BONUS: "Life After Cars” (w/ The War on Cars)

SG: People want choices. People want freedom.

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SG: And more and more people are realizing that cars promise freedom, but they don't deliver it.

AB: From KPBS in San Diego, this is Freeway Exit. I'm Andrew Bowen. I'm guessing most listeners to this podcast will recognize the voices of Doug Gordon and Sarah Goodyear. They're the co-hosts of The War On Cars podcast. And they came to San Diego recently to promote their new book, Life After Cars. It invites the reader to imagine how their lives might be different in a world where people no longer depend on the automobile. It was a great read, and I knew I had to talk to them about it while they were in town. 

AB: Hi!

SG: Hi!

AB: So, on a very rainy San Diego morning…

AB: That's a Cleverhood!

DG: Yeah, I told you I'd be on brand. It's a wearable umbrella, it's perfect for today.

AB: I met up with Sarah and Doug just outside San Diego's Crown Jewel: Balboa Park. 

AB: We'll walk over the 163 freeway, which I don't know if you remember the first episode of Freeway Exit, but it's the first freeway in San Diego.

AB: If this is the first episode you're listening to, I highly recommend going back to episode 1 and listening to the podcast in order. You'll learn a lot about the 163 freeway, which runs along the bottom of Cabrillo Canyon, right down the center of Balboa Park. It's a beautiful view from atop Cabrillo Bridge… but as Sarah and Doug note, it's not exactly peaceful.

11:59

DG: Can we talk about the noise?

SG: I was going to say, especially because we're recording this for audio, this road is at the bottom of a ravine, so it's echoing off of the sides of the ravine. And the impact of this road is so much greater in area than the actual pavement. I mean, it's like, here we are, we're a couple of hundred yards above it, and it's just deafening.

DG: Yeah. And the thing is, you have to ask yourself, what is a park for? It's for recreation, of course. It's for just gazing at the trees, but it's also for tranquility and peace amidst a busy city. And you can't even escape the sound of the city here. I like to say cities aren't loud, cars are loud. I don't know. I would want to come to this park and just be able to sit and read a book or go for a meditative run. And you're never not aware of cars even when you can't see them.

AB: Sarah, Doug and I make our way to Balboa Park's central square, the Plaza de Panama. It used to be a parking lot but was pedestrianized in 2013. We sit at a table under a big umbrella to get the interview started. But hardly a minute goes by until Doug and Sarah are recognized by a fan.

29:03

A: Oh my gosh it's Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon! I'm Aidan.

AB: Aidan is finishing up a cross-country bike ride from his home in New Jersey to San Diego. He has a War On Cars sticker on his water bottle.

29:20

DG: Holy moly!

AB: Do you guys want a picture? Let me take a picture.

AB: Two things go through my mind. First, Doug and Sarah are actual celebrities in the world of urbanism. Second, this joyful chance encounter was made possible by the absence of cars. Doug says it before I can.

32:10

DG: Had we all been in cars that would not have happened.

SG: Oh my God, that was absolutely insane.

AB: More with Doug and Sarah… after a short break.

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AB: This is Freeway Exit, I'm Andrew Bowen, and we're back with my interview with Doug Gordon and Sarah Goodyear, authors of the new book Life After Cars. 

AB: I'm going to read a quote from the chapter titled, Designing a Better World: "Urban highways are the most aggressive, obnoxious, destructive infrastructure that car culture has to offer. A freeway going through a densely populated neighborhood is as brutal as a punch in the face and as pervasively poisonous as an oil slick. In the short term, its construction erases communities and displaces people. In the long term, it radiates toxic pollutants, and unhealthy noise levels t into the homes, schools, businesses, and surface streets that remain in place along its ruthless trajectory. Once a freeway exists, it assumes an air of inevitability, like a natural feature of the landscape, determining the fate of hundreds of square miles around it." Really, really to the point, not pulling any punches when it comes to talking about freeways. So now that we've walked over that and you were reflecting sitting on the 163 in this beautiful space, what are your thoughts on freeways and their impacts on cities? I'll keep it really broad and open ended like that.

29:10

SG: Well, yeah, I mean we've been following I-5 up and down the West Coast, and we started this leg of the trip in Seattle. And we talk about Seattle in the book and the impact of I-5 on Seattle. And I think it's actually one of the lesser appreciated abominations in car culture in the United States, because Seattle is such a gem of a city. It has one of the most beautiful geographic locations of any city in North America, and right smack through the center of it, dividing some of its most vibrant and interesting neighborhoods is I-5. And there are efforts to put a lid on it and do other things. But it's just sad because I think people — we had one interview where somebody was saying to me, What about all the ways that the interstate highway system has created wealth in this country? But if you do the math, how much has the interstate highway system decimated wealth in this country? How much public health cost has it incurred? And we just don't do the math. It seems like whenever it comes to car infrastructure, there's an infinite amount of money for that. But if there's any desire to repair or to create other kinds of infrastructure for transit or pedestrians or bicycling, suddenly that just seems wildly expensive. And that is really depressing to me.

