(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 553: Life After Cars

This week Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon of the War on Cars podcast join the show to talk about their new book: Life After Cars – Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile. We discuss opposing views, Turtle Jesus, and potential offramps towards car free cities.

Listen to this episode first at Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive or your podcatcher of choice.

Below is a full AI generated unedited transcript:

Jeff Wood: Yeah, thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourselves? We’ll start with Sarah and then Doug.

I’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay area. I’ve lived in rural Maine, but I’ve spent most of my life in New York. I’m a career journalist. I was a general interest journalist for a long time. Did a lot of cultural criticism and just other kinds of reporting and essays and so forth. And in 2006. I answered an ad to cover a press conference that Mayor Mike Bloomberg was giving to Announce PlaNYC, and that ad was placed by Aaron Naparstek of Streetsblog.

And I took the assignment, I turned it around for the next day. I guess I did okay, because soon I was freelancing for Streets blog on a pretty regular basis, and that turned into me. Making urban design and transportation planning and all of that good stuff. My beat and I have been writing about that for almost two decades now and for a variety of outlets and yeah, we started this podcast seven years ago now, so.

I’m somebody who just always loved everything about cities and the way they work, and I found a way to make that my work.

No sidewalks off of a busy road where you couldn’t really walk anywhere. But my family was from New York, we visited, so I sort of had this sense of like, okay, this is what a city is and I might wanna live here. So, um, I started my blog, Brooklyn spoke in 2010, and it was at about that time. That the Prospect Park West Bike lane fight, which some of your listeners might know and remember, was really heating up in Brooklyn.

This was a big project under Mayor Bloomberg and Janette Sadik-Khan that a bunch of neighbors in our community did not like a lot of neighbors did like it, but the ones who didn’t like it had a lot of power and a lot of sway, and it turned into a very big fight. And so I was covering that at a kind of very.

Granular level and it just got me more and more involved with Safe Streets’ advocacy and you know, started volunteering for Transportation Alternatives, going to community board meetings. And long story short, I’m a TV producer and writer by professional trade and I sort of like brought those skills to bear on my advocacy and yeah, started the podcast and here we are.

Jeff Wood: How did y’all first meet? Like what was the first interaction you had with each other?

Doug Gordon: Sarah and I I don’t remember the exact first time we met in person, but like these things happen. You follow someone online, you know, you read their writing, especially given the advocacy that I was doing, I was following all the smart people and reporters who were covering these issues.

And Sarah, I. I think you might’ve actually been at grist or at least doing a few things. When I first became aware of it, I was at CitiLab.

So, but I actually don’t remember. Prior to the podcast like we had met probably at press events or things like that, I

Yeah.

These issues and Brooklyn spoke was definitely one of the blogs we brought in. So that’s probably when I first became aware of Doug online. But yeah, I, I seem to remember you at that rally. And if I didn’t introduce myself, I knew who you were then I was stalking you. My reputation preceded me.

I would go to transportation alternative. Like local committee meetings and volunteer trainings, and I think being in real life conversation with people is a very important thing. And certainly now,

In the nineties and early aughts, you know, you used to go out and report in the world a lot. Like that was the main way you did reporting was you would go to a place where people were and ask them questions and write them down even on a piece of paper. And the more journalism became not that. And the more it became like sitting in front of a computer and aggregating content and researching things online and just working off of the computer, the more dead it became to me.

And one of the things I really like about working in audio is that you get to go out and get audio and you have to get that in the real world if you’re gonna get it. And there’s so many situations, it just has a kind of a tactile quality, even though it’s not something you can touch. But it does encourage going out into the real world.

Then it was like, okay, well we’ve got a lot of people listening to the podcast, but we need to figure out how to expand that audience again. So a book is a wonderful thing. I mean, a book is a great technology. You can take it with you anywhere. You can get it wet and it still works. And I think that I just thought, Hey, here’s a way of doing this that would get the message out wider.

And then Doug, you can say how circumstances kind of conspired to make that a Yeah, a reality.

You know, we think there’s a book here. Have you ever thought about writing one? You seem to have the platform. The issue is very interesting and certainly very in the zeitgeist right now. And this was in, you know, post pandemic, let’s say, when e-bikes and outdoor dining and all of this stuff was sort of in the ether and it was just a sort of fortuitous.

Timing that they both emailed at the same time. And we went with them as agents and we landed at Penguin Random House for our publisher. And like I said, it’s not an easy process to write a book, but they helped make it a much easier one.

