Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams. Over the summer, o we're bringing you some of the highlights of our 2025-26 season, which wrapped up in mid-May.
Speaker: We're going to be back with our brand new fall season in September. Our first live radio broadcast will be on September 19th on Vancouver Cooperative Radio CFRO 100.5 FM and streaming live at coopradio.org slash red eye.
Speaker: Podcasts of interviews from that show will be posted the following week. In this episode, I'm joined by Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, hosts of the War on Cars podcast, to talk about their new book, Life After Cars.
Speaker: The War on Cars podcast delivers news and commentary on the latest developments in the worldwide fight to undo the damage caused by cars. Hosts Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon approach the topic from all angles, from politics to pop culture.
Speaker: Sarah Goodyear is a journalist and author. Doug Gordon is a TV producer, writer, and Safe Streets advocate. Sarah and Doug are authors, along with Aaron Knapperstek, of Life After Cars, a book that offers an overview of the societal and environmental costs of the automobile and the forces that have created our current crisis.
Speaker: It also offers practical tools that we need to bring in real transformative change. Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon join me now from Brooklyn. Hello to both of you.
Speaker: Hi, how are you? I'm good. Hello, Sarah. Hello to you. i want to ask you first of all about the title of your podcast, The War on Cars. I understand that there's a Canadian connection there.
Speaker: Yes. um There are many fathers of the phrase war on cars, but we drew inspiration from former Toronto mayor Rob Ford, who, when he was elected in 2010, said, ladies and gentlemen, the war on cars ends today, something like that. And he proceeded to cancel streetcar projects, rip out bike lanes. He had a very hostile relationship with with progressive transit and transportation projects. So that's where the inspiration for the podcast title comes from.
Speaker: And you write in the book that the phrase was catnip for the news media. Yes, that's true. It's a very provocative phrase, and it's one that local news media especially loves to put in headlines and gin up outrage with. And we thought that by taking the phrase for ourselves, we could reappropriate it and put it to good use um in trying to reduce the number of cars that we have to deal with. So it's it is a provocation.
Speaker: But I think it's also an invitation to open your mind and think differently about what a war on cars is actually trying to achieve. Now, I was really surprised to learn in your book that there was a big movement against cars right when they first came in. Why was that?
Speaker: Yeah, as we discussed early in the book, um there's an excellent book by a historian, Peter Norton, at the University of Virginia called Fighting Traffic. And, you know, when the car came...
Speaker: on the scene in the early 1900s, but especially in the 1910s and the nineteen twenty s it was seen as an invader in cities. You know streets were places where you could walk. There were no such things as crosswalks or traffic lights because they were unnecessary.
Speaker: And when cars came, we sort of referred to them as the original move fast and break things technology, to borrow a phrase that's popular among Silicon Valley technology today, because they did. They moved faster than anything that was on the streets before, and they killed tons of people, many of them children. At some point, I think in the United States, like 60% of deaths from traffic fatalities in the early and 1920s were kids.
Speaker: There was a lot of outrage about this just monster, really, that was invading cities and killing so many people. There were memorials to the dead in many cities. There were campaigns to get them out.
Speaker: Cars were seen as unnecessary playthings of the rich. Most people couldn't afford them, didn't own them. And yeah, there was great backlash to all of that. So it's it's a history that's sort of forgotten, unless you have read Peter Norton's book. And it's something we wanted to try to bring as an introductory piece to our book to set the stage for this idea that cars are sort of a historical blip in that sense. And we've also become inert to the death and destruction that they cause because as we talk about in the book, nobody alive today remembers that history. Nobody knows a world where there aren't cars, where cars aren't built into every facet of our lives.
Speaker: And well, how did we get from there to here now, where huge numbers of people, as you say, were newer to the number of people killed, injured by cars every year? It's been totally normalized. So how did we get here?
Speaker: I think it's been century-long campaign by the auto industry and the fossil fuel industry and various other corporate interests that you know had a real stake, a financial stake in what has become called motordom.
