Factually! with Adam Conover - America is Addicted to Cars, with Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

While we think of automobiles as an integral part of American life, the fact is that they’re just objectively a bad form of transportation. They’re costly, they don’t scale well, and they’re a leading cause of death in the country. The oil and automobile lobbies have done a lot of work to make it feel like there’s no way we could live without cars, but the fact remains that it’s very possible to take significant steps to diminish the relevance of cars in everyday life. This week, Adam sits with Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, hosts of the War on Cars podcast, and the authors along with Aaron Naparstek of the new book LIFE AFTER CARS: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile. Find their book at factuallypod.com/books--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much. for join me on the show again. You know, I'm on record as loving public transit. I'm a public transit advocate. I, in Los Angeles, didn't drive and exclusively rode public transit for many years. And that's because I know that public transit is simply objectively better than car-based

transportation. It's cheaper. It's safer. It's better for the environment. It is more efficient in every way. And if we had more transit and less cars, the world would be better. If you've lived somewhere with good public transportation that dominates over car culture, you know what I'm talking about.

If you visited a place that has that, like Amsterdam or even New York City, depending on what neighborhood, you've experienced it. And that love of public transportation is part of why I actually refused to drive for most of the years that I have lived in Los Angeles. Part of that is sheer stubbornness. I moved here from New York. I was angry about having to drive. And I said, you know what, I'm not going to do it anymore.

And part of that is because I wanted people to know that, you know, L.A. actually does have the second best and biggest public transportation system in America by many measures. People say, oh, no one takes the subway. No one takes the bus in L.A. It's actually not true. And I thought that by my example, I could show that to folks. And so I've very publicly been a transit user in this city for many years.

But, you know, after living that way, for six, years, taking the occasional Uber and letting other folks drive me around, I decided, you know what, I actually do want to dip my toe back into driving again. So I leased a car, got the insurance, and joined in with a stream of traffic. And, you know, it has reminded me of why I hate cars. It's more expensive. It's annoying to have to maintain the car. I certainly hate being stuck in traffic.

But it's also the case that driving around Los Angeles has helped me enjoy the city more in some ways. L.A. Unfortunately, unfortunately, was constructed in many parts to be traversed via automobile. And if you are carless, it is harder to do certain basic things like going to the movies. And, you know, I'm not alone. For most people in America, they live in a place where public transportation simply is not an option. It would be too inconvenient or almost impossible to get around that way. So I think what we as public transit advocates need to remember is that no matter how much we love public transit, we cannot change the fabric of our cities

just by wishing for it. As much as they're building mass transit around Los Angeles and in many other places in the country, we're a long way away from turning our cities into places where transit is an option to get anywhere, any time that we want for anyone who lives there. And that is the case for the majority of people in America. Most people in this country have to buy a car.

They are simply forced to get a car. around. And so it's no wonder that so many people in America have trouble even imagining what a carless world would be like. But that doesn't mean it's not possible. That better car free or car light world is possible. But to get there, we just need to realize and remember how bad cars are for our communities, for our safety, and for our sanity. Well, my guests on the show this week are two longtime advocates and communicators about this who have written a book that addresses this very topic. It's called Life After Cars

and invites us to think about not just why cars are bad for us, but what a better future could look like. I know you're going to love this interview. Before we get into it, I want to remind you that if you want to support this show and all the conversations

you bring you every single week about how we can build a better world, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month. It gets you every episode of this show ad free. You can also join our online community. We would love to have you, Patreon.com slash Adam Conover.

And if you want to come see me live on the road, coming up soon. I'm going to be in Des Moines, Iowa, Atlanta, Georgia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Brooklyn, New York on November 15th at the Bell House as part of New York Comedy Festival. After that, I'll be in Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And we just added a date in Orlando, Florida, all the folks asking me to come to Orlando. Check it out. You can get all those tickets at Adam Conover.net. And, hey, why not take the bus to the show? Check it out.

Tell me if you do, I'll give you an extra hug in the meet and greet line afterwards. And now, let's get to this week's conversation. My guests this week are Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gord. They're the hosts of the wonderful podcast, War on Cars, and the authors of the fantastic new book, Life After Cars, freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the automobile. Please welcome Doug and Sarah. Doug and Sarah, thank you so much for being on the show.

Thank you. It's a real thrill to be here. Yeah, very excited about this. I feel like it's been a long time coming because I was on your show a number of years ago. Wasn't I? Am I misremembering? 2019.

Oh, it was before. In the before times. It was before the pandemic. Yeah, so that's, I don't remember anything that happened then. That was like, no. It's like a story in an old book I've read about the life of another man. That's right. Well, I'm such a fan of what you guys do.

And I think our shows are our companions in a way. I feel we have a lot of crossover audience. So it's belated to get you on the show. But let's talk about this as though. We've never discussed it before. Hey, guys, why, what's the, what's the problem with cars? What, uh, you know, because a lot of people, you grow up driving a car, you grow up riding in the backseat of your parents' car, then you learn to drive.

Most Americans are driving around all day long. It's just part of life. And here you guys are coming saying we should do away with them. That's like saying we should do away with, uh, baseball and apple pie and Walmart and, you know, all the other basics of American life. So what, well, where do you? you get off? Where do we get off? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think I think you kind of summed it up when you say like that you're just basically surrounded by a car and by cars from the moment you're born

in this country and like there's no reality outside of cars. That is a big part of the problem because pretty much any problem that you can identify in modern society, especially modern American society, you can find a car somewhere at the bottom of it. So yeah, that's what I would say. Yeah. And the book is not an anti-car argument. It is sort of like, let's just start to question this system. Cars have their place. They've just been over deployed. And what we're trying to argue in the book is not that you should never get in a car. We use cars every now and then. But we should see cars as a tool like any other. Like if you only had a sledgehammer in your house and you needed to hang a picture, you'd have a lot of holes in your wall.

And that's sort of what we've done with cars of like, why do you need a pickup truck to go get a gallon of milk or take your kids just one mile to school? You could use an e-bike or a smaller sort of mobility device. And that's sort of the argument that we're making. It's like cars have their place, and we talk about places where there are still cars, but they've just sort of managed them a little better. And yeah, I mean, look, the book does open with the title, with the phrase, cars ruin everything. So we are making an anti-car argument to an extent, but we're not saying ban all cars. How did you guys come to this point of view? Because I'll say for me, you know, I grew up, I had poor eyesight.

I had ADD, so I didn't learn to drive until late in life. I had some lack of comfort with it. My parents were also pretty bad at teaching us. My sister also didn't learn to drive until late in life. So I think there was some sort of familial, either genetic or, you know, cultural thing in our family that held me back. But also I lived in New York for 10 years and I was used to, you know, taking the subway and walking around.

And I moved to Los Angeles. And when I got here, I was just like, this is wrong. Like the way this city is built is incorrect. It's less pleasant to be here as a result of the car dependence. And I was just mad about it. And that's part of why we made the episode that like the, the second or third, the third episode of Adam Ruins Everything is Adam Ruins cars. And it's an entire argument. And it was just based on me being pissed off that I had to drive all of a sudden.

And so how did you come to it? Well, I grew up in New York City. I grew up in Manhattan. And my mother drove. We would drive out to Long Island. but we never drove in the city and I just grew up walking, taking public transit.

I started taking the public bus when I was eight years old to school. So I was just very much, like, it was just normal to not have a car. I went to school in Northern California, still was able to live without a car. It wasn't until I moved to Maine, which I did.

I moved to rural Maine. I married a guy from Maine and we moved to her. rural Maine and it was in the 90s and and like it's like a Nora Ephron film or something like that the coastal elite moves to Maine yeah well it was it was a real shock because I was suddenly in this place where I needed a car to do everything and I and I was a pretty good driver I had learned to drive in California and and I was I consider myself still to be a very good driver but it was like this thing, like having to drag this thing around with me all the time.

And then also, this was at a period when the crime rate in New York was actually pretty high as opposed to now. And there was this image that New York was kind of a dangerous city, which it sort of was at that time. But it was, I didn't know anybody who had been the victim of a violent crime in New York City. And as soon as I got to Maine, I was meeting people on a. pretty much daily basis who are like, oh, yeah, my dad died in a crash out on the highway or, you know, and I was like, this is scary. Yeah. It's scary to have to depend on this.

