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We talk with a guest who knows firsthand just how destructive cars can be. Dr. Rex Tai is a physician who works in long-term care. Many of his patients are the victims of traffic violence. His experience providing care for these people has been part of his growing awareness of how our country's car-dependence creates and exacerbates inequality and division in our society and even in our global politics. We talk about all that, the effects of catastrophic injury for individuals and families, and ...
This is a preview of a Patreon-exclusive bonus episode . For complete access to this and all of our bonus content, plus ad-free versions of regular episodes, merch discounts, presale tickets to live shows, and more, become a Patreon supporter of The War on Cars . For a long time, safe streets and transit advocacy organizations have had to play a careful game. While non-profit organizations can advocate for policies and infrastructure changes that protect pedestrians and cyclists and make transit...
The Pushcart War —written by Jean Merrill and illustrated by Ronni Solbert and first published in 1964—is a charming and provocative children's novel that tells the story of a band of pushcart vendors who fight against the organized forces of big trucks on the congested, contested streets of New York City. For Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer-prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, and author, reading the book as a child was a formative experience. "It made opposition, even nonviolent civil disobedien...
Do people really like our all-enveloping autocentric system quite as much as everyone keeps saying they do? What kind of communities would they live in if given the choice? The answers, as a new study shows, are not exactly what so many of us have been told. Nearly one in five American car owners is "strongly interested" in living car-free, and another 40 percent are open to the idea. We talked about the implications of that study with its authors, Nicole Corcoran, Deborah Salon, and Hue-Tam Jam...
***This is a preview of a Patreon-exclusive bonus episode . For complete access to this and all of our bonus content, plus ad-free versions of regular episodes, merch discounts, presale tickets to live shows, and more, become a Patreon supporter of The War on Cars .*** In our latest Patreon bonus episode, we get into what we saw in the wildly different cities we hit on our last round of book tour (Miami! Pittsburgh! Toronto! Phoenix!). Then, we discuss how all the snow we have gotten this year h...
Brent Toderian has decades of experience in city planning, urban design, and transportation. He was chief planner for the city of Vancouver from 2006 to 2012, a time when the city hosted and was transformed by the Winter Olympics. As a consultant, Brent has advised and collaborated with folks from Auckland to Buenos Aires to Copenhagen to Reykjavik, and he often sparks conversation on social media, where he is one of the most prominent voices advocating for more human and humane urban design. We...
Super Bowl LX had everything, from ads for weight loss drugs and male grooming products to spots touting tax prep services and calming fears about our AI overlords. It also had one outstanding halftime performance from Bad Bunny. But what the game didn't have was a whole lot of car ads. (Or a whole lot of touchdowns, but that's a different story.) Why, after dominating the broadcast for decades, has the automobile industry gone cool on one of broadcasting's biggest nights? And what did the few c...
***This is a preview of a Patreon-exclusive bonus episode . For complete access to this and all of our bonus content, plus ad-free versions of regular episodes, merch discounts, presale tickets to live shows, and more, become a Patreon supporter of The War on Cars .*** When it comes to transforming cities and reclaiming space from the automobile, some of the best and boldest leaders are women. There's Mayor Anne Hidalgo in Paris and former Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante, just to name two. Why is ...
We talked with Dr. Bruce Appleyard, who has spent a lifetime thinking about what we mean when we talk about liveable streets—and why it is so important that we build our cities with human beings in mind, first and foremost. Bruce's research makes an appearance in Life After Cars, and his father, Donald Appleyard, was a legend in this field for his work that led to the indispensable book Livable Streets, published in 1981. In 2020 Bruce published Livable Streets 2.0, which brings his father's boo...
Signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, otherwise known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, ushered in an unprecedented era of roadbuilding in the United States, becoming the largest public works project in the country's history. Designed to spread freedom and prosperity — and, as the name implies, provide for the national defense — these highways tore through urban neighborhoods, destroying once-thriving communities and displacing...
