The War on Cars

In her new book,  Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities , Veronica O. Davis — the Director of Transportation and Drainage Operations for the city of Houston, Texas — takes a hard look at the ways in which planning a world for cars has harmed communities and how that affects anyone working to change things today. How do you repair a system that continues to divide...

The rising problem of mopeds and motorcycles in New York City bike lanes is impossible to ignore but the solutions are anything but simple. Recently, journalist and friend of the podcast Aaron Gordon wrote an essay for his newsletter titled  "Biking in New York City Has Gotten Worse," in which he laments the change that's happened in recent years of larger and faster motorized vehicles using the c...

***This is a bonus episode that was previously only available to Patreon supporters of The War on Cars . If you want to hear more bonus episodes like this, please enlist today ! We'll taking a very short summer break and will be back with a new episode next week.*** Have you ever wondered what the reporters who cover the auto industry think about oversized SUVs and pickups and whether the fever fo...

This special episode of The War on Cars was recorded live before a sold-out audience at Caveat on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and was styled after a community board meeting... except instead of people yelling at each other about parking spaces and bike lanes, a fantastic time was had by all.   ***This is a preview of a Patreon-exclusive bonus episode. For complete access to this and all of ou...

In his groundbreaking book, Traffication: How Cars Destroy Nature and What We Can Do About It, scientist and researcher Paul Donald synthesizes dozens of studies to help us understand what cars and roads do to living things. Paul makes the case that cars ruin more than cities—they also ruin the countryside by fragmenting habitat and creating a neverending barrage of threats and stressors for anima...

This is a special presentation of the first episode of Freeway Exit , a six-part series produced by award-winning reporter Andrew Bowen of KPBS Public Media in San Diego, California. Freeway Exit reveals the mostly forgotten history of how Southern California's urban freeway network was built. It tells the story of the citizens and public servants who fought these projects and how decades after th...

Have you ever been walking across the street when a driver turned into your path and almost hit you? Or riding your bike when a hostile horn-honker laid into you for delaying them to the next red light by a few seconds? If you spend any amount of time on a city's streets outside of the protective shell of a two-ton automobile, you've probably had frustrating, frightening, and infuriating experienc...

Have you ever wondered what the reporters who cover the auto industry think about oversized SUVs and pickups and whether the fever for these gas-guzzling, space-hogging, planet-heating and people-killing monstrosities will ever break? Bob Sorokanich has some opinions.   Bob Sorokanich was the Editor-In-Chief of Jalopnik , t he news site about cars, the auto industry and transportation in general....

You may know the actor Nick Offerman as the gruff city parks director Ron Swanson on the NBC comedy Parks and Recreation or from his turn as the survivalist Bill on the HBO series The Last of Us , but he also has a lot to say about how people get around, share public space, and relate to nature. In his book Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Wh...

In episode 103 , we looked at depictions of cyclists in movies such as The 40-Year-Old Virgin  and TV shows such as Arrested Development  and asked, "Why Does Hollywood Hate Bikes?" Our co-host Sarah Goodyear unfortunately missed that discussion, so in this exclusive bonus just for patrons of The War on Cars she brings some recent pop culture specimens to examine: the NBC sitcom  American Auto and...

All car trips begin and end with a place to park, making a parking space "nothing less than the link between driving and life itself." In his new book, Paved Paradise , Henry Grabar, a staff writer at Slate , argues that the need to accommodate the short- and long-term storage of countless big metal boxes on wheels is a determinative force in the design of cities, the shape of buildings, the cost...

Weird things happen when you're an investigative reporter trying to cover an international oil giant like ExxonMobil. Your plane tickets are mysteriously canceled, your hotel room gets broken into, and the local reporter that you've hired is offered a lucrative job to work on something else. In this special bonus episode for War on Cars Patreon subscribers, investigative journalist and podcaster A...

In Huntsville, Alabama, it's illegal to play ball on any street, alley, or sidewalk. In Lewiston, Maine, pedestrians must keep to the right half of the crosswalk while crossing the street. And in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, bicyclists are strictly prohibited from any kind of "fancy riding." If these laws sound vague, arbitrary, and difficult to enforce, well, that might just be the point. In a grou...