And I think that was when my eyes were first opened. Also, I was totally broke and like having to, I sometimes was putting $5 of gas in the car at a time because we were so broke. And it was just like, I can't do anything without this car and I basically can't afford to run it. I grew up in a suburb north of Boston on a cul-de-sac in an area with no sidewalks, and it was pretty socially isolating. And as soon as I got my driver's license, my friends and I, we would drive into Boston, park the car, and then walk around. Because we just sort of knew, I don't know intuitively, that being in a city, walking around, having things to look at, shops to go into, that was more interesting. After college, I moved to Atlanta, which, you know, I sometimes, look, I like Atlanta, but I sometimes refer.

to it as L.A. without the beach. And you have to drive everywhere. And that was incredibly socially isolating as someone, you know, in their 20s. And I was driving a used hand-me-down Subaru. The transmission broke. I think the repair bill was going to be something like $5,000 or $6,000. I made $22,000, you know, per year. And basically, as soon as I could, I broke up with the girlfriend, which was the reason I was down there. I was like, I need to move. My friends were in New York. I had family in New York.

I grew up coming here. I was like, this is just going to be better. I don't think I actively made the decision based on driving. I think I just sort of knew intuitively, like I said, that it was a better place to be and a better way to be. And that was sort of my journey to radicalization, I guess. You guys said so many things that pinged for me there. One of them is the expense of driving. That was something that jumped out to me when I came to L.A.

Because at the time when I moved was about 10 years ago, and a lot of comedians in my cohort were moving at that time, sort of a thing that happens to a lot of people you spend your 20s in New York and then you move to L.A. If you're in the entertainment industry in your 30s, and people would say, oh, it's cheaper in Los Angeles. Now, that was before housing prices got really out of control in L.A. People don't say that anymore. Nobody says it's cheaper in any way. Things were already bad, but they've gotten much worse since. But also, I, when faced with the cost of a car, which is, you know, if you have a payment, hundreds of dollars a month, and even if you buy a junker, right, then you've got,

you've got repairs, you've got fuel, you've got insurance. I was like, this is, this is like an extra chunk of rent, you know? Yeah. And then I was looking around going, having gone from being in New York where it's like, look, you get a monthly metro card and you pay your rent and your electricity bill, you're kind of done beyond groceries, right? That monthly metro card is like one of your biggest expenses, but that just unlocks the whole city. You never have to pay a penny more.

And then to come to L.A. and look at everybody going around, going, hold on a second, every single person has to maintain all of these expenses and the legal liability of drive it. You know, your car breaks down. Suddenly you have a $1,000 bill to pay. I was like, this is crazy. This is a tax on everybody who comes here that we don't acknowledge as being one, that you have to pay all these different private companies. And then the other thing is the amount of death, the amount of pain and death. Like, I love the way that you put it, Sarah, that we, the crime we see as being sort of a horrific thing that should be ended, you know, if someone is, you know, shot or mugged or

stabbed or whatever it is, like, oh, my God, what a horrible thing. But when someone dies in a car wreck, people, they do, we do kind of shrug for some reason. it's treated a little bit like a heart attack or something like that where it's like oh like well oh that's tragic but well that's kind of how you go that's just yeah you know you could die in a car wreck every day in my my personal family

my grandfather who I never met died in a car crash my great uncle who I loved when I was very young died in a car crash so bad it like made the papers in New York City when I was seven years old The first person I knew to pass away was him. And then my cousin, when I was in high school, my high school aged cousin, the same age as me, died in a car crash. That's three members of my family that I never got to know, right, because of car crashes. And that is so typical, you know, that's about like about the same number of people I know who have breast cancer, who had breast cancer in my family, you know.

But guess what? The people who got breast cancer, they're still with. us, you know? Like, my, my close family members who got press, well, they had chemo for a couple years and they had some, because treatments have gotten so much better because we've actually addressed cancer as a society in a lot of ways. If you look at deaths from, from many common cancers, they've gone down because of all of the resources. We've poured into them. But like, car crashes? No, not the opposite. I mean, actually, I don't know car crash deaths off the top of my head, but it's still a scourge that is like killing people. And, and when it's not treated as

a matter of societal concern on any level. We just sort of shrug at it. Well, you have a great thing in the book. I wanted to cue you up for this about sort of how we are so a nerd to it. We use car crashes as like the standard metric by which we measure all other tragic deaths. Yeah, has a great acronym in the book for this, actually. It's the standard American unit of mortality. And that's, you know, like there are about 40,000 people who die every year in car crash. in the United States, give or take a couple thousand of people's lives, like individual people. And anytime there's something like opioid addiction, gun deaths, they'll say, oh, gun deaths have surpassed car crashes this year or, you know, opioid deaths are twice as many as car crashes.

It's like car crashes are just like this thing that's like, yep, we lose a whole huge pile of human beings every year to car crashes. And to your point, Adam, we're not wearing a ribbon, a pink ribbon or having, you know, fundraising walks for the most part for car crash victims. And it's interesting, too, in the entertainment business in Los Angeles, how many times car crashes are used as a plot device in movies and fiction, you know, that's how somebody died. That's always a good way. What is the lie they tell Harry Potter about his parents? They died in a car crash. Exactly. Because it's so believable. Right. It's so like you would never question that. It's just how it happens. And yes, there are a million movies. I think the other standard that

you often see in the media is related to the environment and climate change. You'll see things like, you know, switching everybody to heat pumps would be the equivalent of getting 50,000 cars off the road. You're like, okay, cool, that's great. Why don't we also get 50,000 cars off the road? Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, occasionally there'll be some plan about this, like, you know, various city mayors. I know there was one in L.A. We'll have like a Vision Zero plan. We're going to try to get traffic fatalities or car fatalities down to zero. And they make a plan. And then they just sort of never follow through on it. Nobody ever asks a question. It's nothing is ever really done about this. Nobody is ever happy if the number does go down. It's just sort of. accepted as a as a baseline fact of life um and so yeah a big part of my work has been to try to just like provoke people to think about this a little bit a whole chunk of my last hour a stand-up that i just released on youtube is uh came on dropout the the year prior is about how insane driving is and just trying to get us to think about it again for the first time as being a you know

something that's that we could actually question like why do we do it this way. Yeah. I mean, another thing that we write about in the book is that people who would give their children, who would never think of giving their children non-organic apple juice or, you know, who are obsessed with every educational thing that happens to their child, they think nothing of loading them into the back of a car, which is by far the most dangerous thing that Americans do every day and it's one of the leading causes of death for children. And I think that we, because we have to do it every day, because the system is constructed so that parents have to do this, they can't think about it. So they don't think about it. And that is the cognitive dissonance

that I think this entire country is operating under. And let's not forget, not only could you die in a car crash, you could kill somebody. I knew somebody in Maine. who was passing on a place where he shouldn't have passed. Nice guy worked as an executive, very friendly man, and he head-on a car with a family of five in it, and they were all killed. And he was not. Wow.

And he's going to have to live with that for the rest of his life. So, of course, we can't think about it. It's freaking terrifying. Yeah. How would we get up in the morning? You know what I mean? Yeah, if we actually confronted it. Yeah.

But let's acknowledge, since you hinted at it, that for so many people, they have no other option because of the way that we've built our cities. Like, Doug, you said earlier, hey, if you want to go to a place a mile away, you don't have to drive, you know. And that's very true. There's plenty of trips, you know, I take in L.A. I've started driving again, unfortunately, and we can get into it. but, you know, where I'm like, well, I am going to walk here. I'm going to take the bus here because I can and that'll be better and it'll feel a little bit better. And I have to remind myself to do it.

And we can all make that, you know, we can all urge folks. Hey, buy a bike, get an e-bike, whatever. But we also have to acknowledge that, like, there's only a certain number of people for a certain number of trips who that works for. Yeah, 100%. And a lot of people, every time I post about this, people say, I live in XYZ place and I have no other option. So what do you have for me? Right. Like what message do you have for me? Um, and that's when you get into the level where this is just a, a huge societal mistake that we've made, where you go to so many American cities and they are constructed such that the people in them

have no choice. If you were born in Phoenix, sorry, you have to give $40,000 to Ford, Nissan, Toyota, or Subaru. You have no choice. Like they own your fucking ass if you were born in Arizona. Right. Yeah. How did this happen? Yeah. I mean, and that's exactly the thing, is that this took 125 years or so to get to the point

where we are now. And hopefully it won't take 125 years to get to a different point. And we're seeing it changing quickly in a lot of cities. But yeah, in a lot of the United States, 99% of it really, unless you live in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, a handful of neighborhoods in other cities, you're going to need. need a car for most of your daily existence. You know, we were saying like, you know, some of these cities were constructed this way, but they weren't, right?