Speaker: Actually, that's Peter Norton's word for it. Motordom was... all that the car dealers and the car manufacturers and the fossil fuel companies, all of these people had a lot of money to make in creating an entirely new transportation system that made us all dependent on cars. And those same forces of the fossil fuel industry in particular are still very actively invested in keeping us in that system and not allowing us to think about the possibility that any other system might might be able to come into existence.
Speaker: And you write the the the phrase, America's love affair with cars. It's not some folk saying it was actually created in an ad. Yeah, um it was originally appeared in 1957 ad for Chevrolet, but it became popularized in a 1961, essentially an infomercial that aired on NBC and starred comedian Groucho Marx. And the infomercial itself was produced by DuPont, which at the time owned about a 23, 24% stake
Speaker: in general motors And in the early 1960s, you had the beginnings of what in the United States became known as the highway revolts, where people were pushing back against the continued expansion of the interstate highway system and urban freeways.
Speaker: And This special, it doesn't advertise a particular car. It's just sort of an ad for driving itself. And in it, Groucho just says this phrase over and over again that America had a love affair with cars and that when the Model T rolled around, it was love at first sight. Sort of questioning this idea that anybody could be against cars something like driving and freedom and all of the things that are often associated with car ownership and driving in general. So no, yeah, it's it's sort of like um diamonds are a girl's best friend or one of those marketing slogans from Madison Avenue. It's it's not some folksy saying.
Speaker: I want to talk about bike lash. And this is the attack on cyclists that primarily focuses on how cyclists behave in traffic. In the book, you refer to this as a moral panic. What do you mean by that?
Speaker: Well, a moral panic is often defined as the attempt to stir outrage and upset over things that aren't really that much of a problem. I mean, you can look at what's happening today with trans people.
Speaker: There's a moral panic being stoked all over the world about the very existence of trans people. But these are things that are exploited for political uses. And a lot of politicians like to participate in this kind of activity because it allows them to pander to certain parts of their voter base.
Speaker: And we see this with bikes. you know Bikes are just a form of transportation and recreation. They're not inherently evil. But often when bikes are given a place on the street, they're there's this reaction that, you know, oh my God, what's happening? The bikes are coming, you know, it's so terrifying.
Speaker: And, you know, this is just really part of the way that people, politicians especially, try to woo voters or, say you know, what they think their base might be and to show, oh look, i'm I'm just as upset about this as you are. and And bikes have been the focus of that throughout the last hundred years. Yeah.
Speaker: and And also, I guess, in terms of how bikes behave, cyclists behave, I've had people say to me, cyclists are so unpredictable. And it's like, I cycle all the time and cars are pretty damn unpredictable too.
Speaker: Yeah. And I think it just gets back to the idea that we have become inert to the behavior of motorists and we accept it because it's just part of the status quo. It's part of, it seems like nature. And and cyclists do stand out, um you know, despite...
Speaker: bikes being around for a long time. It's really only been in the last 15 to 20 years that we've seen a major resurgence of cycling. And so if you've been driving for, let's say, 30, 40 years, and suddenly there are all these cyclists on the road, they do stand out. And it's very easy to spot the type of lawbreaking that cyclists do, to be honest, right? when If someone runs a red light, they stand out. But we don't tend to see the type of everyday lawbreaking that drivers do, such as speeding, because it's a little harder for our eyes to measure. Drivers are also insulated behind glass and steel.
Speaker: They don't seem like people in the same sense that cyclists do. So some of it is just a sort of like novelty bias, I guess you could say, that cyclists just really stand out in a way that drivers don't.
Speaker: You have a section of the book which is about the the things that cars have ruined. and Now, if I had to come up with a list of things that cars ruin, i I might come up with street life or neighborhoods, the air we breathe, but I wouldn't have thought of childhood. And in the latest episode of your podcast, you talk with your guest, Tim Gill, about children and cities.
