Sixty years ago this week the Clean Air Act was passed to protect us from the effects of pollution. Since then, car ownership has trebled in the UK. Two million households own three or more vehicles. Today, around 40,000 people each year die prematurely of illness linked to emissions. On Monday, medics from the Faculty of Public Health published a report in Scotland urging rapid and radical replanning of our towns for the sake of safety. They had in mind air quality, not collisions or obesity.

Everybody knows this. Everybody computes the cause and effect. Yet we are encouraged to stop our ears and ignore it as best we can. Incentives for people to quit their motors remain minimal. Cheerleading for top rides is still an endlessly indulged national pastime. Such widespread blitheness means any suggestion that people might have a moral responsibility not to slowly kill others while on the school run is met with scoffing.

Small wonder: it’s easy to ignore something that’s invisible. From the driver’s seat you can’t see the stuff spewing out to poison passing pedestrians. It’s also easier to care less. Being in a car is insulating. You transport your own space to the outside world, dominate your surroundings, totally imposing. People like driving because it enables individualism, as well as propulsion. The less contact you have with other people, the less you factor them into your actions.

But the key reason such behaviour continues is that it is perpetuated by the rich, and its losers are the poor. The convenience of the wealthy is consistently prioritised. We start with cars. The community must adapt or die trying. The keys to our cities are now found in dashboards, not the pockets of the people.

Every day, I walk to the station along a street lined with largely multiple-occupancy terraces built about 40 years before it was classified as a B-road. Usually, it’s a slog. There’s a lot of traffic – about the same capacity as the A-road which runs parallel, despite the absence of bus routes. Plus, the pavement is often impassable. Parked cars line both sides of the street and are permitted to take up half the pavement too. Negotiating your way is grim, even without a wheelchair or buggy.

But for the past couple of months, this road has been closed to through traffic because of repairs to a railway bridge. Now, it is heaven: or, rather, it is the residential street it was intended to be. You can hear the birds, you can speak to people without shouting and then retching. But the absence of traffic is not, in fact, the most striking thing. Rather, it is the pavement. The number of parked cars has dropped dramatically. Now, there are just a scattering.

Slowly, you twig: not only do the people who live on the street not drive down it, they don’t park on it either – because by and large they don’t own cars. Those vehicles belonged to residents of the 20 or so posher roads in the same residents’ zone, cutting their commute by a couple of minutes by driving to the station.

Wightman Road is a sacrifice zone, an abused vein running through protected territory. The winners here are the people who hit back by protesting (with a little justification, of course) that some car journeys are necessary. Who strenuously campaign for their own streets to be ring-fenced from congestion. Who endlessly press the case that not all cars are owned by those with bucketloads of lolly. Again: this has some truth. But one survey put the cost of buying a new car and running it for a year in the UK at £18,901. This is more capital than many people can muster.

With money comes responsibility. Car ownership in India is projected to rise 775% over the next 24 years. Not every effect of a mass move out of poverty is wholly desirable. For it is always ultimately those with the very least who will suffer most. In this country, that means people without the money to move. Elsewhere, it’s those whose environments will be made uninhabitable – and certainly unfarmable – by the effects of emissions so serious they make the Clean Air Act look like a curio.

In September, the bridge will be repaired, the road will reopen, the cars will flood back, lining the pavements, belting down the street. Motorists will breathe a sigh of relief. The residents will just try to breathe.