Like the outer Atlanta excerpts absolutely were built with driving and parking in mind. But, you know, inner Phoenix, inner Atlanta, Milwaukee, every city you can think of had great street cars, good pedestrian environments, trains connecting them from one city to the next. Los Angeles famously did? Of course, right. Yeah. And, you know, so these were choices that then bulldozed these cities and plowed highways through them, many of them very racist choices in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, all the way through today. But yeah, it's going to be hard. I think our mission with the podcast and with the book is to say in the places where we could be making other choices, you know, neighborhoods in New York that aren't yet transit, accessible places in Los Angeles that had a history of street cars and have the good bones of like good retail, walkable environments, but you've got that one or two streets that are just

impossible. That might as well be a sea of lava to try to cross. You know, we could fix those. And it's not about tearing down highways tomorrow. It's about little pieces of repair. I often refer to sort of our mission as like a meatless Monday sort of mission, you know. It's like we're not asking every single person to give up the car tomorrow. That's going to be impossible. For the for the Sarah Goodyers of the 1990s who lived in rural Maine, like she wouldn't have been able to do that. But, you know, e-bikes and other things like that, if you had a safe route, if a bus came more than once an hour, you know, and was convenient to where you lived, you might start to imagine a different way. And, you know, I sort of joke with the book, like, we're not hoping that everyone reads

of the book, shuts it at the end and says, okay, I'm getting a bicycle and they chuck their car keys into the nearest river. We're just hoping that as we start to build this repair process that a lot of cities are doing, they get why it's happening. And part of that repair process is changing the way that we use land, right? And changing the way that we build housing. And that is just so incredibly important. The housing affordability crisis is obviously top of mind for many, many people. And one of the really tragic things about the United States of America is that walkable neighborhoods are a luxury good. And that just should not be the case. Everybody should be able to afford to live in a walkable neighborhood. And it should not be something that's

only for the elite. Right. And so when we're building, when we're building this housing, that we desperately, desperately need to build. We need to build it in places where people can not just access transit, but we need to zone it so that they will have a corner store to go to or a cafe or a bar that can be a gathering place for the neighborhood. And like, it's really not that complicated in a way, but because of the incessant lobbying that the fossil fuel industry and the automobile industry have done for several generations now, nobody around remembers that it could be different.

You know, there's nobody who remembers life before cars, right? Oh, I really like, yeah, because your book is life after cars, life before cars. But there's little hints of it, you know? Like, you know, when I travel to do stand-up, so often I try to find the walkable area wherever I am. And usually it's like the old part of town, right? It's the part of town. It's like the main street.

It's where like the church and the little shopping district is. And like there's a spot that you can stroll around in whatever that place is. And that's where people like to go. That's like the cute place that they like. And then they all drive back to the suburbs. Even in Los Angeles, people remark about this all the time. But the most popular places to go, everyone talks about malls are dying. The malls that aren't dying are the Caruso malls, which were built by one of our

our local Donald Trump, Rick Caruso, our local right-wing real estate billionaire who's trying to get into politics always. But he built these malls, which are extremely pleasant because they actually resemble a downtown. Yeah. Like you go park, you pay him to park there. You pay like 15, 20 bucks. And then you get out of your car and you stroll around.

There's like a lawn and there's a fountain and there's like, you know, little kiosk selling shops. And there's an Apple store and also a Tesla store. There's a little car dealership in the mall. but people go there just because it's a nice outing, you know? It's just, and it's like the most popular things in L.A. are places where you park and you can stroll around. And yet those people are not thinking, oh, what if my whole life was like that?

And in fact, Rick Caruso, the dude who built them all, if he were to become mayor, would be the first guy to try to kill as much public transportation, try to make as many car lanes, try to, like, build as many suburbs as he can. because he's, you know, that that's the part of society that he speaks for. You know, the idea that that should be a private experience that you only get to have if you have money. It's a real shame because it's like, oh, we're so close. Yeah, people intuitively, I mean, you're hitting on something so great because we talk about this in the book. People intuitively understand that walkability and proximity and being around other people and people watching is great.

Like, you know, no one walks down Main Street USA in Disneyland and thinks, you know, it would be great if I could just drive right to the castle. That would be awesome. Or, you know, if you go to a beach town, you go to the boardwalk and you rent a bicycle or you walk, people go to Europe and they marvel at how lovely it is and they can walk everywhere and they eat whatever they want and they don't gain weight and they feel great when they go back to their hotel at the end of the night. And then they go home and they think, well, that would never work here. And the funny thing is on the business side of it, it's so much better for business, right, when things are close by people. Cyclists spend less money per trip than a driver, but they spend more money overall often because, like, things are more accessible to them. We see in New York City, when we pedestrianized Times Square, retail rents went way up. So those billionaire developers, like, they should want more walkability. They shouldn't want it to be so exclusive. But yeah, we intuitively understand that it's better. There's this spot in my neighborhood where when we made the Adam Ruin's Cars episode,

we profiled this little triangle here in Silver Lake that they had closed to cars and turned into a little, just put some like little chairs and, you know, some stuff you could sit on. And they had just done it. And now it's been, it's been like eight years or so. It's like there's like four restaurants there, like a bunch of little shops. On the weekends, there's a little flea market, farmer's market thing. And it's like one of the parts of the neighborhood that people just sort of know, oh, I can park and like walk around there.

And there's like, oh, it's nice shit. And it's literally just one intersection that was like close to traffic, you know. Folks, today's sponsor is one of my all-time favorite services to recommend on this show. Delete me. If you're a factually listener, you're probably already aware of my personal. commitment to online privacy? Well, delete me has been an indispensable tool for me for many years, and I used this service for years before they ever even sponsored this show. That's how much I actually was recommending them in my personal life. In today's digital landscape,

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And there was a huge amount of controversy about it. People were really upset about pedestrianizing Times Square. Oh, it's going to lose its character. There's not going to be all those cars and honking. That's what makes Times Square Times Square. Yeah. Well, they did it. It was first done as a pilot program.

And now it's permanent. I mean, no one in their right mind and no one even in their wrong mind would even consider putting it back or even remember that it used to be filled with cars. Who wants to drive through Times Square? Oh, my God. There were so many people. There were so many people who were so outraged about it. And that same type of pedestrianization and these plazas have been done near Madison Square Park.

And in New York, we also now have busways, 14th Street and 34th Street's going to be a busway that doesn't, you know, it still has. vehicles going up and down. It has buses, but it's so much quieter. It's so much more pleasant. And again, there's no, there's no cars. It's a, it's a street that's used for traffic, but just buses. And, and, and local deliveries. Right. And, and it's just, it's just transformative. And people love it and they flock to it. And, and the thing is that what you need is you need political leaders. Mike Bloomberg, I had a lot of problems with a lot of his policies, but he did, you know, he had considered reasons for all the policies that he implemented, and he had the courage to just implement them. And he had enough money that I guess he wasn't

worried about what his next job was going to be. And he wasn't pandering to whoever was screaming loudest, who is usually somebody who has just gotten out of a car and is mad about. how long it took them to park. Right. I think another city that should be on everyone's radar that's not like the marquee, New York or Los Angeles is Minneapolis. Minneapolis is building some really high quality bike lanes. They already had a pretty good network of rails to trails paths around the city.

The Midtown Greenway is a good example. And Minneapolis is a city that has been carved up by highways. I-35 and 94 blast through those cities. truly like a bomb went off, you know, like just destroyed some neighborhoods, largely black neighborhoods, of course, because that's how it works in this country. And they are doing the hard work of repair, building, like I said, very high quality bike lane networks, some good bike share stuff. And that's a cold city.

That's a pretty spread out city. It's not the biggest city in the world, but cars are still very useful in Minneapolis and St. Paul. and they're doing a lot of really great work. So I would say, you know, if you're looking for a good example of places where it doesn't seem like it might be possible but is working, that would be at the top of my list, Washington, D.C. They're, you know, building all kinds of new infrastructure. And there are bike lanes on Pennsylvania Avenue right down the middle, the Navy Yard area

that they've built up with all kinds of new condos. They've made sure that as that stuff is going in, bike lanes are going in, safe pedestrian crossing. So, you know, granted, again, Washington. Washington has a good metro system. It already had good bones. But there are places, you know, Atlanta, the Beltline, has been an immediate hit where they took an old railway and turned it into a pedestrian and cycling path. And they've built up all these apartments along the way.