Speaker: How do cars ruin in childhood? Well, essentially, cars make it too dangerous for children to engage in what Tim calls doorstep play, which is a phrase that I absolutely love. But it's the idea that you could open your door and your child could go outside and play out there.
Speaker: And that, of course, has been the story of humanity for the vast part of our history. Cars have made it so that's impossible. Right.
Speaker: And then we are constantly freaking out. Why aren't children playing outside? Why are they on their phones? Why are they on their computers? Well, it's not safe for them to go outside, not because they're going to be kidnapped by a stranger, but because there is a very real threat that everybody knows about, which is those massive metal machines whizzing past on the street.
Speaker: So we constrain childhood ah in favor of cars. We would rather give cars freedom than children freedom. And not incidentally, parents suffer as well.
Speaker: parents aren't allowed to have their own freedom and they're not allowed to let their children develop ah normally ah in terms of it getting farther and farther from mom or dad, you know, just in terms of space, you can't let them because it's too dangerous outside. So this very fundamental developmental stages of childhood, it's not a luxury for children to be able to play. That's how children learn how to be human.
Speaker: And we've taken that away from them with cars. You have a lovely story in the book about Sean Kenny, who's ah an artist who moved from US to Amsterdam in 2020. And there's a real sort of cultural moment when he's talking to the landlord of his new apartment. Yeah.
Speaker: Yes. ah Sean is a great guy. He's a friend. He moved to Amsterdam with his wife and children, and the landlord is giving them keys to the apartment. And he has a set of keys for the the two parents and the oldest kid and all and says, you know, I'm so sorry, I do not have a set of keys for your youngest child, who I believe was was six when they moved.
Speaker: But you can go get a pair made, you know, at the hardware store down the street. And Sean and his wife were almost, they were incredulous. They're like, what do you mean? that Why would our six year old need set of keys? they're He's not gonna be walking by himself.
Speaker: And um they had just not understood that in the Netherlands and in the neighborhood where they were were in Amsterdam, it was just sort of taken for granted that young children would walk to and from school or cycle to and from school. And then of course, walk to the playground down the street and meet up with friends independently. And so, you know, there's a bit of helicopter parenting that I think like North American parents all suffer from for reasons real and imagined. And that was a very hard moment for Sean and his wife to sort of process that, oh wait, our our kid might have like a certain extra amount of freedom here in the Netherlands that they didn't have back home.
Speaker: Now, one of the common responses you've heard to a challenge to the dominance of the car in North America is that this isn't Copenhagen. But it turns out that Copenhagen hasn't always been this poster child for bike-friendly transportation. When did it start to change?
Speaker: Yeah, you always hear when you try to change a city, this isn't Amsterdam, this isn't Copenhagen, this isn't Europe. um In the early 1960s in Copenhagen, if you've ever been there, there's a very famous pedestrianized street, the Stroyet. It's a big shopping street.
Speaker: It's a little over a kilometer long. It's very popular. But back in the 60s, it was just clogged with cars. And Copenhagen, like a lot of cities following World War two experimented with car-based development and it just wasn't working out. There were cars everywhere, it was dangerous, it was noisy, no one could get anywhere. So some folks in the city and other activists and planners said, you know, let's pedestrianize, destroy it. It would be better for everybody. And the shopkeepers revolted and said, you've got to be kidding. This isn't Italy. We are Danes. We are not Italians. We we we need our cars.
Speaker: you know Copenhagen has dark and long, dreary winters. Nobody ever imagined that Copenhagers would sit outside or walk for their shopping. So basically, they pedestrianized the street just for two years. And they said, this is an experiment. If it doesn't work out, we can always bring the cars back.
Speaker: And almost immediately, it was a huge success. The number of people visiting the stores on foot went up by a lot. Retail activity increased. The sort of lingering activities like browsing or just sitting and getting a bite to eat increased. And, you know, so today we hold up Copenhagen as the shining example of urbanism.