DG: I think also there's a lot that we work on in this movement that what I like to say is very intuitive because nobody wants to live next to a freeway. The people who do live next to a freeway are often the most marginalized members of society, people who can't afford to move anywhere else, the people whose homes or neighborhoods were destroyed for the freeway itself and are just the grandchildren of the people who lived there before, unhoused people living under the highway. But we all intuitively know that living far away from cars and traffic is desirable. Real estate, prices reflect that often. And so the other thing we like to say is someone at some point in history made a choice to build that road through the middle of your city. Governments made choices to build that freeway through your city. These things were built, and they can't be unbuilt overnight, but they can be unbuilt, and we can make long term decisions that move us towards a place where, okay, we shrink one half of the highway, we lid it, we remove it entirely, and see what happens. So we'll get there.

AB: You were talking about I-5 devastating Seattle. It actually devastated a lot of neighborhoods here, too, of course. San Ysidro is the historic neighborhood right next to the Mexican border. It went through Little Italy, which at the time was an immigrant working class neighborhood. And it actually goes through Balboa Park, too. So the 163 goes north-south, but there's this S-curve of the 5 that cut off the south end of the park and actually separates it now from downtown, which is the closest densely populated neighborhood. But to get here from downtown requires a really unpleasant walk over the freeway. And a bit of interesting history that I learned while researching for the podcast was that the 163 was approved by a vote of the people, and it was like an absolute landslide in favor. And it was the first freeway ever built. And not that long after, less than 10 years later, the federal government had the interstate highway system coming on, and there was all of this money that was going to be available. And the city and Caltrans wanted to build the 5 through Balboa Park. So they held another vote that basically was like a blank check for freeway building through parks. So they wouldn't have to have another vote every time they wanted to build another road through Balboa Park. And that one passed by a much, much slimmer margin. So even in that brief period where people began to see the impact of the 163 on Balboa Park, I have to imagine there were people who were also seeing the downside to it and how we may not want to be building all of these roads through our beautiful natural spaces in the city.

DG: Yeah. I think that's exactly right, is once people do see the impact, they start to question the system and that intuitive sense of like, this doesn't feel right kicks in. I think the positive flip of that is that all the changes we're seeing in cities with bike lanes, with more transit, they face a similar skepticism. But once people see the impacts, look at where we're sitting, would anyone now say the cars should come back to this plaza? If anything, they're saying, no, put in more shade, put in more benches. It's pleasant. Like I said, I do believe just this intuitive sense that something went wrong with our decision-making process, even if it was in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s seen as the wave of the future.

AB: I really loved this front page of the New York Times that you included in the book. It's in the first chapter called A Brief History of the War on Cars. I'm wondering if you could just describe what it looks like and what it tells us about the war on cars.

DG: Right. So the headline says, Nation Roused Against Motor Killings. The subheadline talks about the alarming increase of automobile fatalities. And there's a hand-drawn illustration of a giant car driven by basically a Grim reaper style figure with a skull for a face and a big billowing cape. And beneath the wheels of this giant automobile are screaming, mostly women and children, that it's just running over right here. It's the historical antecedent of the war on Cars. It is this idea that there was this period in history where the death and destruction caused by cars — I mean at the time that this illustration appeared in the New York Times, you had thousands upon thousands of people dying in the country. You had hundreds of children in New York City alone being run over and killed by drivers. And so there was this sense of shock. You're only — the Model T is 1908, but really, you're only 10 years or so into the mass automobilization of North America. And a lot of these people who were driving were wealthy. Cars were seen as unnecessary. They weren't necessary for your daily needs to get to work or to buy food or things like that. And so we've lost that shock. One of the things we talk about in the book is, cut to 100 years later, and a young woman was killed on a bike lane, a painted bike lane near Central Park in Manhattan. And the New York City DOT decided to put in a protected bicycle lane. And the same newspaper had a headline that said, "A bike lane is going in — sorry about the parking," or something like that. As if parking and losing it was more important than preserving human life. So we've done a 180 switch, and we're trying to point the compass in the other direction.