So last time I was there, Atlanta, I was on the Beltway. I was doing stand up there. And I was like in a hotel near the Beltway. And it was, it was beautiful. I like went on like a multi-mile jog. And I was like, oh, there's a commercial district. There's apartments. I was like, oh, it's upscale, but it's also accessible, it's public.

It was wonderful. Sorry, go on. No, no, I mean, I think that's exactly right. Like, you could just walk out of your hotel or your apartment and do that trip to go get, you know, go get some exercise or go get some milk or just people watch. You are seeing places all over, you know, Austin, Texas, despite, again, a highway widening project that we talk about in the book that Textdot wants to do to benefit people outside the city. they're building like Dutch quality infrastructure for cycling.

So it is possible. It's possible in red states. It's possible in blue states. There's a real hunger for it everywhere you go. How do these projects overcome the opposition? Because sometimes the opposition to transit of any kind is so intense. And I also want to point out it has become part of the culture war. The war on cars has become part of the culture war.

I mean, you mentioned. Mike Bloomberg, Mike Bloomberg was a Republican, but he sort of ran in this, ran the city in this sort of classical liberal mold where he was like, oh, if the experts say it's a good idea, then let's do it, you know? And he was a, he was a technocrat. He would put the faith in the experts rather than listen to the sort of reactionary homeowners or, and this wasn't culture war at the time. But, you know, like you say, he had so much money and he had that sort of personal philosophy. That's why you know, there were some good things about his mayorship despite a lot of black marks on it as well.

Yeah, yeah. But, you know, what I have observed here, you know, in L.A. Where we don't have that kind of mayor currently is that, first of all, you have homeowners and other folks who like how things are. They like driving around in their enormous, you know, Kia tell you ride or whatever. They feel terrified of people on the streets.

They want to be in their big metal cocoon. and they want those parking spaces and they scream and yell if anybody takes away one parking space from them and those tend to be the loudest voices that local politicians listen to and then on top of that

you have the resurgent right wing movement in America which now controls the entire federal government and the way this version of the Republican Party works as opposed to the Mayor Bloomberg version is anything that an expert says is good they say is bad.

If there's somebody with a degree who says, I've done a study, this would be better. They say, fuck you, we're doing the opposite because you said that it's good. Because you think it's good, we think it's bad. And so you see the Trump administration going to war with New York City over congestion pricing and trying to take money away from rail projects and, you know, literally trying to promote the automobile, not because there's any research that says that's a good idea or any really ideology other than fuck you. going to do the opposite of what you want. So those are the political conditions under which we live. How can, you know, we make progress under those circumstances? Well, I mean, the current

political conditions are so extreme and, and the Trump administration indeed has come out and, you know, started yanking funding from anything that is, quote, unquote, hostile to cars, which That's the literal line from Sean Duffy and the U.S. DOT, yes. So the poor cars. Well, you got to remember he's from Road Rules. He made his career in a car. Like he, it wasn't, it wasn't called transit rules.

It wasn't bus rules. Bike rules. It wasn't bike rules. Thank you. That's, yes, yeah. No, but so, so it's, I mean, I can't solve the Trump administration in this answer. Yeah. But, well, what I would.

will say is that it takes some guts and it takes some political will. And we talked, for instance, with mayor, then mayor, John Botters of Emeryville, California, which is a tiny little city in the East Bay, you know, just south of Oakland. And it's got, it's basically like half freeway, half rail line and, you know, and some big box stores. And somehow this guy, John Bauter, despite this being a very car-centric part of Northern California, the East Bay is very, very car-centric. He said, I think that what our community needs is to have, you know, walkable development, bike lanes that connect us to the rest of the area,

bus lanes that connect, you know, buses that connect us. And he and his allies on the city council, went about doing it. And he just said, this is what I'm going to do. He stood there. He took the heat. He had been elected on this platform. And he just went ahead and did it. And what he said, and then all these mares were going to him and saying, how did you do this? How did you make this happen? And he was sort of the bike mayor of America for a few years in there. And he said, what I tell all of them is, are you winning, are you, are you willing to lose an election? And if you are, you can do something.

Wow. And if you're not, you can't. So that's what I think we need is we need politicians who care more about serving their communities and doing what they know is right for their people than they do about their people. than they do about their own political career. And indeed, you know, I think that there is a generation of politicians, perhaps, right now coming up, that gets it, not just about this issue, but about a lot of other issues. I guess I want to push on that a little bit because, yes, you want politicians who can take risks and do what's best for their communities. But a lot of politicians look at if you're willing to lose an election, well, then they say, well, hold on a second.

the people elect me, if I lose the election because of this, it means the people don't like it. You know, like that is the premise of democracy. And if you lose the election, then someone else comes in and then they undo the thing that you did, as we're seeing. So there's risk taking, but there's also, like, how do we, you have to look at the electorate and say the loudest voices, the people who are trying to get me on elected are not really the folks who I represent

in some way, right? It's very hard. I mean, I often say, like, it's impossible to organize the residents of an affordable housing development that hasn't been built yet, right? But it's very easy to organize the single-family homeowners who don't want the vacant lot on their block developed. They can show up to the meetings. The people who don't live in the building yet don't know the meeting is happening. And even if they were interested in having an affordable housing, you know, affordable place to live, maybe they're working two jobs and they can't afford child care and they can't come to the meeting at. at 6.30 on a Tuesday night in a church basement.

Yeah. So that is a big challenge. I think, you know, what elected officials have to do, there's a bit of sort of like memento-esque policymaking to this where nobody really ever remembers that the last fight happened and worked out fine. You can point to Obamacare. You know, it was going to be the end of all endings for the U.S. government. Flash forward to the last Trump administration when they tried to take it away,

And, you know, you had people laying their bodies down on the steps of the Capitol in the hallways of senators' offices saying, don't take away my health care. That's a huge reversal from 2008. The smoking ban in most cities to go back to Bloomberg, but other cities too. Nobody now would return to a time when you came home from a night out smelling like a chimney. But at the time, it was going to ruin nightlife in every city. It was passed. and businesses were going to go under bar. No one would go to bars.

That's such a great metaphor because it really was incredibly controversial. I remember that. And I literally remembered debating that. I was in college at the time in New York State. So it was a topic of conversation. But my college cafeteria literally had a smoking section at the time. We were smoking at like 1 p.m. In like between classes going like, can you believe Bloomberg's trying to take the cigarettes out of the bars in New York?

this is crazy, it's a nanny state. And like now, we were like, we were like 20 years old. Like that's insanity. And now if you want in there, aside from not being in your 20s anymore, but if you lit up a cigarette in a college, you know, cafeteria, you'd be kicked out immediately. Yeah. And we'd all be happy.

We all agree with that. Yeah. And we've seen that play out with Safe Streets projects. You know, Prospect Park West, which we talk about in the book, which is a bike lane, just up from where we're recording in Brooklyn. Huge controversy. I remember now. But yeah, now 15 years later, I was running with a friend in Prospect Park and a car came through the park. And she was like, oh, that stinks. How is that driver coming through the park? And I said, oh, if you think that's bad, you know, up until like

the last year of the de Blasio administration, cars would come through here every rush hour, like dozens and dozens of cars. She thought I was crazy. She thought I was making it up. You know, people have very short memories, new people move into cities. They just assume things are the way they are. City bike was a huge controversy. No one would really use it. The streets were going to run red with the blood of tourists and inexperienced cyclists. And now, you know, real estate listings will say proximity to two city bike stations with this apartment, you know. So it changes. They just keep expanding it. But I mean, this is the thing. It's for the most part, when you put these projects in, if you have the guts to put them in, people love them. And then it doesn't become an

issue in your reelection because people are like, this is great, but they have to see it. Who wants a freeway on the Embarcadero in San Francisco? I mean, that was taken down for a different reason. But like, nobody's going to be like, hey, let's put a freeway back up here. No, that's not going to happen. So, I mean, what it also takes is advocacy and organizing. Like any societal change, there needs to be the pressure from the grassroots, right? And you need to have advocates who are willing to put the pressure on politicians so that it's not just the lobbyists for real estate firms and fossil fuel companies and whatever else, whatever lobbyists that particular politician is dealing with, you have to have really good advocacy efforts that are educated

and persistent and you have to not just complain about things that you don't like. You have to tell electeds when they do something that they have taken a risk, you have to reward them for that. you have to call them and and and hold them up and and and give them, you know, a nice pat on the head. Yeah. To tell them. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, like, you have to be ready to do that and you have to be organized. And like, you know, speaking of culture wars and the bigger things that are happening in our society right now, you know, organizing is becoming increasingly important. and we need to organize. And I've been really grateful, actually, that I know people in the Safe Streets movement in New York

because as fascism ascends, I have a whole network of people that I know I can trust and that we have similar values and that we know each other and we know how the system works and we can band together and make change that way. So, yeah, like grassroots pressure and also, like, have it come from parents.

