Spanning 5,000 years, Tom Standage’s examination of the way we move begins with the assertion that “the modern world has been shaped by the car” in ways “so familiar we no longer notice them.” Automobiles have, he shows through the course of the book, affected everything from “the geography of cities to the geopolitics of oil,” as well as redefining “dating, eating and shopping.”
Standage is the author of six previous works of non-fiction, most of which take a general subject—different types of drink, for instance, or food production—to chart a fascinating journey through global history. Here he begins in Mesopotamia, where four-wheeled wagons were used variously for military, ceremonial and agricultural reasons. He then navigates the rise and fall of the popularity of these kinds of vehicles, and the places—North Africa, for instance— where wheels were deemed unnecessary, because the Nile or a camel could do the job just as well.
Standage paints a portrait at odds with the romanticised view of the pre-car city. In London in the 1890s, 300,000 horses worked the streets, and the public health implications of all the manure were becoming dire. The farmland required to produce the horses’ feed was reducing, in addition, the space dedicated to growing human food. “Horses had become both indispensable and unsustainable,” precipitating the introduction of “self-propelling motor vehicles, known at the time as horseless carriages.”
From here we learn of the car’s inexorable rise and its many unforeseen consequences: from fast-food drive-in chains to the creation of wide avenues to accommodate their proliferation. The global landscape—rural or urban, in developed and developing countries—now caters to the car. The vehicle introduced to eliminate one type of pollutant (manure) has inadvertently created another that contributes both to climate change and poor health. As we now shift “from car ownership to mobility services,” including ride- hailing apps, we have the opportunity to “look in the rearview mirror” to ensure the same mistakes aren’t repeated.