SG: Yeah. I mean, we talk about how there's no one left alive who remembers the world before cars, life before cars. And so the challenge is to imagine a life after cars, because in terms of human history and human development, the automobile period isn't even an eyelash width in that timeline. If we want to think of human civilization continuing on in a sustainable way, I think it's really, really important to be able to imagine more and more places and spaces without cars and how we might begin to put that into practice, because I think the best world that we can imagine in the future is not one in which we become more and more car dependent. It's not one in which just because cars are electrified, just because cars are autonomous, and we get the benefits of those things — which are real. It's great to not have tail pipe emissions. It's great to have cars that are speed regulated because they're autonomous, and that actually stop at stop signs because they're autonomous and not human. All of those things are great. However, the solution to cars is not cars. Somebody was saying the other day, we often talk about cigarettes as an example of it used to be completely acceptable to smoke cigarettes everywhere, including on airplanes, and smoke was everywhere, and that was just fine. Well, that's not fine anymore. And so we often use that as an analogy of like, Oh, look, you can change these huge societal norms, right? But then somebody came up to me after a talk we did and said, Well, you realize that's a bit of a flawed analogy because the tobacco industry realized they needed to keep making money and they had to figure that out. So they came up with vaping. And they're still making a lot of money off of vaping. And vaping still has many, many, many of the downsides of smoking cigarettes. And I was like, Oh, right. Autonomous vehicles are like the vaping of cars. And so that really made me think. So, yeah, I mean, let's have autonomous vehicles. Let's have electric vehicles. But let's also radically redesign our spaces so that they're for human beings again, because that's what human beings really like.

DG: I mean, coming back to this plaza, it's wonderful. Nobody sitting here would think, You know what would make this better? Robot cars and electric vehicles. Part of what makes this pleasant is that you're not by these big machines. I actually can't see the driver in that car because the windows are a little dark. It could be a driverless car for all I know. But keeping it far away from me makes sitting here much more pleasant.

AB: I really loved that analogy to smoking, and there was a survey that found people are more likely to disagree with people blowing smoke in public spaces than spewing exhaust from a car in public spaces. The difference or the other flaw that I see in this analogy, though, is that nobody has to smoke for their life. A lot of people in San Diego, in particular, do have to drive. They don't really have a choice. It's the infrastructure and the transportation system that we've inherited from past generations. And I think this city is in a really uncomfortable transition period right now because we've been really successful at building a lot of new housing in the urban core, where things are more walkable, where people are less likely to need a car for everything. Yet we're still not there. The transit system, as you all have noted, is still inadequate. There's a lot of bike infrastructure that still is lacking. So what do you say to the folks in a city like San Diego that today is still very car-dependent, and they really struggle to see life after cars.

DG: I mean, despite the provocative names of both our podcast and the book, the book in particular is an invitation to imagine something different, even if you can't live it right now. And for the people who live in truly car-dependent places, and I agree, I often joke, no one drives a cigarette to work, right? You don't have to have it, but you do need a car. But what if one day out of the week, you experimented with taking transit, or you said, It's not that far to the grocery store. I'm going to see what it's like to walk there. And I'm going to do that because I'm only getting a dozen eggs. I don't have a lot to carry, and it's silly to drive the Tesla or the Ford F-150 20 minutes to go do that. We're not an absolutist movement. We liken it to meatless Mondays. What would it be like? And then once you take that first step, then maybe you become the person who contacts your elected official and say, Hey, why doesn't the bus come more than every 20 minutes to 30 minutes? Or why is that intersection so dangerous that just to get to the park, my kid has to cross a four-lane arterial? Could we put in a better crosswalk, a shorter distance, a bulb out or something like that? That's what we're aiming for, is not radical change overnight. It took about 100 years to get to where we are. Hopefully, it won't take 100 years to get to where we want to go. But big changes start with small changes, and that's what we're asking people to imagine.

54:10

AB: A lot of the book talks about children and how car culture has impacted children negatively in particular. Can you talk about that and why you chose to really spend a lot of time thinking about our kids?

DG: Kids are a uniquely vulnerable population. Traffic fatalities are one of the leading causes of death of children in this country. And so we do think politically and socially and culturally, there is an argument to be made of, If we can make streets better for kids, we can make it better for everyone. Kids have a lot of ability to navigate their cities. We talk in the book about a psychologist, a child development expert named Louise Bates Ames, and she wrote a series of books starting in the '70s about children's development at every stage, every year of their lives, from infants all the way up to teenagers. And she has one about six-year-olds and talks about the stages of development that you should look for. And one of them was, can your child walk four to eight blocks to the store or to a friend's house or to a park? And so what that says to me is that there was a time in this country when people thought, oh, children are capable of doing this. And I still think most six and seven year olds are. I have two kids in the city and they can walk independently. But the question is, what has happened in the intervening 40, 50 years since she wrote those words? And what has happened is that the cars have gotten bigger, the streetscapes have gotten worse. Nothing has changed about children. We are so focused on screens and social isolation among children, the anxious generation and phones. But you read that book, The Anxious Generation, and Jonathan Haight gives just passing reference to the built environment. It's more about the lure of these screens and what social media companies in Silicon Valley are doing to our children. But if you give children safe space to walk, a safe street to cross, they'll go out, they'll do it. And that's what I think we want for all of our kids.