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Let's move, though, from a lot of those projects that you're talking about, removing parking spaces and putting in bike lanes, that's something that can be done, like, pretty cheaply and easily, you know, in almost any city. But also, you know, when we're talking about public transit, we're talking about, like, rail sometimes. Like, that's what I like, I like, I like a fucking subway line, you know what I mean? I like to be underground. These projects are incredibly expensive, and it's very difficult to build them later. You know, I'm really influenced by, you know, I'm one of those guys, unfortunately, who read Robert Carrow's Robert Moses' biography and a million things from it have stuck with me. But he really makes vivid how, you know, when you build a rail line first to nowhere, you get dense development around the rail line. When you build roads, you get, like, you know, a more dispersed pattern development that is, like, harder to build rail on later.

Talks about that a lot in, you know, the freeways that were driven through Long Island and how, you know, Moses made it impossible to build rail along a lot of those and, you know, sort of cursed a lot of people to, he really describes it as like, he doomed, Robert Moses doomed generations of New Yorkers to be stuck in traffic by making these decisions, by refusing to. leave enough, you know, right-of-way on the side of a freeway to build a rail line later. And just like, you know, all these people who never even knew Robert Moses' name are now doomed to be looking at taillights for, you know, hours every day. And there are cities that are trying to dig their way out of it, right? I literally just the other day went as part of a little bit of paid promotion with L.A. Metro, because they know me as a transit activist. They hired me to make a little video about the new L.A.X. Transit Center.

and I took the train all the way down there and it was over an hour trip to get down there because I'm very far away in L.A. But, you know, I rode the B line to the E line to the K line. And we're riding back in one of the transit activists with me says, you know, I was like, wow, this new line is really great. And she's like, yeah, it's really good. But, you know, the current ridership is in like the hundreds.

You know, like, or maybe the low thousands a day, right, of people riding it. And so this was built at great expense, right? Probably hundreds of millions of dollars. the station itself costs $900 million. And that's for the airport. It should be expensive and, you know, it makes a lot of sense. But I'm sitting there going, man, if we're taking a city like L.A.

that has huge portions that were built for cars and we want to build transit, but it costs tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. And then the city around it is still so spread out that people, you know, are a small number of people are even going to be able to ride the train to begin with. It's very hard to justify that kind of project, right? And that's when you start to realize what a deep hole we're in to bootstrap ourselves out of, to build, to rebuild the literal physical infrastructure of our cities to be able to support more transit. How do we, how do we do that?

Yeah, I mean, there's no question that building things in this country is really expensive, especially compared to other countries. Yeah. You know, Paris is expanding its metro at a fraction of the cost that it has cost to build just like one extension of the Second Avenue subway here in New York. London built like the Elizabeth line and it's a beautiful way to get from the airport to the center of the city. And again, didn't cost anywhere near what it's costing to build stuff in the United States.

So we definitely have that problem. I guess what I would say is number one, nobody really questions the cost of highways and the long-term cost of highways, right? So, like, we also have a problem with highways costing too much to build and then maintain because they don't generate tax revenue. In California, you know, there is a bill on the governor's desk right now, unsure what the status will be by the time this hits listeners' ears and eyeballs. But SB 79 that would allow the, and really kind of force the state to build more housing near transit,

which is a thing that should happen. So, you know, part of the problem is we do build transit. transit in this country, never mind the expense. But then, like, Long Island is a very good example. Most of the Long Island Railroad stations are just surrounded by parking. You know, they should be surrounded by four, five, 10-story condo buildings and apartment buildings. And that's what we need to be building as well. So, you know, I think to Sarah's point about organizing, if you're not involved with, like, housing groups, these things are all related to cars in some way. I think that the cost of Building stuff is sort of not something we get into in the book so much.

But it is a big issue. But again, you know, look, there's a Chuck Morone who does Strongtowns, which is a organization that talks sort of like a conservative leaning group, but they talk about suburbs as a giant Ponzi scheme. You know, you build the suburb and then you build the sewers and the roads out to the single family homes, but those don't generate enough tax revenue to pay for. the maintenance and the long-term building of that infrastructure. So what do you do?

And the debt service. The debt service gets there because a lot of that infrastructure is built with bonds. Right. And so then what do you do? You build farther out suburbs to pay for the ones inner. And then you just keep going. Wow. Eventually the bill becomes, eventually the bill becomes due.

You know, compare that with a really dense neighborhood in a city. You know, they just replaced the sewer lines on my street. I didn't see a bill. In a suburb, you would. because it's really, really expensive to do that. So we just need density everywhere. And then that would make the ridership on that line to the airport, for example, go from the hundreds or the thousands of people to the hopefully tens of thousands of people per day.

Yeah. And again, I'm going to just say the word that, you know, makes people fall asleep zoning. You know, it really is about zoning. It's about not just zoning for denser development and not just single family homes. but it's also about zoning for mixed use so that there are those amenities, and especially with so many people working from home, the idea of having a small neighborhood that is where most of your life is happening because there's a school, there's a cafe, there's a bar, there's a, you know, whatever.

And you're in a little village. You just want to trap people in 15-minute cities? I do. I'm part of the big conspiracy. Seriously. And then, Adam, I will say I am also a subway person to my bones, but I am going to say the word buses. Yes. Because buses are great and they can be wonderful. And actually, I was out in LA a couple years ago and I didn't rent a car when I was there and I was there for eight days. And I did use the metro quite a lot. But I also used buses quite a lot. And if buses are, you know, if they have, dedicated lanes, if they have good, you know, bus shelters and not just like, you know, a sign and a baking hot sidewalk that you're supposed to stand next to that, you know, buses can be a very dignified

and wonderful form of transportation. And they are so much cheaper than rail. So, and so buses. Like, I'm just going to say buses. The problem is that. buses have is that they get stuck in traffic, right? Because they don't have their own lanes so often. But there's a bus line here in L.A. I think it's the orange line, if I remember correctly. It's in the valley. And I believe it's built on an old rail line, like they turned an old rail right of way into a busway. And I've ridden it only once, but it was incredible. It's like a bus that is not on a normal street. It's just, you know, going down its own corridor, it was so fast. It was, it felt great to ride on. and, you know, I think a lot of folks have had that experience. The bus from L.A.X, the flyaway bus, famous bus, is kind of one of people's favorite ways to leave L.A.X.

Because for some reason, those bus drivers can drive faster and better than an Uber can in traffic. Like, they get you to the destination, like, they're fucking motoring down the street, you know. It's just that in so many places, the buses are too infrequent, and they're on traffic-clod corridors. They don't have bus lanes. But, you know, it's true that it's a much cheaper way to add a lot of transit quickly. And you can add them, you know, imagine if you took a bus that comes once every half hour and make it once every five minutes, right? And how that would change the way people see, oh, yeah, I just go there. I don't need to look up the bus schedule or like look at up where the bus is on my phone.

I just go stand there and a bus comes very quickly. And the really cool thing about bus service is if you get the traffic out of the way. you are essentially adding bus service without adding buses, if that makes sense. You know, when the bus shows up late, that's because it's stuck in traffic most of the time. Now, there are places, obviously, that only schedule the bus every half hour or hour. But a lot of places have buses that are supposed to come every eight to 15 minutes, let's say. And they don't because they're stuck in traffic. You get the cars out of the way.

It is like you added multiple new buses adding capacity to the route. And, you know, I think what we're really talking about is a democratization of the public right of way. Yeah. Who has the right to go to their destination quickly? The person in the Land Rover who's sitting in a single occupancy vehicle listening to music, listening to a podcast, smoking a cigarette, whatever, or the 40 people on the bus stuck behind the guy in the Land Rover. You know, that's just undemocratic. And unfortunately, to our earlier point, those 40 people on the bus... They probably don't have time to advocate for better bus service.

But the guy in the Land Rover has time to complain that someone's going to take his travel lane away for better bus service. So we really need to start rethinking both how we democratize public space and how we democratize the public process for changing that public space. Yeah, I mean, the way people see buses, the guy in the Land Rover actually hates the bus, right? When he's behind a bus, he's like, fuck the fucking bus. I hate the bus. Yeah, but you know who he hates more than anybody else? Who? Other drivers, other drivers.