On our last episode, we mentioned the brief cameo that a Brompton folding bicycle had on season 2 of Ted Lasso and why that bicycle model in particular was a very deliberate choice meant to convey something special about the character who rides it, Dr. Sharon Fieldstone.   For this bonus episode just for Patreon supporters , we talk with Brompton's Managing Director, Will Butler-Adams, about the c...

Chances are, if a character rides a bicycle in a movie or TV show that character is a huge loser. From The 40-Year-Old Virgin to Arrested Development , bicycles are frequently used to represent immaturity, otherness and misfortune. Thankfully, things are changing — at least a little. Witness the Citibike-riding women of Broad City or Dr. Sharon Fieldstone, the sports psychologist who counsels the...

What if we told you that some of the biggest, most exciting, and potentially transformative victories in The War on Cars are being fought and won these days by people working on affordable housing? In this special Patreon-only episode of the podcast we are talking to one of those people -- Matt Lewis, communications director of California YIMBY . In the last few years, California YIMBY has launche...

"15-minute cities" are having a moment, and not exactly in a good way. How did a mundane urban planning concept turn into the latest grist for the culture-war mill? Why does the idea of making it easier to walk to school or the grocery store have some people afraid that they won't be able to leave their homes for more than 15 minutes? And why do some think this is all a plot by the World Economic...

EPISODE 101: FEMINIST CITY WITH LESLIE KERN Cities have almost always been designed by men, prioritizing men's needs as defined by the traditional male-female binary. But as scholar and author Leslie Kern writes in her  book, Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World, a truly feminist city could be, "an ongoing experiment in living differently, living better, and living more justly in an u...

It's our annual Super Bowl roundup, where we analyze the car ads that ran during the Big Game and ask what they say about driving and, more importantly, U.S. culture. This year's ads included Will Ferrell cruising through a post-zombie-apocalyptic Las Vegas in a shiny GMC EV, a heroic "Binky Dad" who drives a KIA Telluride like no one would ever drive one in real life, and a parody ad that we thou...

This marks the 100th episode of The War on Cars, and we're feeling pretty good about it! In our centenary edition, we go all the way back to Episode 1 and ask what we got right, what we got wrong—and what the heck has been happening since we launched back in September of 2018. Then we hear from listeners around the world about what The War on Cars means to them. Here's to the next hundred! This ep...

What does the recent culture-war freakout over gas stoves have in common with efforts to maybe, possibly, just a little, pretty please, slightly reduce the many harms of automobiles, especially large SUVs? And of all the thing he could have chosen in his (pretty lame, if you ask us) attempt to bait climate activist Greta Thunberg on Twitter, why did Andrew T ate use his luxury car collection — and...

Is it acceptable to harm another person? To steal someone's private property? To bend health and safety rules just to save a few minutes or make more money? According to a new study, it might depend on whether or not a car is involved. Dr. Ian Walker, a professor of environmental psychology at Swansea University in Wales, joins us for a fascinating discussion about the unconscious biases we all sh...

Parking is at the heart of every fight about how we build our cities and towns, with effects that go far beyond transportation. Minimum parking requirements  — laws that dictate how many parking spaces are required for various types of buildings and businesses — make housing more expensive, raise the price of goods and services and exacerbate sprawl, making congestion and the climate crisis much,...

In Part 1, Welcome to Muscle Car City , we met Denys da Menace, a young New York City guy who does "donuts" and "burnouts" in a souped-up Dodge Charger as part of the Brooklyn Hemi Boyz car club. Then in Part 2, We Are in the Movie , we rode along in what was supposed to be the biggest, loudest, craziest car meet of the summer. Now Sarah, Doug, and Aaron are going to break it down and talk about i...

***Happy holidays! This is a rerelease of our interview with Jessie Singer, the author of There Are No Accidents, which originally came out in February 2022 as Episode 80. It's one of our favorite episodes from 2022. We'll be back with new episodes in January.*** What do we mean when we say something is an "accident"? When a motorist kills a pedestrian or cyclist it is often described in the press...