Automobility, planet, and humans: Pathways linking car use to environmental, societal, and individual well-being

Amidst the climate crisis, global car ownership continues to rise. Scholarly literature often emphasizes negative impacts, while under-examining the varied effects on society, car users, and non-users, as well as the benefits that help sustain car dependence. This conceptual paper introduces a new conceptual model that organizes pathways linking automobility to environmental, societal, and individual well-being. Automobility exerts a profound influence on climate change and environmental sustainability, while it has far-reaching implications for human well-being. The effects on human well-being largely depend on contextual factors, such as the degree of car dependency in the built environment, and personal circumstances, including socioeconomic status. Automobility's influence operates at both collective and individual levels, shaping collective societal outcomes as well as individual experiences. Collective outcomes are mostly negative, including traffic fatalities, consumption of public space, and harmful effects on public health. Individual outcomes are unevenly distributed: individuals who rely on cars often derive important benefits such as flexibility, comfort, accessibility to destinations, and job opportunities, whereas non-users face serious mobility disadvantages particularly in car-oriented systems, thus deepening existing inequalities. The paper calls for global reflection and new empirical research that build upon or enhance the model and pathways proposed here.