LIFE AFTER CARS

The crisis of cars.

The great American love affair with cars and driving, a notion deeply held in contemporary culture and history, has been intertwined with death and devastation from its earliest days. Automobiles killed 2,200 Americans in the nine years before Ford’s popular Model T hit the streets in 1908. From there, things only grew worse, and the destructive path continues to this day. “Cars are, without exaggeration, one of the most significant and negative environmental, political, social, and cultural forces in the history of humanity,” write Goodyear and Gordon, hosts of the popular podcast The War on Cars. In the common narrative of the country’s societal history, the authors note, the car and its mass production built the middle class. But history is written by the victors, and perhaps the cars are the winners here, not Americans. Goodyear and Gordon seek the true story of how car culture has shaped us in ways that have been dangerous and wasteful—from providing unreliable public transportation to harming the climate and our natural environment. “Instead of unbounded freedom and rugged self-reliance,” they write, “the never-ending proliferation of automobiles has delivered a host of costs and burdens. Among them are the demolition of our neighborhoods, towns, and cities to make way for expensive car infrastructure like freeways.” The authors’ call for “real transformative change” is reasonable enough. Cities and towns, they suggest, need to “decenter” cars. Parking reforms should be implemented, and people should push for more dedicated bike lanes and bus lanes. “We shape our streets,” they write. “Then they shape us. We can choose a human shape.”

Sensible solutions for taking back our streets from automobiles.