Speaker: But even they were skeptical back then that this could work. And of course, if you told younger Danish people that the street used to have cars, they would look at you like you had two heads.
Speaker: Now, I was out on my bike one day and I was thinking about your book. And then I suddenly thought, you know, most of the problems that you're talking about in your book aren't going to go away if everyone switches to electric cars, even though so much is made of how this is going to save us.
Speaker: I think the electric vehicle transition is incredibly important, and that is one of the things that has to happen because it will remove tailpipe emissions from the equation, which is a huge win because air pollution is an incredibly destructive force in our cities.
Speaker: So that's great. And also these vehicles are quieter. They're not silent. um I think that there was some idea that maybe they would magically be silent. They're not because the tires are rolling on this on the pavement.
Speaker: And also there's that sort of high whine of the electric motor, but the tires themselves are part of a huge problem. Tires decay.
Speaker: They throw off a lot of dust. The dust is toxic. That toxic dust has been linked definitively to salmon die-offs in the Pacific Northwest, among many other environmental hazards. Also,
Speaker: As we say in the book, no one ever got hit by electric at an electric car and said, oh, well, thank goodness it was a an electric car that hit me. you know they they have They are sometimes heavier than than internal combustion engine cars, and they take up the same amount of space.
Speaker: And they require the same land use, which is incredibly destructive in a lot of ways and extremely expensive. They require all the same infrastructure.
Speaker: So, yeah, no, they they solve some problems. what What I would like to see is, you know, looking at a lot of smaller electric vehicles, everything from electric bikes, which are an incredible innovation that I really believe is game changing,
Speaker: electric scooters, and small electric delivery vehicles. You see these now in new York City. Amazon is using them. There are a lot of options for small electric vehicles to become part of a healthy urban transportation mix, but just changing your enormous gas-guzzling SUV to an enormous battery-powered SUV, that is not going to solve the problem.
Speaker: You have plenty of examples in the book about how people and places are moving towards life after cars. Can you talk about one that particularly inspires you? Why don't you start, Sarah?
Speaker: So i went for a bike ride in Emeryville, California with the mayor at the time, John Botters, who was referred to at the time as America's bike mayor for the work that he had done in Emeryville, which is a tiny city In the San Francisco Bay Area, it is kind of sandwiched in between a freeway and a very heavily used rail line.
Speaker: It's been an environmental dumping ground for generations, a very neglected place. And because real estate in the San Francisco Bay Area became so valuable, Emeryville was being developed with big box stores.
Speaker: And you know what what was going to happen to Emeryville? John Botters and his allies on the city council said, we want to make this small city a model for active transportation and transit oriented development and you know streets that people, there there's a street that I bicycle down with him. where people are coming out of their apartment building onto ah completely car-free little stretch with a bike lane going through.
Speaker: And this place that has been for so long just completely neglected and indeed destroyed by car infrastructure has been...
Speaker: It was reclaimed by a man, John Botters, and his allies who had the political courage to say, we are going to try something different here. And there was a lot of pushback. How could this work in Emeryville? Emeryville is... You know, just it's a nowheresville. How could how could this be good?
Speaker: But they stuck with it. And now there's all these great bike lanes and parks and all sorts of other things in Emeryville, simply because a few people had the courage to say we could live better. We could we could have a better life in our city. Doug?
Speaker: I was most inspired by a visit to Ghent in Belgium, which is, i i really think it's one of the best examples of life after cars in the world right now. So in 2017, Philipp Wateau, who's the deputy mobility minister in that city, ah he and his team implemented a traffic circulation plan. Ghent is a very beautiful, small little city.
