Personally I was thinking purely in terms of the various forms of pollution, although the Harvard study does try to account for injury and loss of life. Externality is an economic theory, far from a euphemism.
It’s easy to gauge how many lives are lost due to the automobile. But how many lives are saved? How many lives are enriched? How many lives are even made possible because of the automobile?
You can look at only the costs of a thing, but I find the appeal to emotion, similar to gun control arguments, to be entirely unconvincing.
Furthermore, technology has steadily improved the safety of these machines, and I’m convinced we’re less than a decade away from a quantum leap in safety by automating more and more of the driving process.
As automobiles get quieter, safer, less polluting, available on demand, and less expensive, I’m afraid you’re going to see quite a bit more of them, not less.
It’s nothing less than economic warfare to ban diesel cars outright from entering a city. Ban the sale of new diesels if you want. Tax the hell out of diesel fuel if you want. Add a toll booth and set a lower speed limit. But your well meaning compatriots spent their hard earned money to buy their vehicles and if you’d just assume fuck them over for it, I’m sure they will find a way to repay the favor. Probably by not coming to your city (and spending their money there) in the first place. To which you might say, “Good riddance!” And we have an expression for that too.
Oftentimes there is an entirely valid reason to get in a car and drive somewhere. I know, this may be shocking to you. Shocking to the people talking about bicycling a couch uphill downthread too.
There are 45 million passenger cars in Germany (for 82 million people) so it seems you’re in the minority on this. Before you call for just outright banning cars, maybe consider how you could make public policy which would decrease the number of cars by 10% without increasing the cost of cars.