “catch up” meetings.

I am a member of a CIEH Property Working Group and we met in April. The group is considering options to progress the CIEH into a strong financial position.

It was a pleasure to represent the CIEH at the University of the West of England Bristol, Centre for Public Health and Wellbeing Postgraduate Research and Careers Showcase Conference on 24th April.

I have had various communications from members and have replied to all. Thanks to these members for taking the time to do this.

Please do contact me at [email protected] with comments, concerns, suggestions and hopefully praise on occasion; or write to the Editor at EHN.