SG: Yeah. And I think we really need to look at what cars do to children developmentally. And there's so much focus in our society today, if you're a parent, on giving kids enrichments of various kinds. And, oh, they have to go to this kind of lesson and that kind of lesson, this kind of physical activity, and that kind of physical activity. And it all has to be scheduled, and they have to be gotten there, and everything. Of course children have traditionally learned how to be human beings just by being human beings in their environment. And what's sad to me is that parents who spend all this time worrying about what's best for their children and wouldn't feed them non-organic food or anything like that, they're forced by the structure of our society to strap their kids into these death machines every day — one of the leading causes death of children — and just pretend, first of all, that's not a problem. You're just, That's okay. That's great. But also, we cite the work of Bruce Appleyard in the book, who's a researcher who's done cognitive mapping exercises with children. And he asked these kids to draw maps of their neighborhoods. And the kids who were driven to and from school and other activities had these very crude and simple maps where it would basically be a dot with their house and then a dot with their school and a straight line in between. And they didn't really know how to get from one of those places to the other. Whereas kids who biked or walked to school drew much more detailed maps that had lots of little details like, Oh, there's flowers over here. There's a tree over here. There's a yellow house over here. And what is that? That is a child learning how to navigate the world. And it's a really important developmental task for children to learn. How do I find a landmark and use that to get to the next thing? And extrapolate from that, Hey, this is a good way to go, and that isn't a good way to go. Our kids are being robbed of all that while we're desperately trying to enrich their lives.

DG: I sometimes joke that I love living in the city because I'm lazy. Like, everything is really close by. I've had days where I'm really sick. I have a cold or whatever, and I tell my kids the night before, I'm probably going to have to sleep in. They can wake themselves up and walk out of the house and go to school. I don't have to drag my butt out of bed and get into a car and drive them and struggle with traffic. My daughter will just come to me and say, Hey, my friends are going to the movies tonight. And what do I say to her? Cool. Just text me and let me know when you're going to be back. I don't have to rearrange my schedule to go drive her somewhere. And that's a luxury for me and my wife. Now, a thing that Sarah will also say is that word luxury. These places that we're building where that's possible are expensive. There's a reason why real estate is higher in places where you can walk and have transit and have the coffee shop on the corner. It's because we've built so few of those places. And so we need to extend that so it's not a luxury. So every parent, every child, every senior citizen has the ability to just have that lifestyle that we're talking about.

AB: You mentioned Bruce Appleyard's research, and he appears in this podcast, and I know him. I think it was also part of that same study where he measured how descriptive kids were of their route to school or where the destination was, depending on how much traffic there was on the road. So when they were walking somewhere that had a lot of heavy traffic, they were less able to describe in great detail what that journey looked like. And it made me wonder, is this car culture and the infrastructure that surrounds us and all the traffic actually making us less perceptive of the world that surrounds us? Any thoughts?

SG: Yeah. I think it absolutely is. And I think, again, this is something that it's so pervasive that it's just in the background for us, and we don't necessarily understand it. But again, we're animals, and cars are life-threatening, and we perceive them on all sorts of levels, our amygdala perceives them as threatening and releases a lot of stress hormones into our bodies, especially if we're about to cross a busy road. I was trying to cross streets in Pacific Beach last night, and as soon as it got dark, it felt really dangerous. I actually was like, this is dangerous to cross these streets. And so, yeah, I wasn't really aware of what was around me in the same way because I was just focusing on staying alive. And in a Maslow's hierarchy of needs way, you're trying to survive. And that doesn't allow you to have the pleasure and the serendipity of noticing who is around you, what is around you. We had somebody in Portland tell us a story of how she was riding her bike through a neighborhood, and there were some peacocks walking around in the street, and there was a bike bus with kids going by, and all the kids saw the peacocks, and she was on her bike, and she saw the peacocks. And there were all these drivers who were very irritatedly waiting for the bike bus to go by, and they didn't see the peacocks walking around. And that says it all. It's like these huge peacocks walking around. And the kids not only saw them, but they told her, oh, yeah, these peacocks aren't where they're supposed to be. They actually live three houses down from here.

DG: That's the most Portland story ever, perhaps. But no, one of the things I love about bike riding, and I miss about my bike commute since COVID, and really everyone started working from home, those of us who could, is roaming through different neighborhoods and seeing things. One of the best things about walking and cycling, sometimes, as you notice all the little changes. Oh, that hair salon, now it's a coffee shop. My favorite restaurant, oh, no, it's gone out of business. Or that place that I went on a date with my wife 15 years ago, whatever. You see those things or you bump into a friend. You see the person that you maybe aren't friends with, but you just have the same commuting pattern, and you give a slight little smile and nod to. Biking and walking and transit are social activities, and we are social animals. It's why we have survived as long as we have. It's through human cooperation. When you drive, everyone on the road is just in your way. Like Sarah said, that animal instinctive, I just have to survive to get where I'm going. When those cortisol levels spike, you just tune everything out and you become hyper focused. But when you can relax, walking is wonderful because it gets you where you're going, but it connects you to your community as well. I think it's really a shame that we've built cities that are not designed to notice anything other than the traffic.

