The unsayable case for cars

Rob Henderson is justly famous for coining the phrase ‘luxury beliefs’. These are opinions which are unshakeably held irrespective of any countervailing evidence, either because the display of such opinions confers status on the holder, or else because adherence to them is an article of faith among some social or professional group in which you need to be seen to belong.

The only approved vision of the future involves extracting people from their cars and cramming them into mass transit

Such beliefs are hence closer to religious creeds than to any conventionally formed opinion. Consequently, any contradiction of such accepted beliefs in public, however intelligent, is treated as heretical: a social gaffe at best, a career-ender at worst.

I once had an idea to host a conference where the speakers and the attendees had all recently retired. The idea was that, freed from the obligation to repeat the usual approved platitudes, you could learn what experts really thought when they were free to speak their minds, rather than reciting a Davos-style litany of received opinion. (My cunning idea was not to pay the speakers, but to hold the event on a cruise ship, which are like catnip for the over-sixties.)

One of the speakers would have been David Metz, the author of Travel Fast or Smart? A Manifesto for an Intelligent Transport Policy, a fabulous polemic written after the author had left his job as chief scientist at the Department for Transport.