The War on Cars

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...

***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. The...

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 St...

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 —...

***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...

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 expansion...

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...

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 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 . Back in September, Sarah moderated a conversation with Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo as part of Climate Week events in New York City. The e...

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...

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 expl...