Yeah. And that's, you know, what would be good for that land rover driver is if all the other drivers, there's a great onion headline that's like 98% of Americans favor public transit for others. And I, I, but there is some seriousness to that idea that, like, if you want a better driving commute, and that's sort of like to get back to where we were almost at the beginning, the book is not anti-driving. It's saying if you are someone who needs to drive, not the guy in the Land Rover, but someone with mobility issues, an elderly person, an elderly person, I almost said, but that's just a new pointage. You know, you should want all the able-bodied people who have alternatives to be able to access those alternatives. So that's sort of what we're talking about.

And congestion pricing here in New York is a great example of how this can work in practice. another policy that strangely nobody is yelling bad things about anymore, except for Sean Duffy. Well, yeah, I mean. But like it makes it better for drivers. And a lot of people I know who have to drive in Manhattan are like, oh, this is so much better now. And also the buses are running on time and they're adding bus capacity, just like Doug was talking about. But for what the Land Rover guy is a minimal fee for him, he gets a better driving experience. He gets clearer traffic lanes.

You know, if you just actually, and that policy is just a win, win, win all the way around because not only our buses faster, not only do drivers have better experience, money's going to the MTA, the air is cleaner, there's less noise. I mean, it's just absolutely a winning policy. You can just, it's hard to find a policy that, that when implemented, delivers so many rewards, yeah. Except that, I mean, yes, it's a wonderful policy. But I lived in New York the first time they were going to do congestion pricing and it was killed. I think did Bloomberg kill it directly himself?

No, it was killed sort of in a back room, smoke-filled room sort of thing in Albany. By a corrupt politician who later died in jail. Okay. But that was over a decade ago, right? Oh, it was 2007? It was 2008, I think. Okay. And like, I remember years afterwards, the MTA was getting worse and worse.

And, you know, that was a big part of why it was because they were denied that money. Then a decade later, a decade plus later, they try to revive it. Kathy Hochel kills it. And then, you know, finally brings it back again in revised sort of scale down form. And now Sean Duffy is trying to kill it, right? And I'm sure there's still plenty of people in, you know, the right-wing. media who are who are fulminating against it and like this is such a common sense policy right the if you are driving into the most congested place in america pay a toll you know and and what i

think it hits an odd psychology about driving that people have where because we grew up with it as a necessity people feel it's a right and a a a thing that they should not be charged for and it's this perverse form of psychology that almost everybody has when they're driving even though you're paying tens of thousand dollars for the car thousands of dollars a month to fuel it and insure it you do nothing but pay for it as soon as the city tries to pay you

to use the space the thing takes up whether it's to pay for parking or to pay a toll people lose their shit right people will drive around for 45 minutes to avoid paying 15 bucks for parking right or the idea of paying What's the congestion pricing? Seven bucks, ten bucks.

It's nine bucks. Nine bucks drive in Manhattan. If you're trying to drive in Manhattan, you have $9. If you're trying to drive a car into Manhattan, you have $9. That's less than the price of a subway sandwich, motherfucker. You have $9. Think about it this way. It's now going to be $3 to take the subway.

So if my wife and I want to go into the city to see a Broadway show, that's $6 one way and $6 back, right? So $12 for us to take a round trip into and out of the city. A driver only pays congestion pricing in one direction. So it's $9 for a round trip to Manhattan. So you can bring a mobile living room and search for parking for free for $9. Meanwhile, a family of two, a family of four, a family of six has to pay for each trip they're making on the train. And I think that's part of what the brilliance of congestion pricing is.

reasonable price. It's a very reasonable price to ask people to pay. Exactly. Exactly. But I mean, I think we haven't talked about class very much. And I think that that's part of, this is that's part of the bus problem is buses are really stigmatized, right? In everywhere, I certainly have seen that in L.A. that it's like, oh, you know, that's for a certain class of people, right? And it's not the kind of class of people that can afford a Range Rover. And, And, you know, I think that in the United States, cars, and elsewhere in the world, cars symbolize wealth and cars symbolize, you know, I'm in control of my own destiny because I have wealth, right?

And what is more important in the American psyche than money? I mean, I hate to say it, but it's like a really defining thing. for our society, and being able to buy things that other people can't have because they're not as rich as you is something that, unfortunately, in our society, to a greater extent than in many, many, many other societies, that's a defining thing. So, you know, I mean, I grew up in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which is one of the richest neighborhoods in the world, if not the richest neighborhood in the world, frankly. And a lot of, you know, very, very affluent people ride the bus up and down Madison Avenue and Fifth Avenue and the cross town buses. There's a lot of really

rich people who use those buses. So I grew up in an environment where bus ridership was not stigmatized that way. I was shocked when I realized how how people in the rest of the country see bus riders. So, I mean, you know, there. This gets back to, like, this is all connected, right? This is all connected. And cars are an expression of the sickness of our society in a lot of ways. And they embody that and they perpetuate it. Yeah.

I mean, in my act that, that again, folks would go watch on YouTube, I, you know, when I take the bus in L.A. And I arrive somewhere, people will be like, you took the bus here? Like, I've never taken the bus. I've never met anyone who's ever ridden the bus. Like, people literally look at me with, with shock. And I'm like, well, no, you actually, pretty sure the person who cleans your house probably rides the bus a lot. I'm pretty sure that, you know, the person who works at the grocery store, you know,

at the Gelson's where you buy your expensive groceries probably rides the bus. But it's this sort of class blindness. And even in New York, you know, literally everybody rides the subway. But a lot of people who ride the subway never take the bus. They're like, oh, I'll take an Uber rather than take a bus. But it is funny how you're right. A lot of folks will buy an expensive car and will overpay for a car because of what it says about them. You know, like, oh, God, no, I'll afford the lease on something expensive.

Even though I don't need it, I could have a much cheaper car. But, hey, this one's comfy and it's luxurious and I have to spend so much time in it and it makes me look good. And yet, they don't want to pay a small tax on using the car that would go to fund public transportation. Is there a way we can make that luxurious? Can we make congestion pricing, right? Like a luxury good, a badge of honor. Like you can buy the Manhattan pass, you know, and we send you like a sort of gold pass that you get to put on your windshield

and it costs like $1,000 and it means you can drive anywhere in Manhattan. It makes you look like a big fucking rich shot, a rich fucking big shot. No, we need that for the Metro card or the Omni card. We need like, you know, express access to the subway because we want to make. make the subway and the buses like seem like a luxury product that is cool to ride. That's what we want to get those drivers out of their cars and into the subway system. That's good. We need like American Express Centurion louches, but for the subway system where like, oh, you sign up and you get to go to the special.

You get free, free coffee. Every $3 subway fare, you get 300 delta points. That shit would work on me. One thing that does give you this kind of cachet is, you know, e-bikes, we haven't talked about e-bikes and how they're really changing the way that people can get around cities. And, and e-bikes can be super expensive. And I was talking with a researcher who works in Zurich, Switzerland, and she was saying, we have some e-bikes here that are so expensive that even for like these Swiss gearheads who are like, you know, so into their fancy cars and whatever, that. They have these, like, luxury e-bikes. So, I mean, I think that's, you know, we can start to, you know,

boost the class profile of the e-bike as well. Yes. You know, my dad is, has, you know, driven my whole life. In fact, I think about him a lot when I think about congestion pricing because we grew up on Long Island and we would drive into Manhattan. He would want to take us to Broadway shows and cultural things, which is wonderful, go to Chinatown, et cetera. all the good things

but you know he would drive us into Manhattan and like on the way in it would be as we got closer to Manhattan he would start yelling at us in the car he'd be like shut up because he needed to hear the traffic on the 8th

you know to because there was no Google map so you'd be like which is the Holland Tunnel or the other one you know which way do I get in and then we get into Manhattan and he would in Manhattan he'd be like like looking for the parking lot that would charge him through the nose so we could, and then, like, 20 years later, I was like, we could have taken the fucking train.

You could have read a book? Yeah, we could have just, like, hung out. We could have driven around Concoma and parked there and then taking a 90-minute train ride right to Penn Station. And then we'd be like a two stops from the theater district. Like, what the fuck? But so that's how much of, you know, a car guy he was. Now, you know, his last job, one of his last jobs, he was working in D.C. for a couple years. He was like, there's so many bike lanes in D.C.