***This is a preview of a Patreon-exclusive bonus episode . For complete access to this and all of our bonus content, plus ad-free versions of regular episodes, merch discounts, presale tickets to live shows, and more, become a Patreon supporter of The War on Cars .*** We were out in Portland, Oregon, for our book tour in November, and spent a lot of great time hanging out with Jonathan Maus, the legendary founder of Bike Portland . We sat down with Jonathan in his backyard shed/studio and talke...
We are back home in Brooklyn but we can't stop talking about everything we saw out on the road on our Life After Cars book tour. Listen for our takes on the second leg of our trip, which took us from Providence to Austin to Houston to Denver to Boulder…and then ended with a surprise diversion to an unexpected destination. We've seen so much along the way—like just how destructive freeway expansions can be. But also how cities can reclaim automobile infrastructure for humans! Plus, a shout-out to...
The last few weeks have been a whirlwind as we hit the road (not in a car) to promote our new book, Life After Cars , in some of the greatest cities of North America including San Francisco, Washington, DC, Seattle, Vancouver, BC, Nanaimo, BC, Portland, OR, San Diego, and Los Angeles (as well as our home base of NYC, of course). Getting to visit all these cities in person, often walking and riding the streets accompanied by local advocates and elected officials, was a real joy and a privilege. W...
This episode is part of a special series called "Changing American Car Culture" funded with the generous support of The Helen and William Mazer Foundation. As historian Peter Norton documents in his book, Fighting Traffic , the death and destruction caused by the introduction of automobiles into U.S. cities in the early part of the 20th century caused a lot of people to challenge the notion that such machines would ever become popular. In response, autmobile companies, car dealers, driving enthu...
This is a preview of a Patreon-exclusive bonus episode . For complete access to this and all of our bonus content, plus ad-free versions of regular episodes, merch discounts, presale tickets to live shows, and more, become a Patreon supporter of The War on Cars . Back in September, Sarah moderated a conversation with Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo as part of Climate Week events in New York City. The event was presented by the Clean Cities Campaign and Respire , a Paris-based nonprofit that focuses on ...
Today we celebrate the publication of our new book, Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves From the Tyranny of the Automobile . In this episode, we serve up a sample of the audiobook and talk about some of the things we learned and that surprised us during the process of bringing Life After Cars to publication. Also, who should play us in the movie version? Listen to hear our thoughts and let us know your opinion. We are so grateful to all of our listeners and supporters for making this day possible...
In this episode, we talk about the Trump Administration's full-on financial assault on all the modes of transportation we hold dear here at The War on Cars. Biking, walking, public transit—basically, anything deemed "hostile to cars" or that has something to do with sustainability and equity is under attack. Ted Mann, a reporter at Bloomberg News who has been covering the story , joins us to explain what is going on with federal transportation funding for active transportation projects and more....
Tim Gill is a London-based independent scholar, writer and consultant on childhood, and a global advocate for children's play and mobility. He is the author of Urban Playground : How Child-Friendly Urban Planning and Design Can Save Cities and No Fear : Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society . We met Tim when he appeared on a panel with Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo that Sarah moderated during Climate Week in New York. When we heard what he has to say about cities and children, we knew that we had to ha...
This is a preview of a Patreon-exclusive bonus episode . For complete access to this and all of our bonus content, plus ad-free versions of regular episodes, merch discounts, presale tickets to live shows, and more, become a Patreon supporter of The War on Cars . If you spend any time at all on social media, you've seen countless videos of all kinds of different people talking about all kinds of different things with one setting in common: the car. We got together in the studio with journalist a...
Brad Lander has been a fixture in New York's progressive political scene for nearly two decades now, and has earned a reputation as a strong advocate for bike lanes, bike share, driver accountability, and congestion pricing. This year, though, he's become known in a new way. As a candidate in a crowded Democratic mayoral primary, Brad cross-endorsed Zohran Mamdani, who eventually won the race with a margin that shocked the Democratic establishment. And in June, mere days before the primary ended...