Like our, our city has one of the worst traffic problems in the country. Something has to be done. And the mayor, and we, we say this in the book, you know, in a situation that will not be all that unfamiliar to a lot of advocates, the mayor’s sort of like, yeah, it’s a problem, but what do you want me to do about it?

And um, he gets very angry, Clark Kent, and Don’s the red cape and turns into Superman. And declares war on cars and like goes around the city smashing lemons at a used car dealership, stopping a cop from accepting a bribe from someone trying to get out of a traffic ticket. Scares the bejesus out of the mayor himself who’s driving and turns things around basically in the city.

And then, yeah, sort of as you’re saying, like over time the sort of social justice warrior version of Superman, who really, he was, it was a New deal, Roosevelt era version of this superhero who’s tackling real social issues just becomes like. Yeah, he’s battling Lex Luther or you know, the villain of the weak.

I think that really speaks to, and we talk about this in the book, the growing acceptance that we have had in the United States over traffic violence, and the role of the automobiles is unquestionable as just part of the background that nobody can do anything about. But in 1939, Siegel and Schuster, the creators of Superman would’ve been old enough.

To have known, you know, our book is called Life After Cars. They would’ve known life before cars or life with a lot fewer cars and life with fewer people being killed by cars. And so you can imagine the outrage they must have felt when in New York and they, they lived in Toronto I think too. So many people that they probably knew were affected by this issue, or at least it was in the newspapers all the time.

And I think it’s just the sort of like proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water. We just sort of haven’t noticed. The ways in which cars have grown up around us.

It’s like this progression of ways of which the car has progressed into our lives. As you’ve mentioned, like the frog boiling in the pot, and I’m wondering what you think about that progression over time and why we’ve gotten to this point where it’s gotten to be this polarizing thing, whereas in a lot of what Peter Norton shares in his book Fighting Traffic is it used to not be like so controversial to be caring about people’s lives, kids’ lives, and now it’s, you know, a two-sided thing and caught up because of the way conservatives versus liberals talk about things.

Cars are great, cars are so wonderful. But I think that it’s also the cognitive dissonance that’s required of us because we have built an environment where 97% or whatever it is of Americans are engaged in daily car use. And if we were allowed to think about that or if we allowed ourselves to think about it.

Every time we got into a car, wow, this is a really dangerous thing to do. This is dangerous to put my kid in the backseat. This is polluting my neighborhood. I’m alienated from my neighbors. If we thought about all those things, every time we got into a car and started it up, it’s very challenging. It’s really kind of challenging to your entire lifestyle and your entire set of values and what it is that you do every day.

That’s very scary to say like, Hey, the whole way I’m living my life is unhealthy and dangerous and not good for me mentally. It’s much easier to. Retreat into kind of the certainty of, but this is the way it is and that’s just the way it has to be. We talked to Dr. Ian Walker, you know, really fascinating researcher on these things, and he said, you know, it’s this principle and behavioral psychology called the is ought fallacy, which basically people see that this is the way it is, therefore that’s the way it ought to be, and they accept that.

But I think, yeah, I think this issue of cognitive dissonance of not allowing yourself to think that there could be something better, because if you did think that there could be something better, having to deal with the way it is might be painful or scary. And it’s a defense that’s exploited by politicians.

But the one thing they can all agree on is hating the bike lanes, hating the bus lanes. Right. We would always say that it was often in some of the most progressive places, right? Park Slope where the Prospect Park bike lane fight went, or Berkeley, California Cambridge, Massachusetts. He’s like liberal bastions where people would be the biggest opponents of bikes.

Yes. San Francisco. Yeah. You’re pointing in your hat. Right. Like those were the places. The war on bikes, let’s say, was fought at the most extreme levels. Now there is a little bit of a negative polarization happening, I think, where, you know, because these things are so wrapped up in the culture wars and we have so many more good examples of success also because we fought those early battles and won that, you know, people are coming around a little more.

You know, I think the reaction to congestion pricing and Governor Hoel pausing it. Trump and Secretary Duffy going after it. You’re seeing people just kind of stand up for it because it’s a pretty good, successful, progressive policy that also is just a good policy. So, um, that’s been a real shift in terms of the culture war aspect of this.

