The Tide of Traffic

An Academy Award-nominated documentary about the impact of traffic on cities sounds like something that everyone should see.

There's just one problem with "The Tide of Traffic": the sponsor is an oil company! It's British Petroleum, more recently famous for the Deepwater Horizon explosion that polluted the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 (you may recall the company's CEO insisting that it wasn't a big deal and then saying "I want my life back.") It's also worth mentioning that BP - back then called the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company - seeing its assets in Iran nationalized in the early 1950s, convinced the US and UK governments to overthrow Iran's prime minister, cementing the shah's autocratic rule and leading to the revolution that established Iran's current government.*

Whatever good points this documentary makes about traffic, the fact remains that an oil company is the wrong group to address it, especially since the continued oil consumption in the ensuing decades exacerbated global warming, and now civilization itself is threatened.

Truly awkward documentary.

*Without the 1953 coup, there wouldn't have been the 1979 revolution, without which there wouldn't have been the Iran-Iraq War, without which there wouldn't have been the 1991 Gulf War, without which there wouldn't have been the 2003 occupation of Iraq and subsequent mess in the region.

This is a curiously dry documentary produced by one of the world's largest energy companies for the United Nations and it's not especially clear why. We start in the car-free Venice and then travel the length and breadth of Europe and the United States illustrating the exponential increase in motoring for leisure and business purposes and the concomitant increase in car production, road building and debris accrued after we are finished with cars and tyres alike. The narration is adequate. Descriptive but not especially insightful, and though it does remind us of a certain age of life before cars went everywhere all the time, it's still nothing of great interest or innovation beyond displaying the relentless and unstoppable progress for the roadbuilding and using lobbies. Some interesting car designs though - square and angular was clearly in style, especially Stateside.