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AB: After the break, Doug and Sarah share their thoughts on provocative and confrontational slogans… like The War On Cars. Stay tuned.

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AB: We're back with Doug Gordon and Sarah Goodyear, co-hosts of The War On Cars podcast.

AB: You tell the story about this guy in the Netherlands whose daughter was killed by a driver, and he started this movement that was organized under the slogan of "Stop the Child Murder." It got me thinking about the type of language we use when we're talking about the war on cars and the strategy involved in that. And a phrase like "Stop the Child Murder" is clearly meant to be reactionary. It's meant to be provocative. Somebody who hits a child with their car and kills them, I hope, didn't intend to actually kill that child like someone who would be murdering them would. But the result is still the same. And so I'm wondering what you think about the type of language we use. What is the utility of these really confrontational slogans? And is there a downside to trying to confront people with the violence of the automobile when it's so integral to their livelihoods and their lives?

DG: I think provocative slogans are important in lots of political messaging. You certainly need your diplomacy. We talked to a city councilor in Vancouver who said, you need the people doing hallway conversations at the state and national capitals. But you also need the table flippers. You need the people who are really going to be there with the pitchforks and the torches, demanding something different. And every movement needs its far left flank and the more moderate people as well. I think the War on Cars as a title, we have re-appropriated that from the folks who say that, Oh, you want to take one parking spot to put in an expanded bus shelter or bike parking? You're waging a war on cars. Sort of like saying happy holidays is a war on Christmas. And so as much as there are some people who push back and say that's too provocative, I think there are far more people who say, Wait a minute, what do you mean by a war on cars? And it opens up a conversation. The other thing I would say is that we use terms like crash instead of accident. That's really important because these things aren't accidents. They're almost inevitable by the design of our road. And then you use the phrase violence. We talk about traffic violence instead of traffic accidents, because when someone is killed by a driver, it is a violent rendering of that person from the world, from their family. Someone goes out and all they want to do is go to work or go to the grocery store or go for a run or a walk and they don't come home, that is in every definition of the word, violence. It is also a very violent way to die, if you've ever seen the body of a traffic crash victim. So I think it is important also with this language, we need to break people out of a forced slumber. And this is through no fault of their own. Like we're saying, this is a systematic way of living that we can't imagine our way out of. So sometimes provocative language is a way to disrupt the pattern of how we talk about these things. And then you can get to, as I hope we do in the book, the more nuanced way and the more understanding way of saying, you are just the victim of a system that you're living in. We don't do a lot of finger wagging in the book. If you need the car and the SUV to get your kids to soccer practice and get to school, that's just your circumstance, and we're not going to question that. But we want to talk about broader societal choices that could enable your neighbor to make a different choice. That's where we are.

SG: I will say that over the 19, 20 years that I've been covering this beat as a journalist, I've seen the language change. And the Associated Press went from accident to crash a few years back, back in 2018, 2019, I think. And that was a huge difference. That was a huge win on the part of advocates who'd been asking for that for a long time. And then I also had the opportunity during the Democratic primary season before the 2020 election, I had the opportunity to briefly meet Elizabeth Warren, and I had heard her use the phrase traffic violence. And I said to her, When I heard you say that, I was so happy. And she said, Yeah, it's traffic violence. It's a public health issue. And I think the fact that people who are mainstream politicians, absolutely the most mainstream press outlet, the Associated Press, the fact that these linguistic moves are being made shows just how pervasive the growing awareness is. I think that we really are getting someplace with this. And I would say also in terms of "Stop the child murder," I think that what's hard is, of course, no one sets out in the morning when they turn on their vehicle and start driving, they don't think, I could kill somebody today. But I think they actually need to think about that more. And it's an important thing to have in people's minds. And one of the most difficult episodes I ever did for the podcast was I interviewed somebody who killed somebody with her car. And she has spent the rest of her life — it was on Route 1 in Northern California, and it was "not her fault." It was found to be not her fault. He was riding a bicycle. He was a farmworker who was trying to get from one side of the road to the other in an area near Santa Cruz, where there's a lot of farms. And I don't want to say it ruined her life entirely, but it dramatically changed her life for the worse. And while it's difficult to think of yourself as being a killer or the potential that you could be a killer just by going about your daily routine, the truth is that if you're driving, you could be a killer. And if you get into your car and your society is not being real with you about that, the chances that you're going to do it are greater. I think that's really important that being real with people about this stuff actually is part of making a safer world and, let's hope, preventing more people from dying and more people from killing.