During that period, those countries had a chance and they chose to go a different direction in the United States. And there’s several kind of off ramps that we’ve had over time, and we’ve always chosen the route that goes towards cars. And so like we keep embedding this thing into our lifestyle that really harms us.

And these other countries, they’ve gone other directions. And it’s really interesting to think about these off-ramps, these time periods where we could have gone a different direction, but we did it.

That flip that happened at the end of the seventies when Reagan was elected in 1980. That, that to me is like such an important inflection point that we had solar panels on the roof of the White House. We had people putting on sweaters and turning off lights and understanding that there’s a limited amount of petroleum products in the world and that maybe we need to figure out how to make it so that fewer people have to burn those in order to get where they’re going.

And then, Reagan happened, and it’s sort of like the 2000 election. How different would our climate trajectory be if. Those few hanging Chads hadn’t been there in Florida and we hadn’t had the Supreme Court decide that election. Yeah. But I mean, there’s another inflection point that I think is more positive, and that’s the COVID pandemic, and we talk about this in the book, that first of all, everybody learned over the few months before the vaccines, especially like, hey, if we can be outside.

We can actually see each other again. So in cities all over the world and all over this country, there were people hanging out outside on the street, sometimes on open streets with outdoor dining, all of that. I think that really did a lot to change people’s vision of the street because it was stuff that they had never actually seen implemented before.

Suddenly. It was implemented. Now there’s been a ton of backsliding and New York didn’t maintain its outdoor dining program the way that many wish it would have, and I hope with a new mayoral administration will be going back to the drawing board on that. But I think that. If you look at the Great Highway example in San Francisco, you know, I think that we developed a vernacular in this country of opening streets to people, closing them to cars, having fun and realizing that that was possible and hundreds of thousands of people experienced that in real life.

And that’s not an opportunity that we’ve had before, and I really think it has changed. It’s a mindset.

You know, like you yourself, Sarah, right on the show. And we say if it’s in the book, cars became a form of PPE. During the pandemic. Yeah. You saw people like the investment now in drive-throughs. Right. And like the elimination of even the fast food restaurants, like a place to sit down and eat your meal.

You just pick up your food and go. So it’s like, you know, all of these things, it’s like sliding doors, you know? We can sort of pick one path or the other. I do think, to Sarah’s point, you know, I always say the term open streets, that was a real inside baseball urbanist sort of thing. What do you mean the streets?

Open. I thought it was closed. No one can drive on it. And now you have like entire city departments and public facing programs where regular people are saying like, oh, have you been to the, you know, Berry Street, open Street? Just regular people who are not urban planners or bloggers or podcast hosts.

Talking in, as Sarah said, this, like vernacular that is expanding to more and more people. So, you know, I think like everything in the country, it’s like we, we take a few steps forward, we take a couple steps back. I do think the progress is forward moving, but it’s always and fits and starts.

What was so interesting about the pandemic. Was that all the people who had been sort of toiling away at these ideas and tactical urbanism and variations on that prior to the pandemic, when the pandemic happened, a lot of those same people were part of the teams who were using those same strategies that they had been developing.

They were like, okay, here’s a great time to implement those. And I think that readiness is all right. Like when the off-ramp comes, when the inflection point comes, you have to be ready for it. And so that’s something I think advocates and like-minded planners and electeds need to be thinking about is like, okay, I’ve educated myself.

I know what the tools are. How can I be ready for that opening when it comes, because we don’t know what the next opening is gonna be. Is it gonna be a natural disaster that. Damages your freeway so that you have to knock it down and create a beautiful waterfront place for everybody. Maybe it’s that, uh, you know, there are gonna be these things that happen and so maybe it’s ready to jump on that tariff on

Exactly

Yeah. Yeah.

Controversial. So it means that maybe the next step is obvious because it’s so close to that next kind of quadrant.

It is controversial among a small subset of people as these things often are. You know, one of the things we talk about in the book is at the end of our bike lash chapter and car culture chapter is that at the same time that New York magazine under the Jeanette Cyan era was running cover stories on.

Bike lash and how New Yorkers are not ready to become Copenhagen. The New York Times ran a poll at the end of Bloomberg’s term in 2013, and it showed something like 64% approval for bike lanes and the expansion of city bike, for example. Uh, and I would joke that like if city bike and bike lanes ran for mayor, they would’ve won.

I always think and I think this is a Jeanette line too, that the people are always ahead of the politicians and I, and it is. For sure true. That the people are ahead of the press Now. We’re lucky that we have like Streets blog and you know, the stuff that we’ve been doing with the war on cars.

