Cars are essential to American life. They’re also toxic for the environment, humans, and society, these authors say.
Our whole society is based on car ownership. Is it even possible to change that?
For most Americans, driving is a normal part of everyday life. In much of the United States, a car is required for most trips to visit friends, commute to work, or go to the grocery store.
The side effects of this auto-dependence are catastrophic, argue the coauthors of a new book called Life After Cars.
There is the obvious danger from crashes, which kill roughly 110 Americans every day, but there’s also environmental devastation wrought by mass car ownership, social isolation engendered by the built environment, and soaring costs for American households.
Did you know that the largest source of microplastics strangling oceans come from the tiny particles thrown off by tires? Or that in 1969, more than 40% of U.S. kids walked or biked to school while today only 11% do?
Life After Cars is by Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, hosts of a podcast called The War on Cars, a facetious name they adopted because opponents of non-car traffic infrastructure often accuse advocates of waging such a crusade.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Aaron Naparstek is a cowriter but was not featured in this Q&A.
For most Americans, driving is part of everyday life. Why do you think that needs to be reevaluated?
Gordon: Forced car dependency isn’t really working, even for people who love driving.
Many Americans do love driving, but the type of driving that most Americans do is terrible. It would be great if most of the driving we did was on the open road, the camping trip, or the road trip, but most people are driving to work; they’re driving to get groceries. Those are such stressful trips that it would be great to provide alternatives.
Goodyear: The price of real estate in walkable neighborhoods and transit-rich neighborhoods tells us that there is a real appetite for living in places where car dependence is not a given and where there are options.
We’ve gotten to the point in this country where walkable neighborhoods have become a luxury good. We think walkable neighborhoods are something that should be available to everybody.
You argue that America’s car culture severely limits the freedom of children. When I was a kid, I walked to school or to friends’ houses. Today, that’s rarer because of the threat of cars. And parents’ freedom is limited, too, because they have to drive their kids everywhere.
Gordon: Cars and traffic fatalities are one of the leading causes of deaths for children in this country. You’re not wrong if you think to yourself, I don’t want my child walking to school because of the roads they might have to cross.
Most of my friends and family who live in car-dependent suburbs have to serve as chauffeurs for their children until they’re at least 16. If they can’t afford another car, they have to continue negotiating how they’re going to get places after that.
We live in a walkable neighborhood. My kids walk and take transit to school. There are some mornings where they get up and leave the house and I don’t see them because they’re totally independent. We want that freedom to be available to all parents.
It’s also robbing kids of their ability to be kids, to learn about the world around them, to navigate their neighborhoods, to interact with shopkeepers and their neighbors. If we want to create better American citizens, we have to start creating walkable places for children.
You have a chapter on the effect that cars have on the environment, a lot of which was news to me, like the fact that up to 340 million birds die every year in America from car strikes.
Goodyear: It’s on all fronts. Transportation is a huge contributor to climate change. If SUVs globally were a nation, they would be in the top 10 for carbon emissions.
But there’s all sorts of unintended consequences, like habitat fragmentation. Roads cut up our natural areas to the extent that animals can’t seek mates and their genetic diversity is really constrained by these islands that they’re living on between roads.
We really don’t think about the effect of road noise, which increases stress hormones in animals that leads to them being less effective at reproducing.
These things are happening constantly all around us, and we don’t even think about it. And as we sprawl outward, we’re not thinking about what all of the effects are on wildlife.
I’m old enough to remember when if you were driving cross country, your windshield would be covered with bug splatter. That doesn’t happen anymore because there are not as many bugs. Cars are one of the reasons that’s true.
You compare tech companies of today and the automobile industry in the early 20th century. Negative effects of cars have been known — and resisted — for a long time. But through media and political campaigns, the industry was able to argue that efforts to regulate the technology would undermine progress. Sounds familiar!
Gordon: Cars were the original ‘move fast and break things’ technology. The Silicon Valley ethos is exactly the same.
It was important for us in the book to document that early history [of resistance to cars] because we’ve lost sight of that outrage.
There’s this myth building around cars that we had this love affair, and it was the inevitable march of progress that got us all behind the wheel. But at the outset, that was not the case at all.
There was deep, deep resistance, and we’ve forgotten that because none of us know a world without cars. Getting people to understand that this was not inevitable is the first step toward changing our future trajectory.
You try to end the book on a hopeful note. But a lot of the human-centric cities in Europe and East Asia are possible because those countries have comprehensive mass transit. The U.S. doesn’t and isn’t likely to for the foreseeable future.
Gordon: It does boil down to transit. Almost all of this stems from density and transit and all of those things that we are lacking in the United States. It’s a long battle. We are planting trees, and we will not get to sit under their shade.
Goodyear: We started this podcast seven years ago. I’ve been covering these issues as a journalist for 20 years, so I have had a pretty good look as issues of livable streets and reducing car dependency have gone from being fringe to being much more mainstream.
Just the fact that this book came out from a major publisher is huge. Another metric is that in almost every city on our book tour there has been a local elected official on the panel with us. And these are younger politicians.
What’s really been missing in the United States is leadership on these issues. The advocacy community has been there, and it’s growing. But what hasn’t been there is political leadership to make the changes that we all know are necessary. I see that changing, and that gives me hope.