Automobile transport is an ecological catastrophe. It produces most of our air pollution, causing all kinds of respiratory diseases and many cases of early cancer.
Automobiles are also the main producers of soil pollution. Oil and other liquids leaks from cars and poisons the ground. Heavy metals in exhaust fumes settle to the ground, creating a particular hazard from children's playgrounds and vegetable gardens.
Cars are also the main culprits in noise pollution. The piercing shriek of car alarms and the noise of starting motors jangles peoples' nerves and steals sleep, especially in small inner city yards. On busy streets, pedestrians are forced to carry on conversations by shouting, and residents to sleep in summer heat waves with closed windows.
Besides that, parked cars create ubiquitous "landscape pollution". Yards, lawns and sidewalks are seized by motorists and turned into free parking lots. It is important to note that apartments in buildings with car-free yards invariably bring much higher prices than analogous flats in buildings whose yards serve as parking lots.
Besides their direct polluting effects, automobiles bring other serious harm. Hundreds of pedestrians and bicyclists are killed and maimed each year by car crashes in St. Petersburg. Because of chronic traffic jams, surface public transit is paralyzed. Conflicts with motorists not only costs passengers time, but also has caused the liquidations of several tram routes in the historic center of the city.
Considering all the well known harmful effects of automobiles, government policy should be directed at reducing their number. But the policy in St. Petersburg in fact encourages the use of private cars. This encouragement, of course, does not take the form of budget items named "Payments to car owners", but rather of hidden subsidies and undeserved privileges.
The biggest hidden subsidy is universal free parking. Also significant is subsidized road building.
"More than any other single factor, it is the
automobile that has wrecked the twentieth-century
American city, dissipating its strength, destroying
its form, fragmenting its life."
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former US Ambassador to the
United Nations and Senior US Senator from New York.