But I think there’s a growing sense in the media that like we need to talk to more than just the two people who are worried about losing their parking. Let’s talk to like the mom and the cargo bike, the delivery cyclist, whoever it is, and. You’re seeing that fade a little bit. So what I always tell advocates is like, eyes on the prize, keep your head down.

Don’t react to every last. Terrible headline. I’ve done that for sure in my advocacy career. But like I do think if you dig down and see who’s showing up to meetings and who’s voting, who’s sitting at that outdoor dining restaurant, right? Those aren’t advocates. Those are people who just think it’s pleasant to sit there that we are winning in that sense.

So, you know, yeah. We’ll, we’ll see what happens with the great highway if the opponents can turn things around and I know it’s cost some people their jobs, but you know, I do think people are winning.

Yeah. Anyway. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, it’s one of those natural process things. It does

It’s terribly dangerous, what you’re doing. You know, you have to, you have to have some courage.

Well, I know

Of course we know they come out of nowhere. Yeah, my, I mean, I think any advocate for these issues knows a lot of people who are against them. I once was at a cocktail party and someone said to me, oh, you do a podcast called The War on Cars. Do you ever talk about. The positive things that cars do and I was like, no, I think, I think other people have that covered, you know,

Yeah. It seems like they spend billions of dollars to tell you. Yes. So,

Whether or not the people around me think they’re a good idea. If, if I can make my argument, I’m gonna make my argument. So I’m just kind of used to it.

My wife’s family is from the Midwest and other car dependent areas of the country, which is to say the rest of the country outside of, of New York and a few small neighborhoods in other cities. And, um, it isn’t so much that they will complain like, oh, you bike people, or you’re, you know, you’re living a pipe dream.

I don’t get that. It’s more just the sort of like mindset. Of driving. Uh, we don’t tell this story in the book, but I might have said it on the podcast and I apologize to any family members who are listening, but I went, we went to a a long time ago when my daughter, who’s now 15, was just like, just turning one, I believe.

We went on a big ski trip to Park City and we, we like had a big condo that we all stayed in, like a dozen of us or whatever, and. My wife and I being New Yorkers like looked at the map of like where the house was in relation to the bottom of the mountain and we’re like, oh yeah, we can just easily walk there.

It’s not that far. I mean, I doubt it was a quarter of a mile and everybody else just defaulted to getting in their SUVs, you know, we didn’t make a big deal out. We didn’t say like, why are you driving? We weren’t obnoxious or anything like that, but you know, we were like at the bottom of the mountain, like in our gear and get heading over to the lift.

Before they were even just getting out of their cars after having looked for parking. And so it was just this sort of like, oh, you just drive. I, I don’t fault them for that because it’s just like we talk about in the book, the water, they’re swimming in everywhere else. I do have a lot of that of like, wait, you’re walking there?

You know, oh, okay, we’re gonna drive. It just doesn’t cross people’s minds.

It’s like, yeah, I’m gonna be just fine. Probably better than if I sit in that car.

And you know, you’ll want that, that comfort of religion. And there’s a mirror to that or a parallel in the like, oh, your kids will get bigger and you’ll have to get a car. You know, you’ll be like, it’ll just, life will get more complicated and you’ll have to move out of your small apartment and move.

It’s like, Nope, made it this far. My daughter is like. A year and a half away from going to college. My son is about to turn 13. We love living in the city. We love living car free and it’s enabled us a lot of freedom to be able to be car free. A lot of privilege. It’s not cheap to live in most of the neighborhoods where it is possible to live car free by choice, but I think there is that parallel there.

Once people get a car, then the, the sunco fallacy starts to creep into their minds, right? And so, yeah, it’s baked in. You use it for more and more and more, and you bake it in and you’re already paying for it. It’s already just sitting there, so why not just take it? And so, yeah. And Sarah, to your point about people asking you whether you’re gonna be okay, actually my grandmother who lived in the East Bay, her neighbor, who was a very nice lady, and she came over and have wine with my grandmother all the time to hang out.

And I would bike to my grandma’s house from Bart and it was dark at night. Uh, in the summertime, nine o’clock. And so I would start to go out of the house and she would be like are you gonna be okay going back to Bart on your bike? It’s dark outside. Can I drive you? And I was like, mm-hmm. I kind of like this time, like to myself, to bike, to walk e even on the trail.