I'm like I got a I got he got like a little scooter he was like scooting around now he's retired he lives in Oregon he lives at the top of a hill in like this community where it's like you know they're like a quarter mile from all the other houses you know what I mean super not walkable um but a couple years ago he got an e-bike and he's like had him this e-bike like I can just go into town on my e-bike and then it zips me back up the hill he's in his 70s you know and he can that's great he can do this and of course he's like you know he's a retired, affluent guy, and it's easy for him. But it is a little bit of that change of perspective that has allowed him to take advantage of those options more.

And I guess that's what we're trying. And that is a suburban area that he has that access in. Yeah. And look, it has taken generations and generations, as we said, 125 years, more or less, since life before cars, for us to get to be so cooked that we can. can't imagine how we could possibly get around without the big box around us. So it's not going to happen overnight, but I am really encouraged. I've been working on issues like this as a journalist for about 20 years now. And the difference, the change is incredible. And people like

your father are part of that change. Like, here's somebody who couldn't even imagine getting on the Long Island Railroad and he's using an e-bike now. Like, to me, that gives me so much hope. And then young people today, I hear it all the time. My son's 23. People of his generation, they just, a lot of them really don't see the romance of the car the way that older people did. You know, and it's so expensive. It's so expensive. And they want to be hanging out in cool places and they get that cars and cool places don't always go together.

I think that there is generational change happening. And we just have to keep focused and keep moving forward and not allow ourselves to, you know, get into that despair loop where it's like you're sitting on the 10 and you're like, how is this ever going to change? This is like a mountain or a river or something that like it's here. It's always going to be here and it's always going to be this way. No, cars are not a law of nature. car infrastructure is not a law of physics. Like, it's not something that's immutable and unchangeable. It used to be different, and it will be different again.

And so we have to decide that it's going to be different in the way that we want it to be different in a way that's healthy for our selves, our bodies, our communities, our politics, all of that. Like, we have to make those decisions now because Robert Moses made the decisions he made back in the day, right? And we saw how much influence he could have. What if somebody, what if we empower people to make those kinds of huge changes for the future for a better world instead of a worse one? But for Bikes. The power broker, but for bikes. Right. Exactly.

And that back in his day, the car was new, right? And even in my dad's lifetime, the car was pretty new. You probably started driving in the 60s and 70s, right? And, you know, imagine driving on L.A. in the 60s and 70s. Oh, go up to Malibu. And, like, oh, it's pretty fun. Yeah, it's like a good time. It's a new thing.

It's, there's a freshness to it, right? Oh, they just built a new highway. Now nobody feels that way. People feel trapped, you know? I think young people, they don't even make cheap cars anymore. Like literally cheap cars don't exist. So when you're 25, the first car you're driving is a piece of shit. because that's all you can afford.

You're stuck in traffic. And so the fresh new thing is, like, biking or transit. I mean, literally, when I go back to New York now, and I sort of hate that we keep bringing up New York. But, like, I haven't lived there for 10 years. When I go back now, I'm like, the amount of biking that people are doing compared to what they were doing 10 years ago, it does feel more like Amsterdam.

You're like on fucking, you know, first at, you're like on the Lower East side, and you're having to cross a traffic street. of bikes going by to get to the bar and like the city bikes right there and like oh yeah just take that across town that literally did not exist a little while ago and it it feels like a positive transformation to people so many of the cities that I travel to I'll go to like I don't know like places like Arizona or whatever and so many cities suddenly have oh we built a little tram downtown you know and people are excited about it and maybe not that many people are writing it yet

but that's the new thing that the city is doing that's like getting the headlines. Yeah. One thing we talk about, it's a line I always say and we talk about in the book, is that what's sort of confounding about our movement is that, you know, it's like you had the wheel, then you had the horses,

and you had the horse and buggy, and then you had the internal combustion engine car and then electric cars. And one day we're going to have robot cars and flying cars and teleportation and all this stuff. But we believe that, the solutions to the problems of the 21st century can be found in 19th century technology. Bicycles now adding electric motors to them, of course, but trains and buses and things like that.

We don't need like the whiz bang, awesome gadgets that are going to get us from one side of the city to the next. We need proximity. You know, you need the corner store where you can just walk. You need a convenient bus that's going to show up when you know, like you said before, without looking at a schedule. you need a safe bike lane where you can point in any direction and just know I will get to where I'm going safely. It's not going to be solved by everybody getting into little pods, you know, that are blasting us with advertising and like, you know, the latest message from Elon Musk or whatever. It's going to be these old technologies with new things layered on top of them, like GPS to find the nearest city bike, for example, or to know when the bus is going to show up. So that can be a kind of confounding thing because it can feel. like a step backwards for some people.

But we believe, if you look at cities around the world, it really is the step forward that we need. How do you guys view self-driving cars just because you mentioned them? I'm, yeah, curious how you see them fitting into all this. Self-driving cars don't really exist. And from the experts that I've talked to, full self-driving is just not actually something that is on. the near horizon. Waymos and Robotaxies are different. They're operating in a much more constrained environment than, you know, it's not like you're going from L.A. to Phoenix in your full self-driving car and you can just go. You know, a Waymo in San Francisco is familiar with this service area

that it's within because it's been trained there. I think that there is a place for that kind of vehicle, especially a taxi in a taxi setting, but we're not, I mean, also, I always think about this, like, if you have, like, an hour-long commute and you think, oh, it would be so much more wonderful if I were just sitting in my car doing nothing and I didn't have to drive it, I really, I really kind of question that. Like, I, like, what are you, I guess you're watching TV or whatever. Reading a book. Reading a book. But, like, I think people like, driving actually more, you know, in a way, like what they want is to be able to drive in a fun way, not to be just sitting in a box for an hour and a half on their way to something

by themselves. So, I mean, I'm not saying that those technologies are not going to come into play. And obviously, electric cars, it's great to get rid of the tailpipe emissions. But cars are cars. And the problems of cars persist. They kill people. They, and even full self-driving, like, there's going to never be cars that don't make mistakes. There's no way that that's going to happen. And they take up enormous amounts of space. They're very resource intensive.

The tire dust is incredibly toxic. It's something most people don't realize when it washes into rivers. It kills salmon. when it's, I mean, it's a terrible thing. And all of these negative, and then the parking and having to have, you know, these huge surface parking lots that take up enormous amounts of real estate in our, in our precious cities, all of that is the same for autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles. There's still cars.

Yeah. It kind of gets back to what we were saying before that if you think about the places you like to go to and hang out on vacation, or that little triangle you were talking about, you know, in your neighborhood, nobody walks through the streets of Paris or Mackinac Island in Michigan or, like I said, Main Street USA. So, you know, you know what makes this place a lot better? There are a lot of robot cars just circling endlessly looking for people to pick up. Like, we intuitively know that places with fewer cars are better.

So it's not that these things don't have their place. we just need to make sure that we are building cities to accommodate people. Yeah. Sort of cars here and there as opposed to what we've done historically, which is building cities to accommodate cars and putting the people sort of here and there. And so, yeah, you know, look, I would love to try out a Waymo in San Francisco. I think that would be cool. And maybe one day you will be able to take that trip from L.A. to Phoenix.

But I don't think L.A. or Phoenix will be better once I'm there if there's still all the cars. Yeah, I mean, there's self-driving Waymoes around L.A. now people take them. They're coming to New York, too. I think what people miss is that, A, all of these cars are continuously monitored by humans, first of all, to some degree. Second of all, the price is subsidized, you know? The price of the ride, they've priced it low because they're trying to show people that it works and, like, drive adoption like every tech product does.

But, like, pretty soon it's either going to be more expensive, where they're going to have to completely change business models. You know, I asked, I've told the story before, but I was at a conference once and I was talking to a guy who worked at Lyft and he was talking about, oh, you know, when we can have robot drivers, you know, we save money versus human drivers.

And I was like, well, how does that make sense? Because currently you guys pay someone less than minimum wage to supply their own car, their own gas, their own insurance, and do the labor, right? And so how is it cheaper for you guys to operate your own fleet of expensive autonomously driving vehicles, you know, that you have to ensure and charge less than a current riot hailing. How does that make sense?

And he says, oh, well, you know, right now it's subsidized. But what we think is going to happen is everyone is going to buy their own self-driving car. And then they're going to license them to us, like, you know, for part of the day, you'll like rent your Tesla out to Lyft, drive around for you. And I was like, no, we're fucking not. That's what they think people are going to do. They think people are going to buy a self-driving car and like let lift drive it around for me. And then I get to use it on the weekends.