DG: Yeah. I mean, also in terms of the name of the podcast and the book, I joke a lot. We have broken through with the name The War On Cars. I mean, here we are talking to you, and we've been getting a lot of press, and that's all great. I don't know if we would have had the same impact had we been the, "Look, we understand lots of people need their cars most of the time, but could we imagine slightly changing things just a little" podcast? So it's like there is room for nuance in politics. But what are we seeing right now in Democratic politics, especially, is just really good repeatable platform slogans. Zohran Mamdani, Fast and Free Buses, Freeze the Rent. Language is a way of seeing, and it is our way of understanding the world. So hopefully, if we can move beyond some of this stuff, we will have the luxury of using more diplomatic language, but not right now, perhaps.

AB: On the subject of traffic violence and language, I'd love to talk to you about Vision Zero as a slogan. So I came to San Diego in 2015, a few months after the city council adopted its Vision Zero resolution. And they declared very explicitly, We want to reach zero traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2025, which is this year.

DG: Only like, what, eight weeks left in the year, seven weeks left in the year?

AB: They're doing not great, let's say. I've done a lot of thinking about where the city went wrong or where they fell short, talked to a lot of people about it. And I wonder whether setting the goal of zero traffic deaths was really the right goal to set, because the phrase Vision Zero is agnostic as to how you get there. So if cities had maybe adopted a goal of reducing speeds by X% on these corridors with high collision rates or setting a goal for a number of new crosswalks to install in places where there is a need for crosswalks. If we had set a metric or a goal for ourselves on the actual infrastructure and quantified that instead of the number of deaths, might we have actually gotten closer to the goal of Vision Zero?

DG: I totally agree. I think Vision Zero is a very good internal framework for transportation departments and policymakers. It is terrible in terms of an outward-facing public campaign, because first of all, like you said, what does it mean to envision zero traffic fatalities? Does that mean we put up public service campaigns and wag our fingers and say, make eye contact with drivers or drive slow, save a life. Nobody thinks they're a bad driver. Everybody thinks they're an above-average driver, in fact. Vision Zero is a Swedish-originated program, and yet very few European cities actually follow Vision Zero as their guiding principle. They follow things like reducing the number of cars in their city, reducing the vehicle miles traveled, doing things like saying every person who lives in the city should live within a quarter mile or less of a protected bike lane and a park that they can walk to. And so those quantifiable things are the way to go about it. I think it should be more of a quality of life-based program. Everybody has the right to walk safely to school, to a senior center, to a grocery store. So I think, yeah, I once spoke to a policymaker in New York City after Bill De Blasio had launched Vision Zero in 2014. I was talking to this person saying, as an advocate, I'm really here to support you and everything that you want to do to get to this worthy goal. And she said to me, everyone is in favor of Vision Zero until they understand what it takes to get there. It means taking space from drivers. It means asking drivers to slow down. It means asking them to remove parking to put a bike lane in. And they don't want to do that because they think, I don't kill anyone. If everyone would just follow the rules, we'll reach Vision Zero. And then if everyone would just wear a helmet, no cyclists would die, et cetera. So I do agree. It's the wrong framework for how we should see it. And also, we need to reduce the number of cars and driving in our cities because of climate, because of all of these other knock-on effects of driving that have nothing to do with whether or not people are dying on our roads. I can guarantee you zero pedestrians die on that road through the middle of Balboa Park. Is that Vision Zero? That's not Vision Zero to me.

SG: Yeah. And I was lucky enough to interview a Swedish engineer who was involved in in the development and implementation of Vision Zero back in, I guess, about 2010. And this was when American engineers were first becoming aware of it, American municipalities were first starting to think about Vision Zero as a potential framework for themselves. And the Swedish guy was actually pretty skeptical because what he was saying was the kinds of things that they've done in Sweden were not on the table in the United States. I mean, they include things like having speeding cameras on rural roads. Like that you're driving down some winding rural road in Sweden, and there is a speed camera that will give you a ticket if you are going over the limit. And that's not something I foresee American municipalities or jurisdictions being willing to do. And he was very skeptical about it because his point was, Vision Zero is about designing an environment where human error is expected and it is compensated by design, and that you make an environment that's safer by preventing people from going faster, among other things. And so what would be the best thing if you really wanted Vision Zero? It would be to say, We should have speed governors in cars. We put them on electric scooters. We put them on electric bikes. We could put them in cars. And they're piloting that in New York, among other places. But that would be the best thing, is to just literally make it so you can't speed. And so if you really want to talk about Vision Zero, that's what you need to be talking about. That's the kind of thing you need to be talking about. And so I think just the phrase, just the slogan is empty in the end if you don't do the design.

