The War on Cars

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has been laser-focused on ridding Toronto of as many bike lanes as possible, passing a new law to prevent the city from building new bike lanes and using the power of the provincial government to rip out existing ones. Targeted for removal are approximately 19 kilometers of bike lanes on Bloor Street, Yonge Street and University Avenue, important parts of the city's bike...

Since 2025, Nora Leerhsen has served as the acting president of the Chicago Transit Authority, the second-largest transit system in the United States and an indelible icon of the city. She is the first woman to fill the leadership role at CTA since the agency was established in 1947. We talked with her about the joys and challenges of running a system with ridership of more than 330 million a year...

***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 .*** Ashik Jain is an architect, planner and the Bicycle Mayor of Pimpri-Chinchwad , the fastest growing industrial city in India and...

How will the United States spend $580 billion in federal funds for transportation over the next five years? That's the question facing Congress right now, as it's time once again for the transportation reauthorization bill. Our spending priorities have always been wildly lopsided in favor of highways, but under the Trump Administration, the attacks on projects that prioritize transit, biking, and...

After New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted a social media video showing him listening to concerned citizens and deciding to wear a bicycle helmet, social media exploded. Some people praised the mayor for modeling good behavior while others wished he had kept the focus on larger safety solutions, like protected bike lanes. Needless to say, the conversation was not all that nuanced. So what's t...

***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 .*** What can bicycles do for cities? That's the question we asked attendees at this year's Velo-city Conference , organized by the E...

***We're taking a quick summer break this week so we're releasing this recent  Patreon bonus episode into the general feed. We hope you enjoy it as a taste of what you can get if you sign up to support The War on Cars . We'll be back soon with another regular episode.*** How can people who care about safe streets, transit, and other issues related to our movement take their advocacy to the next le...

Jarrett Walker's career has been dedicated to improving the quality of public transit in the United States and beyond. A specialist in bus network design, he has led transit planning projects around North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand for decades. He is also the author of the book Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives . It's...

***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 our July bonus, we speak with Adam Tranter, the former cycling and walking commissioner for the city of West Midlands in the U...

Our final Life After Cars book tour roundup episode is here, with our reports from Atlanta, Memphis, Chicago, Montréal, Orlando, Portland, Maine, and many, many more great North American cities! We get into the good, the bad, and the ugly of everything we saw out there on the road. Plus a discussion of…Reverse Copenhagen Syndrome? Become a Patreon supporter for access to ad-free episodes and exclu...

In most parts of the United States and elsewhere, sidewalks exist in a legal grey area. They are public spaces that, at least when it comes to things such as maintenance and snow removal, are largely the responsibility of private property owners. They are subject to all manner of laws that govern what kinds of activities can take place on them, laws that change not just from city to city, but some...

***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 .*** The musical artist known as Pondless , who as a civilian goes by the name of Aaron Oliver, writes and performs pop songs about urb...

What should happen to drivers who kill or injure someone with their car? Does a focus on punishment for "reckless" or "dangerous" drivers let everyone else off the hook and never force them to look at the larger harms of a transportation system based around personal car ownership? Those are the questions asked by Ian Loader , a professor of criminology at the University of Oxford, who argues that...

What does it take to make a street safer for everyone? In the US, it typically requires a combination of tragedy, grassroots organizing, and political leadership. Even when these ingredients come together, success is never guaranteed, as so many projects become battles about more than just bike lanes. Changing Lanes, a new documentary from director Ben Wolf, covers the fight to make McGuinness Bou...

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 . See the USA in your... Toyota? That's what US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy and his family have done with their reality-style...

Antonio Reynoso, Claire Valdez, and Julie Won are all running in the June 23 Democratic primary for New York's 7th congressional district. That's the seat that opened up when veteran Democratic politician Nydia Velazquez announced she was retiring. It's a traditionally progressive district, covering neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens. This isn't just about New York, though. Federal funding is in...

Just as it is with road safety, so much of how Americans talk about health pushes the responsibility for eating right and exercising onto the individual, ignoring the many structural barriers that prevent people from making "good" choices. Through her newsletter, She's a Beast , and her bestselling book A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting , Casey Johnst...

Streets can be more than places to move and store cars—they can be  places for children to grow and thrive. Alice Ferguson and Tim Gill are the UK-based authors of a new paper called " Streets for Play, Streets for Freedom: How a 'child lens' would transform transport policy ." Each of them has decades of experience in envisioning a world where children can use streets safely and happily. Together...

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 pol...

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 a...

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...

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 ab...

***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...

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...

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, h...