This is a preview of a Patreon-exclusive bonus episode . For complete access to this and all of our bonus content, plus ad-free versions of regular episodes, merch discounts, presale tickets to live shows, and more, become a Patreon supporter of The War on Cars . In this bonus episode, Doug and I discuss a couple of recent studies that look at just how destructive cars are to the social fabric of our communities, how they decrease life satisfaction, and how walkable neighborhoods with public gat...
Should the bus be free? That's the question everyone following the New York City mayoral race is asking, with Democratic primary winner Zohran Mamdani promising to focus on fast, free buses if he's elected to City Hall. Eliminating bus fares is a big idea, but is it a good one? Like a lot of things in politics, there's no simple answer. That's why we asked Yonah Freemark — a researcher in cities, land use, and transportation at the Urban Institute — to walk us through the pros and cons of making...
This is a preview of a Patreon-exclusive bonus episode . For complete access to this and all of our bonus content, plus ad-free versions of regular episodes, merch discounts, presale tickets to live shows, and more, become a Patreon supporter of The War on Cars . While we were researching and writing "Life After Cars" last year, we read and pulled information from dozens upon dozens of books. There were also a handful of books that caught our attention but that, try as we might, didn't quite war...
At this year's Velo-city conference in Gdansk, the theme was "Energizing Solidarity," in honor of the city's history as the cradle of the Solidarity labor movement that helped bring down Communism in Poland. Velo-city is an incredibly good-mood event put on each year by the European Cyclists' Federation, where people come from all over the world to share best practices in urban cycling, and to connect with their fellow advocates, elected officials, and other members of the wider cycling communit...
This is a preview of a Patreon-exclusive bonus episode . For complete access to this and all of our bonus content, plus ad-free versions of regular episodes, merch discounts, pre-sale tickets to live shows and more, become a Patreon supporter of The War on Cars . Are cyclists too mean online? To read some of the headlines about a recent study, you'd think the answer was yes. "Forceful bike campaigners can undermine UK cycle lane planning, report finds," blared the headline in The Guardian . The ...
Why have some cities become places where it's easy to hop on a bike for daily transportation needs while others have languished or even been left behind? Is there some sort of magical combination of forces that separate the best cycling cities from basically everywhere else? Those are the questions asked by Cycling Cities: The Global Experience , a research project headed by Dr. Ruth Oldenziel, a Professor in The History of Technology at Eindhoven University of Technology. Nthoki Dorcas Nyamai, ...
Journalist Alyssa Walker, a transportation expert, discusses her recent appearance on Netflix's Everybody's Live with John Mulaney. The conversation, intended to be about Uber, devolved into celebrity guests like Natasha Lyonne railing against bike lanes. This episode explores why intelligent people often say misinformed things about urban transportation and how advocates can navigate and reclaim the narrative in mainstream media.
This is a preview of a Patreon-exclusive bonus episode . For complete access to this and all of our bonus content, plus ad-free versions of regular episodes, merch discounts, pre-sale tickets to live shows and more, become a Patreon supporter of The War on Cars . And don't miss our new book, "Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile," now available for pre-sale wherever you purchase books. Enjoy this preview of our live show, recorded before a sold-out crowd at The C...
Charles T. Brown is a longtime friend of the podcast who was last with us in 2023 . We welcomed him back to talk about his important new book, Arrested Mobility: Overcoming the Threat to Black Movement , out now from Island Press. Charles is the founder and principal of Equitable Cities , a minority- and veteran-owned urban planning, public policy and research firm focused at the intersection of transportation, health and equity. He is also an adjunct professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School ...
NOTE: This episode was originally released as a Patreon-exclusive bonus . For more episodes like this, please join The War on Cars on Patreon . We're an independent podcast and rely on listener support. Thanks! Marco te Brömmelstroet, also known as "The Fietsprofessor," returns to The War on Cars to discuss a new study he co-authored with Dr. Ian Walker , another former guest of the podcast. The study takes a look at a phenomenon where people accept the harms and risks associated with cars in wa...