AB: You talk a lot in this book about the costs to society of our car culture, and I'd love to talk about the true costs in actual dollars and cents. One of the big reasons that we stopped building so many freeways in the country was that we ran out of money. There was a backlash to the freeway infrastructure, but I think some of the freeways that we have in San Diego that were planned but never built weren't built because people were rising up in opposition, it was because they literally just didn't have the money. As someone who just had to replace their hybrid battery in their Prius, and it cost a lot of money, I'm feeling this very deeply about the cost of imposing car ownership as a prerequisite to participate in society and the economy. I'm wondering what you all think of the role that economics and the actual economic costs of car ownership and car culture will do to our society that's built on cars. Do you think it's a house of cards that's going to just collapse upon itself because it's simply unsustainable for the average person, or what more do we need to move it forward?

DG: There's a bit of a house of cards in that I think we are seeing subprime auto loans, as we saw in 2008 with the housing market, and that will collapse. We're seeing car insurance rates going up to just thousands upon thousands of dollars for people, all because cars are getting more difficult to repair, supply chain issues, things like that. The average price of a car now, of a new car is just over $50,000. And it's very hard to find a low-cost sedan. Everything is luxury SUVs. So I think people are becoming aware that this is unsustainable. The trick, of course, much like with the electric cars being a solution to pollution and exhaust, is getting people to see that the economic problems of cars will not be solved with different economics related to cars, longer term loans. We're seeing people with seven to eight year car loans where they cannot pay off the value of the car before they need a new car that they cannot pay off. It's like a personal Ponzi scheme.

SG: The White House is even talking about 15 year car loans. I mean, who keeps it — very few people keep a car for 15 years. I mean, it's just ridiculous. And I think there are other economic arguments as well, especially with the focus on affordable housing that we're seeing in our society right now and across the world, that understanding that transportation costs are part of your housing costs and that being in a neighborhood that doesn't require you to own a car, that's a huge reduction in cost for you, right? But those neighborhoods in this country are priced as luxury goods. So I say this all the time, walkable neighborhoods should not be a luxury good. And everybody should have walkable neighborhoods, and they should have transit connections that are meaningful and frequent, and that would reduce costs for individuals. It also has the knock-on effect, and we cite a study in the book that shows it's about a natural experiment that happened in Japan, where there was an area in a suburban area where there had not been a transit stop on a line, and they installed a stop on that line, and they compared the health care costs before and after the transit stop was installed, and it was a savings of something, I think around $600 per year per person of health care costs. That really adds up on a societal level. So how much are we spending? Again, these are hidden costs, a lot of them. But how much would we, as a society, be able to save if we were building communities that encouraged active transportation as opposed to keeping people in cars all the time, which is just not great for your health on so many different levels, whether you're inside the car or outside of the car. And also, I would like to say we're in the middle of this huge rainstorm here in Southern California, and I can bet you that at some point on the news in the next 48 hours, we are going to see footage of cars somewhere around here floating around or trying to drive through water that is going to just fry the electrical systems of those cars. And that's one of the reasons that we're seeing these insurance rates go up and up and up is the torrential downpours and flooding that are being caused by climate change that is being caused in large part by cars, it's destroying cars. And so they're going to be more and more difficult to insure. And I think ultimately the insurance market is going to be a big wake-up call for people as to what the true costs of driving are.

DG: Actuaries, welcome to the war on cars.

AB: You've been on this book tour for a couple of weeks now. What are you hearing from people receiving this book, this message? And are there any moments that stand out to you?

DG: We have done a lot of local media, like your typical daytime morning television show. And I think we both went into some of those thinking, oh, this is where we're going to confront the pro-driving side of things. These are the places you tune into in the morning before you go to work, that give you the traffic report and all that stuff. And remarkably, we've just had very friendly interviews. I think most of those people understand that the type of driving that people do in their day your lives stinks. It's not the car commercial where you're heading out on a road all by yourself into nature or driving through an empty city. Most of what you're staring at when you're driving are other people's tail lights. Those interviews have been really surprising and fun. Another thing that has stood out for me, we did the bike bus in Portland, one of the bike buses in Portland, and we rode with, I don't know, 30, 40, 50 kids and parents and other caregivers. And just the joyfulness of that with children was wonderful. And it speaks to the heart of what we are talking about. When you drive less and you bike more, you would just have more fun. You have more money in your pocket, you talk to your neighbor. And so that, to me, stood out as the ultimate expression of the joyfulness of what we're trying to accomplish.