Like I'm going to Airbnb my car. Like, that's insanity. The other issue is that this could lead to more driving. There have been experiments where people are given a car and driver. You know, like a family of four is given a car and a driver. And what they have found is that it leads to more trips when people don't have to. So think about a situation where you're a busy parent and you've got one kid going to soccer practice and one kid going to violin practice and you need to go to get groceries and the other parent needs to go to a yoga class. Well, now instead of one car going here, there, there, there and there, you could potentially have four driverless cars summoned to your house, plop everybody in and you go.

And that would be a nightmare for all kinds of places, not just cities, right? You would just lead to so, so much more traffic and so much more noise. So again, I just don't think we're going to solve. Like, we have to ask ourselves, what problem are we trying to solve? And I don't, like a lot of Silicon Valley technology, that is not a question that is usually asked at the start of the process. It's usually, let's just get it out there and see what happens. Yeah.

So do you guys feel that we are making progress as a society towards, you know, ending our car dependence because, yes, there's all these great projects at the same time, you know, or building subways in L.A. We're also widening freeways at the same time. And we're building more suburbs continuously. So do you see us moving the boulder in the right direction? I think to paraphrase a quote from Jeanette Sada Khan, the former commissioner of the Department of Transportation here in New York, the people are usually ahead of the politicians. You know, every time we install a new bike lane, a new bike share system, a new street car, a new transit line, I think about like Bright Line in Florida, you know, one of the most car-dependent, most dangerous places for driving in the country. Bright Line is a huge success.

I mean, they have some financial problems and there's safety problems. There are some safety issues, but the ridership is off the charts. There's some other train lines in the country where as soon as they open up, they get filled up. So again, I think it comes down to political leadership. The people are hungry for something different. I think we have been sold to myth that Americans are different. We have this love affair with cars, which we get into is a Madison Avenue creation that is not a folksy saying. And I do think people are hungry for something different.

There's the generational piece that Sarah was mentioning earlier that people just like the experiment that we've had with cars over the last century or so has failed. And I think people are seeing it more clearly. You know, a book like ours, Life After Cars, I think 10 years ago, it would have been like, oh, that's a book for like those weirdo bike activists. And now we have a mainstream publisher, Penguin Random House, saying like, okay, we're willing to take a chance on you guys and get this book out there because we think there's a mainstream audience for it. So look, we have some serious headwinds, not least of all,

is our fascist government that is just hostile, quote unquote, to anything that doesn't have a gas burning. engine and four wheels. But I do think we're winning the culture war a bit more than we used to. Yeah, I would have to agree. And I used to feel a little bit like a, I used to feel sort of embarrassed when I would tell people what I covered as a journalist. I would kind of be like, oh, mm-mm.

And now I just say it. And, you know, sometimes I get a little bit of pushback. But a lot of times of people are like, oh, my. my God, that's so great. Like, I get that a lot now. And that is really, really different. And that is one of the things that keeps me going. And also, in the rest of the world, outside of North America, there's a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot happening. And, you know, this is not all there is here. And thank goodness. And so this is one of those areas where, like, you know, if you look at what we have done to our society, our car dependence is simply bad for the country. And other countries have figured

this out and have better public transportation. And those countries are going to beat us. If you want to look at it in terms of nationalism, which I don't always, I don't always like to do. But like, do you want to be, you know, people come to America. It's embarrassing, you know, what they have to deal with. Don't we want to be a country that is leading and is easy to get around, you know, in the way that other countries are. And that means that just that natural spirit of competition and trying to make the place a better place to live, like could potentially lead us in the right direction.

Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, sort of where Sarah started was like, if you can name a problem, there's probably a car at the bottom of it. But, you know, if you can, the solutions to those, to so. many of our problems. Climate, democracy, all kinds of stuff. Start with re-nitting communities and getting people out of cars and face-to-face with each other, whether that's walking, biking, sitting across from each other on a bus or on a train. We can do this. And we know that it's preferable

to a lot of, to the status quo for sure. So how can folks be a part of your movement? What do you suggest they do? And most importantly, I want you to pitch this at the folks who live in the suburbs who say, I live in this area where I don't have the options. What do I do? Well, I think, first of all, buy the book, life after cars, you know, where we really think that the book is geared towards, of course, the people who sort of understand our message and understand these issues. But it's also geared towards the people who are coming at it fresh and might not understand why it is better. You know, how is it that if you widen a highway, it leads to more traffic? That kind of stuff that nobody ever really questions.

Look, even in those small towns, I'd say especially in those small towns, you know, why do people move to the suburbs if they've lived in the city for a while? They want a little bit more space. They want cheaper housing, but they tend to think of suburbs as like friendlier places, safer places,

but if you factor in the amount of driving that you have to do, then it's not. And when we sort of think about the idealized Norman Rockwell small town, what is it? It's a place where your kids can walk to the park, where they can walk to school. So we're not talking about every place being Manhattan. You know, we're not talking about every place being Brownstone, Brooklyn, or Los Angeles. We're talking about small towns, former streetcar suburbs, rural communities that have that

like town hall in the middle of like a little main street where people can know their neighbors. So I think, you know, just get involved. There probably are people like you. out there who want to just be able to walk to the store, who want to bike. You're not a weirdo, perhaps. You might think you are. You know, talk to your elected officials

and say, hey, we've got that one dangerous street to get to the grocery store. What if we put in a stop signal there in a crosswalk and shorten the crossing distance a little bit? Again, it's not turning every place into Amsterdam. It's just making it so that every now and then maybe you could make a choice other than a car. Yeah, and find,

find those people and and build that community and, you know, that might be go to your local bike shop and find out about rides that they do or go to that city council meeting where they're talking about what to do with the town square or, you know, and then just like literally talk to other people and organize with them and find people who see it your way. and put some pressure on the people who have the power to change things because, you know, it does work and we've seen it work in communities around the country

and you can be part of making things better, but first you have to see that there's a problem and you also have to believe that change is possible. Yes. Thank you so much for coming on the show. The name of your podcast is the war on car. right? The name of the book is Life After Cars. Folks can, of course, pick up a copy of the book at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. Where else can people find you on the internet? So the book is at Lifeaftercars.com. And yeah, the podcast is available wherever

podcasts are sold. And, you know, we're both on Blue Sky and all of these social media places you might expect to find us. You look for the war on cars, basically, on any social media platform. Except for X. Except for X. Famously owned by a car manufacturer. And that's really your only problem. Doug and Sarah, thank you so much for being on

the show. Thanks so much. It was awesome. Well, thank you once again to Doug and Sarah for coming on the show. That URL once again, if you want to pick up a copy of their book, is factuallypod.com slash books. That link supports not just the show but your local bookstore as well via our partners, bookshop.org. Thank you so much to them. If you want to support the show directly, head to patreon.com slash Adam Con over five bucks a month. It gets you every episode of the show

ad-free for 15 bucks a month. I will read your name in the credits this week. I'm just grabbing some people who have supported us. I want to thank Matt Claussen, Joseph Ginsburg, Christina Mendez, Kevin Sosa, Raghav Kaushik, Hayden Matthews, Eric Ziger, and Phil Hanowalt, not to mention Joker on the sofa. Thank you so much for your support Joker on the sofa. If you want me to read your name or silly username at the end of the show that URL Patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Of course, if you want to come see me do stand-up comedy on the road, Des Moines, Iowa, Atlanta, Philly, Pittsburgh, Brooklyn, New York on November 15th, Atlanta, Georgia, Orlando, Florida.

Head to Adam Conover.net for all those tickets and tour dates. I want to thank my producers, Sam Radman and Tony Wilson. Everybody here at a headgum for making the show possible. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next time on Factually. That was a HeadGum podcast. What's up, everybody? I'm Kyle Mooney. And what's up, everybody?

I'm Beck Ben. And, man, ooh, I got, we got something to tell you. Oh, yeah, we definitely do. Yes, it's a brand new podcast on HeadGum. That's right. And it's called What's Our Podcast? Yep. And that's because we don't have a single idea what our podcast you'd be about.

Yeah, we don't. So we actually have a guest. Come on and they tell us what they think our podcast should be about, and then we try it. Yep. Guests like Mark Maren, Jack Black, Brittany Brosky, Caper Lan, Bobby Moynihan, Meg Stalter, and Tim Balls, Landon Axler, Corey, Joni McGreeze, and Dender. And Dender. New episodes release every Wednesday.

So subscribe to what's our podcast. On YouTube or any of your favorite podcast platforms. Yeah. I'm going to go do it right now.