And so it was always shocking to me when that happened. Yeah. Another thing that, that you all mentioned in the book is the natural process of it all and. We had Ben Goldfarb on the show a number of years ago to talk about his book Crossings and you all talk about Paul Donald’s book as well. It’s just a fascinating to think about how we impact nature with the amount of roads we build and the amount of focus we put on transportation of just cars specifically because we impact genetic timelines and things like that.

It’s so interesting to think about how, you know, negative, we’ve impacted things because of our need to build a road somewhere.

I love the city and I love the country. I love wild places. I’m not good at the in-between. So I’ve spent a lot of time in nature. It’s really important to me to know that it’s out there, and that’s one of the reasons that I am so fixated on trying to stop greenfield sprawl development because we need to save every one of these places that we can.

But yeah, the way that roads impact animals is so. So multifaceted and it’s all negative, and as you say, it cuts off populations from each other and creates genetic islands that animals can’t move to reproduce. And so their gene pool is stagnating essentially the noise of roads, the noise of vehicles on roads.

Can have an enormous impact up to a half a kilometer away from the road. Animals suffering, elevated cortisol levels and all these things that cause a lot of problems. Obviously. There’s also just the smushing of animals, uh, which happens a lot, including insects. And I think anybody who’s older than 30 or 40 years old probably remembers how many insects used to hit your.

Car all the time, especially when you were driving out in the country and there just aren’t as many. Like I have definitely noticed a difference when I’m driving in terms of how many insects are hitting the car. Millions and millions of insects getting killed all the time. And then the runoff from roads is also just incredibly toxic.

And university researchers in Washington state have been able to isolate the compound in car tires that was causing salmon die-offs in Washington streams and rivers. It’s just, there’s so many ways, and so this is one of the things about electric cars that I wanna say, which is Electric cars will solve.

Some of the problems with cars, but they won’t solve all of them. And one of the problems they won’t solve is roads. And roads are just our planet is in such dire condition right now that now every time I see a thing about a road getting built somewhere that it wasn’t before it, it really gives me anxiety because it’s like we just can’t afford to build more of these roads.

Than we already have. Obviously there are places in the developing world that need roads. I’m not saying that those shouldn’t happen. I understand that people in the developing world deserve access to transportation options the way that we do, the way that we have them in the developed world. But each road that is built is kind of a catastrophe.

In terms of the environment and they’re just spreading and spreading. And as Paul Donald talks, he says something like, in the UK it’s just patchworked to nothing. There’s almost none of the UK left. Where there’s a spot that’s more than two kilometers from a road, and that’s just, it’s just tragic, frankly.

And that’s one thing that people just don’t think about. And then the irony, and Ben Goldfarb talks about this, that the people who enjoy nature, there’s no other way to get to nature, especially in North America without driving. So all the people who are the most into going hiking and backpacking and rafting and whatever it is that you like to do outside climbing.

When you’re driving there, you are very much part of this problem and it’s a terrible irony and it in some ways, I think it’s almost one of the most difficult things to grapple with in terms of how do we solve these problems.

Yes, yes. With all the, the trucks driving over. Oh my God.

Like I knew exactly what you were talking about when you said Turtle Jesus in the book, and I’d never even heard, heard that term before. I hadn’t seen the Reddit or anything like that. But yeah,

I mean it’s just, that’s another thing that every time I see it, I almost have to like run screaming from the room.

Yeah. No one will ever drive. Or you’ll never be

I guess that’s true. Yeah. What part of the book was hardest to write?

But we were really trying to say like, no, American culture is car culture and vice versa. And that’s the. Problem. That’s the scope and scale that we’re dealing with in terms of tackling this issue and then sort of like. Speaking to advocates as well. Not just new people, but speaking to the people that I’m in conversation with and giving some good guidance for advocates of like, what are you gonna hear when you start advocating for a bike lane or something like that in your neighborhood.

So it’s really trying to boil down like. These are the things people always say. They’re like common, you know, this is in Amsterdam. I never see anyone biking. And also the bike lane is so busy that it’s very dangerous. Things like that. So really trying to boil that down to its essence I think was for me, the hardest to wrap my head around.

But I just wanna emphasize that was a great problem to have of like taking, you know, over a decade of. Knowledge and experience and other people’s writing and all the rest, and synthesizing it down into a digestible chapter for, like I said, the people who are really new to this issue and the people who are coming at it with a lot of enthusiasm.