Speaker: And they had a pedestrianised centre, but over the course of the 90s and early 2000s, cars really started become much bigger problem as the city grew more economically prosperous. Traffic was sort of going nowhere, creating all these problems for people who were biking, for people walking, people taking transit. And so he and his team implemented this traffic circulation plan. They divided the city into four quadrants, basically, and they made it so that if you were in one of the quadrants, you couldn't drive directly to the other. A lot of people were using the city as a cut through, just driving right through the center or through neighborhoods who didn't have any local reason for being there. They weren't doing business in the neighborhood. They didn't live there. They weren't, you know, a plumber responding to a call. And, know,
Speaker: He, Philip Oteo and his team said, that should be impossible. you People should not be able to use our neighborhoods, our city as a shortcut. So now ah if you're in Ghent and you want to drive from one quadrant to the other, you have to go out to the ring road, to the r four and go around and come back in. And what that does is it sort of forces drivers to make a different decision if they're able to. could Because it might be, and it usually is, faster to walk or cycle from one neighborhood to the next. So if you're just going grocery shopping or just going to visit a friend,
Speaker: You might say to yourself, well, there's no way I'm going to take a half hour to drive around the whole city. I'll just walk 10 minutes. And they implemented this plan in 2017. They reversed some directions of streets. They instituted permitting. They did all these kinds of things. They put in new bike parking.
Speaker: They didn't put in a lot of bike infrastructure per se. They put in some bike streets where they left the streets basically the same, but put down red pavement and said you cannot pass a cyclist if you're a driver, no matter how fast the cyclist is going or how slow the cyclist is going. And the effects of this plan have been incredible. Basically, overnight, the number of cars in the city dropped by about 20%. Air pollution, nitrous oxide dropped by about the same amount.
Speaker: Traffic crashes are down by about 40%. That happened in under a year. They were hoping to get to 35% of all trips by bike by 2030. They reached that within a year of the plan going into effect. And if you walk or cycle around Ghent now, it is just so lovely. It's so, it's quiet and yet busy with people. i was standing at the intersection of two major bike paths and I could hear children playing in a schoolyard or playground that I couldn't quite see. You could hear like the whirring of bike chains. It's just a beautiful thing. And it was all done very cheaply.
Speaker: and Like I said, not a whole lot of bike infrastructure, really just putting up new signs, some traffic cameras. issuing permits to residents. and And one of the biggest beneficiaries of this plan, in addition to the people who just love being in the city, is drivers. Because if you do need to drive now, it might take you a little more distance to get where you're going, but the amount of time it takes to get where you're going is unchanged or a little faster. Because the people who are making that trip to just visit a friend or
Speaker: get groceries are probably doing that now on foot or by bike or by transit. And they're not jamming up the road for every last trip. It's it's wonderful. Worth a visit if you have never been.
Speaker: Well, it's so great to talk to you both. And I'm so thrilled you guys have included Vancouver on your book tour. And I'm going to let people know how they can come and see you here. But thanks so much.
Speaker: Thank you for having us. Thank you. We're so excited to see Vancouver and to meet the people there who are doing this work. and we're just thrilled to be on the show. Yeah, and we we really want to thank um Vision Zero Vancouver. They're hosting us there. So just a big shout out to them.
Speaker: Great. Thanks so much. Thank you. I've been speaking with Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, hosts of the podcast The War on Cars, and authors along with Aaron Naperstek of the book Life After Cars.
Speaker: It's published October 21st by Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Random House, and Sarah and Doug are going be here in Vancouver next month, along with City Council Lucy Maloney, as an event organized and hosted by Vision Zero Vancouver. It's all going to happen at the Javid Moafagian Cinema at SFU Downtown, and it's on Saturday, November 8th at 6.30 p.m. And you can find a link to get tickets at visionzerovancouver.ca.
Speaker: You've been listening to the Red Eye Podcast, produced by an independent media collective based in Vancouver. If you enjoyed this episode, it would be great if you left a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps other people to find us.
Speaker: Also, please consider sharing this episode with a friend or telling someone about our podcast. To keep up with the show, you can subscribe to Red Eye wherever you listen to your podcasts. And you can follow us on Blue Sky at Red Eye Radio.
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. Thanks for listening.