SG: Yeah. And we've been talking to some pretty big crowds in these cities, and there is just a real hunger for this message and for the optimism that it represents. I think people really, especially at what is a very dark time in American politics, really are looking for hope and solidarity and the sense that if you organize and you come together, that there will be the possibility of change, and that there's hope, and that there's a life-affirming quality to this movement that we have just been nourished by everywhere gone. And it's just been so moving, people coming up to us and thanking us and telling stories. And then I had a very funny experience the other night. One of the things that we tried to do with this book is to make it a book that's both good for people who are already advocates in this movement, interested in this movement, and give them useful information, things they didn't know, organize it for them, give them hope and support. But we also wanted it to be a book that you could hand to somebody who really doesn't know anything about this, but is an intelligent, thoughtful person with an open mind, and that they would read it and go like, Hey, this thing is pretty cool. I hadn't thought about those things before, right? So I was at dinner with some friends in Portland, Oregon, at a co-housing development where they live, which is just a nice communal group of houses around a courtyard. And they have a potluck dinner that they do every Monday night. And I was invited to that. And I was talking to my friends, and I was giving out stickers about the book. And the woman who was sitting next to me, who had no idea who I was, said, Oh, my dad just read that book. And I was like, Really? It's only been out for a couple of weeks. That's so interesting. Your dad, is he interested in these issues? And she said, Oh, no, not at all. He got it because I just went car-free, and he was worried about me. He was wondering, How is it? Is my daughter going to be okay living without a car? And so she thinks that he just searched on the Internet for car-free living or something. He got this book. He read it. He loved it, and he ended up giving it a five-star review on Goodreads, which I just think is so wonderful. But that's exactly what we wanted to do with the book. It's exactly the person that we want to speak to, is somebody who's like, what would it be like? And then to see, hey, this might be something that really could happen, and that's exciting and interesting to them. So that, for me, was one of the craziest and most fun things that's happened.

DG: It's pretty cool. Also, I mean, Aiden just here bumping into us. How cool is that?

AB: You both already answered my last question, which was about hope, because I think a lot of people are not feeling very hopeful right now. I did a story on the US Department of Transportation taking back a grant in San Diego County for a road diet project in a very dangerous and unpleasant road. And we're seeing a lot of really aggressive pushing of car culture and car infrastructure from the federal government. At the same time, I think we're seeing a lot of stagnation at the local level, at the state level. Some of the goals and the momentum that I perceived when I got here 10 years ago, I don't always see it. And sometimes it feels like we're stalled. What do you say to those folks who want to envision life after cars, but in this current political moment, it's just they can't see it.

DG: Well, I think the people are always ahead of the politicians. There is hunger for this. Politicians respond, even in the best of times, to the status quo, to people who have loss aversion. It's much easier for the person who doesn't want to lose the parking space to be motivated to show up to the meeting to call the elected official, than it is for the people who aren't biking on that street because it's so dangerous to think that they need to show up or call. Yeah, we faced some serious headwinds. Where I remain optimistic is the attention that is being drawn to these issues. So we went through a really strong period of bikelash in New York City at the start of the Bloomberg administration's efforts to install bike lanes and add CitiBike under Janette Sadik-Khan, our DOT Commissioner at the time. And John Orcut, who is the DOT Policy Director, towards the tail end of a lot of that stuff, said that the NIMBYs sowed the seeds of their own demise because the ridiculous things that they would say or do in response to change brought more attention to it. And so we've brought more people into the bike lane movement. Look, Sean Duffy is out there fear mongering about public transit, and the New York City subway in particular. My 12-year-old takes the subway every day, and Sean Duffy looks really ridiculous talking about how dangerous it is when more people take the New York City subway system on a daily basis than fly domestically in the United States. So the more ridiculous things he says, the more attention it might give to how ridiculous it is. That doesn't take away from the fact that the funding is being clawed back. But there might be a negative polarization where even people in red states say, Hey, wait, why are you taking funding away from this active transit corridor that we're trying to build here, a mixed-use path for cycling and walking? People in Florida and Texas love cycling and walking. It's not just a liberal enclave thing. So where I have hope is that this is just a period of backsliding, and we'll come out on the other side of it with more hunger and also more understanding for how these things get funded as well.

SG: Yeah. I mean, I hate to resort to the darkest hour is right before the dawn, but that can be the case sometimes. And I think it's important. This is why being organized and being in community is so important. And to remember, you're not alone. You're not crazy for thinking that things should be different than they are. Keep finding those people who think the same way that you do. I am given so much hope by the fact that Zohran Mamdani won his election in part by elevating bus riders who are the most stigmatized mode users in the United States. They're so looked down upon in most communities, and he put them in the center of his campaign, and he won against all expectations, resoundingly with that against a guy who drives a Dodge Charger around Manhattan. So I think that we should look to the helpers, as Mr. Rogers would say. There's a lot of really great things happening. All of this happens two steps forward, one step back. I think we're in the one step back thing at the federal level. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't keep pressing forward. As Doug said, people love bicycling. People love trains. People want choices. People want freedom. And more and more people are realizing that cars promise freedom, but they don't deliver it. And we have to stay the course, and we have to be strong, and it's not easy, but hard times are hard, and these are hard times. So let's stick with it.

AB: This episode was produced by me, Andrew Bowen, and was edited by Brooke Ruth. If you like this podcast, leave us a rating and review on your podcast app. Even better, share it with a friend. You can support Freeway Exit, and all of KPBS' independent, nonprofit journalism with a donation at KPBS.org. Thanks for listening.