But I think that what was hard, especially in the Carin Society chapter, which really talks about the way that. Cars make us lonely. Cars divide us from each other. Cars reinforce a lot of social division, that there was so much there that I knew intuitively, that you know so much that I just feel to be true and know to be true in my bones, and making sure that we brought all the evidence to bear.

And that because, and this is the way that cars were sold initially, cars were sold as a way to, for people to connect. Right. It was there’s some stuff that didn’t make it into the book. That was all about how a book in 1916 was talking about how now farm boys were gonna be able to find better.

Girls because they could drive farther and that the girls would be excited to see them coming in an automobile because they would know that that would mean they wouldn’t have to spend every minute of every day of their lives on the farm, that they would be able to drive to the city and see that too.

So that was a really interesting perspective to have. I tried to get that into the book. That’s an example of something that didn’t make it into the book, but you know, trying to synthesize everything and make a really compelling argument for the fact that cars are really part of why we’re in the terrible state that we’re in.

And people always look at social media and the internet and say, oh, that’s why we’re all so divided. But there’s a lot of really excellent evidence. Showing that cars are a big part of that equation too. They’re not the only part, but they’re a huge part. And that leads me to something else. All of the book was difficult to write in that we set a very high standard for ourselves, that we were gonna make arguments, that were going to be backed up with evidence and not just, you know, sort of ranting.

And, you know, it’s easy to rant. We have a lot of citations in this book. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of citations. That was probably the hardest part of the book. Yeah, that really was, was proofreading the citations. Yeah. But I’m really proud of that because. No one can look at this book and read even one page of it and say, these people don’t know what they’re talking about.

There’s nothing to back it up. There’s plenty to back it up. Yeah. You know, there’s plenty.

We’re almost word for word. Right? And we do draw heavily on his research, and he’s cited throughout the book because it’s just so important in terms of like anybody involved in this work, you have to read fighting traffic. And it’s just, you know what Peter uncovered in that book and. Other stuff is great, but you know, you could do a whole book.

Right? And there are incredible books about the highway revolts of the sixties and seventies, but we had to condense that down to like just a few paragraphs. There’s an entire middle period of just before the Interstate Highway Act, and there’s all the stuff from the rise of SUVs in, in the nineties and the early two thousands.

So. The history, getting it down to just one chapter and saying, we just need to set the stage for the rest of the book and tell you how we got here. That was really challenging, but again, fun. I got to read so many good books and talk to so many cool people. That was really the cool part. Yeah.

But you all have distilled it down into 250 pages, fairly easily read. If I was not in this space where I’m talking about this all the time for the last 500. 50 episodes or whatever it is we’ve done that I could get pulled in and understand what was going on. And so if you are like a newbie, this is a great intro book.

And even if you’re an expert, there’s a lot of stuff that I learned from the book that I didn’t know before. The Superman thing was like, I feel like I’m terminally online, and I feel like I would’ve come across that at some point. Yeah, right.

You know, my background is in television production and the thing you learn pretty quickly, I’ve worked on shows for the history channel, right, is like if you’re doing a documentary about. Abe Lincoln, you’re gonna get the people who know everything about Abe Lincoln and the people who are just like tuning in because they flipped over and happened to land on the channel.

And you have to speak to both audiences at a high level and satisfy them. And it’s, it’s challenging. I think we do a good job of that. Like I will, you know, I don’t wanna break my arm patting myself on the back, but like, I do think that that has been the standard we always set for ourselves like.

Someone’s dropping into the war on cars, and this is gonna be the first episode they hear. Whether it’s our first episode or a hundred 50th, I hope we can get to as many episodes as you have. Oh, you, you’ll be there soon. You’ll be there soon. Um, but that really was the goal with the book, and it was, it was almost like an instruction from the publisher.

Like, we know that, that people are really interested in this topic, are gonna come to it and hopefully buy the book. We wanna reach people who’ve never thought about this before, but might sort of be like, huh. They just installed a bike lane on the other side of town. I wanna see what this whole issue is about.

There’s a whole new subway systems in a lot of cities. The switch to electric vehicles and almost even more impressive is like all the electric motor scooters and stuff that are going around in the cities. Mm-hmm. Not just electric cars. And what that shows me is that this is all possible with the political will to do it.

