The Madness of Cars

By Peter Hitchens

Cars now utterly dominate our society as well as our roads. Our lives are designed and built around them, and our economy distorted to suit them. For millions of us they are more or less compulsory.

In The Madness of Cars Peter Hitchens argues that this did not need to happen. Forceful lobbies, greedy corporations and weak governments allowed the domination of an inefficient, dirty, and unhealthy form of transport. In choosing the car over rail, we took a huge step backwards: it is the equivalent of abandoning mains water for wells and pumps. The economic madness of prioritising machines that are only used for 4% of the day and spend most of their lives depreciating in the gutter is compounded, contends Hitchens, by the inherently life-threatening nature of the motor car. Like barbarians lighting cooking fires among Roman temples and aqueducts, we live amid the ruins of a lost civilisation, vainly imagining that we are superior.

This book is essential reading for environmentalists and conservatives in need of a reminder that 'Mechanical Jacobins' are not on their side, and anyone who savours rigorous counter-intuitive insight and argument.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 150957106X
• ISBN13: 9781509571062
• Release Date: June 2027
• Publisher: Polity Press
• Length: 200 Pages