And you know, with the advocacy that you all put forward and folks who get into positions of power like Jeanette Sonic Con, who can actually make things happen at the city level and Hidalgo, other mayors advocates around the country are doing stuff. The folks that push back. When Kathy Hoel decided that congestion pricing was gonna pause for some weird reason, that this is all possible.

And so, you know, sometimes we get down on ourselves. I feel like because it seems so slow, and like you mentioned in the book, you take two steps forward, you take one step back. But I kind of wanna hear your feelings about the hope that you have for what’s coming in the future. I mean, I go to China to visit my wife’s family and I’m just like, this gives me hope because they’ve done so much.

And I know it’s a different political system and I know there’s a lot of discussions that can happen about that, but. It just feels like anything’s possible and we can do this if we really wanted to.

Lots of advocates had been pushing for it, but it died in a sort of smoke filled room. Typical political corruption that we’re all used to. And it just went away. And most people outside of the inside baseball folks, the streets, blog readers, et cetera, not a whole lot of people cared for that long.

When Kathy Kel paused congestion pricing, there were rallies in the streets like the next day, and it was major. Across every platform you could imagine. Not just streets blog, not just the war on cars. And that gave me a lot of hope. It was younger people, especially who were out there saying like, we almost had something great and transformative.

And look at you, Kathy Hoel, you’re taking it away. And it was because of that advocacy. And from the top down, you know, you had. Brad Lander and others filing lawsuits, but you had this groundswell of people rising up and saying, no, no, no, no. Like we have to do something. And it was climate activists and it was transportation advocates groups that had been kind of siloed, you know, 10, 20 years ago, all coming together.

That gave me so much hope that like, okay, we have. We have gotten to an inflection point where like, these issues are so important, and again, I, I also think just the existence of this book has really lifted my spirits so much that a major publisher wants to get this out there and they think there’s an audience for it that tells you something that like the issues are incredibly relevant.

To more than just us, the three of us sitting here talking and people like us. So we face some incredible geopolitical headwinds right now, and certainly, you know, with the attack on cities from the federal government, I wouldn’t wanna sugarcoat it by any stretch, but I do think we are winning the culture war.

We just have to get the politics back in order.

I’ve seen how reinvestment in cities has paid off and that there’s now a constituency for cities in the United States of America that didn’t exist a generation ago. There’s a, a whole generation that believes that cities are good and they wanna stay in them. And now I think that if we can really focus on the fight to make cities more affordable, then we’re gonna have another.

Exponential leap forward in the next 30 or 40 years. And housing affordability obviously is one of the top issues out there. And that struggle too has become allied with the transportation advocacy struggle and the climate struggle. And all of that is being seen, as Doug said, as more of a holistic whole now.

And the thing that I say on the podcast all the time is that. Walkable neighborhoods should not be a luxury. Good. Walkable neighborhoods should be accessible and available to everybody of all income levels who want them, and they should be available in many, many more cities. I mean, I’ve had people say to me, well, you want this kind of a city.

You live in New York. What’s the problem? You know, you have New York. Sure I have New York, but I don’t really have a lot of other places that I could choose to live in the United States if I wanted to live the kind of life that I’m living here. Whereas if you live in Europe, you know you have Berlin and Madrid and Paris, but you also have Glen Noble and Hamburg, and you have Urich, and you know, you have hundreds and hundreds of cities.

Across the European continent where you can live this way and across Asia where you can live this way, right? So it can be done and we can make it happen. And I believe that we’re going in that direction because people want that. Nobody would even say out loud 35 years ago, cities are great. Nobody in America said, cities are great.

Back in the eighties and nineties. Are you kidding me? Everybody was like, oh, cities are dead. They’re over. That’s done. And you know what? They’re not. That has made me hopeful seeing the renaissance of the city, and I think it’s a lasting one.

Right? Right. The thing that also gives me hope is you’re seeing bike bus movements in like New Jersey suburbs and rural communities and things like that. So even in places where you’re still gonna need to drive quite a lot of the time, people want to at least every now and then be able to like. Bike to school or walk to the grocery store.

So a big argument we’re making in the book is not that this is an absolute, you either have Manhattan or like rural Vermont and Montana, you know, you, you can have a classic American Norman Rockwell like existence that doesn’t center around getting in a car for every last journey. That’s really what we want to tell people.

And by the book for somebody whose mind you would like to open.

But life after cars.com, we’ll send you to all the places you need to go.