Factually! with Adam Conover - Why It’s Legal to Kill Someone with Your Car, and Other Ways Our Laws Make Driving Mandatory with Greg Shill

Episode Date: November 13, 2019

Professor at the University of Iowa College of Law, Greg Shill, sits down with Adam to explain about why our legal system prioritizes car travel and punishes those who don’t or aren’t able to drive. This episode is sponsored by Exploding Kittens (www.explodingkittens.com/factually code: FACTUALLY) and Dashlane (www.dashlane.com/factually code: FACTUALLY) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know, I got to confess, I have always been a sucker for Japanese treats. I love going down a little Tokyo, heading to a convenience store, and grabbing all those brightly colored, fun-packaged boxes off of the shelf. But you know what? I don't get the chance to go down there as often as I would like to. And that is why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself.

Plus, they throw in a handy guide filled with info about each snack and about Japanese culture. And let me tell you something, you are going to need that guide because this box comes with a lot of snacks. I just got this one today, direct from Bokksu, and look at all of these things. We got some sort of seaweed snack here. We've got a buttercream cookie. We've got a dolce. I don't, I'm going to have to read the guide to figure out what this one is. It looks like some sort of sponge cake. Oh my gosh. This one is, I think it's some kind of maybe fried banana chip. Let's try it out and see. Is that what it is? Nope, it's not banana. Maybe it's a cassava potato chip. I should have read the guide. Ah, here they are. Iburigako smoky chips. Potato

chips made with rice flour, providing a lighter texture and satisfying crunch. Oh my gosh, this is so much fun. You got to get one of these for themselves and get this for the month of March. Bokksu has a limited edition cherry blossom box and 12 month subscribers get a free kimono style robe and get this while you're wearing your new duds, learning fascinating things about your tasty snacks. You can also rest assured that you have helped to support small family run businesses in Japan because Bokksu works with 200 plus small makers to get their snacks delivered straight to your door.

So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way I don't know what to think I don't know what to say Yeah, but that's okay Yeah, that's okay I don't know what to say Welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover

and, you know, I kind of hesitate to say this while so much of my audience is behind the wheel while they're listening to this, but did you know that it's more or less legal in America to kill someone with your car? But if you're sober and you happen to mow down a cyclist, small family, or a Girl Scout through sheer negligence or just driving like an asshole, you won't face much or any consequence. Our legal system will shrug, say, hey, shit happens, and let you off on your merry way. Great for you, bad for the person you just manslaughtered or woman slaughtered or person slaughtered. I am not exaggerating. Negligent driving might be fatal, but it's almost never prosecuted. In New York City, driver mistakes were a factor in 70% of pedestrian deaths. But until 2017, drivers were ticketed for less than 1% of crashes. We're not talking prosecuted, just getting a ticket written up. And an investigation of pedestrian deaths in

Philadelphia found that only 16% resulted in any felony charges. And look, this is bizarre, right? This is an entire category of ways people kill each other in America that almost never gets any legal attention whatsoever, even though nearly 6,300 pedestrians were killed by cars in 2018 alone, which was a 10-year high. And look, I know people love to blame the victim and say, oh, well, pedestrians and cyclists, they don't obey the signals, blah, blah, blah. But that is not true. Drivers break traffic laws at around the same rate that cyclists do.

This blindness is embedded in the very language we use to talk about this problem. Notice how people always talk about car accidents rather than car crashes, implicitly taking the responsibility away from the driver. Hey, don't worry about it. I'm sure it was just an accident. Ah, don't worry, it's not the driver's fault. Look, let me give you a specific example.

The other week here in LA, a four-year-old girl was killed by a car and its driver as her mother was walking her to preschool. And a number of the articles written about it placed the blame not at the feet of the driver, but at the lack of a crossing guard. One headline didn't even mention the car or the driver. It just said, four-year-old girl dies walking to preschool with mom in Koreatown. Like, this girl just happened to drop dead and for no particular reason. No, it was a driver who killed her with a car. We can say this,

we can address this, but we never do. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you're operating a two-ton deadly machine, you bear the responsibility of doing so safely. And you know, if you're so negligent or malicious that you kill a person by doing so, I think that's worthy of some measure of punishment. I think we'd all agree with that, right? But that's not the world that we live in. Instead, we have built our society around cars to such an extreme degree that we essentially have two separate legal systems, depending on whether or not you're behind the wheel. It's like a magic trick. Step into a car and poof, you suddenly have the legal right to kill with impunity, abracadabra. But once you

park that car, get out and start walking down the sidewalk, you lose that right and you also lose the protection you normally get from the government of being killed by another citizen. If someone murders you with a car, sorry, they're not going to do anything about it. And it's not just vehicle fatalities that follow this pattern. In all aspects of American society, we have an entire legal regime that prioritizes cars and drivers. This legal regime is called automobile supremacy. And to tell us more about it, we have Gregory Schill on the show today. He's a law professor at the University of Iowa, and he's the author of the forthcoming law review article, Should Law Subsidize Driving? Please welcome Gregory Schill.

Well, Greg, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me, Adam. It's great to be with you. So you wrote a Law Review article where you developed this idea called automobile supremacy. Can you tell me what that is? Yeah, so this is the idea that whether you want to drive or not, our system of laws essentially compels you to. And folks who don't drive are either taking a risk with their lives or going to great inconvenience and expense to opt out of that system. But even for those folks, it's opting out is kind of an illusion because we're all subject to the externalities of automobiles. That is the effects or the consequences of living in a car-centric society.

The point I try to make in the article is that a lot of this is, of course, produced by public policy and to an extent by consumer preference. But in many ways, we are car-dependent by law. And so that's what I'm trying to highlight here. Yeah, that's a really good point. I mean, I've talked about in this podcast before how I quit driving a year or two ago because I don't like it. It was making me unhappy. I have bad eyesight, NADD, and you put that together and I was like, I'm going to murder somebody one day, and I don't want to. And it was just making me unhappy to do it. And I was like, I'm going to take the bus around L.A. and, of course, Lyfts and Ubers when I have to.

But I moved to an area where I can take public transportation regularly, which is certainly I'm in a lucky position to be able to do so because not everyone in L.A. can afford to live near public transportation. I'm in a lucky position to be able to do so because not everyone in LA can afford to live near public transportation. But you're absolutely right. Even though I am sort of willing to go through inconvenience, right, in order to live the lifestyle I want to live, I admit I'm somewhat bloody minded about it and I can't expect everyone else to do the same, you know, because I give a shit more than most people. I am still subjected to living in a car based society. Like everything is still, you know, the system of city planning is still set out so that places I want to go are like take extra long to walk to. Like I still have to walk across super wide parking lots even after I take the bus to the place. You know, like my versus say when I lived in Brooklyn and, you know, I could stop by the corner store on the way home and it was a lot quicker.

Now, when I stop by the corner store, I have to literally walk a quarter mile across a parking lot, um, in order to get into the store. And yeah, there's the fumes. It's dangerous because, uh, you know, people are very, uh, reckless on, you know, impatient when, uh, crossing crosswalks in their vehicles. patient when crossing crosswalks in their vehicles. So yeah, like I can't, I'm not able to live in a pedestrian society all by myself. I'm still subject to cars in this big way. That's just it. It's a collective action problem. It's a classic situation where joint action is required to make a change. You could compare it to recycling, right? So a couple

generations ago, or even into the 90s, many places didn't have curbside recycling. And so we'd place the onus on the individual to go and gather their bottles and cans and go take them to an offsite facility. It was a real hassle. Not a lot of people did it. But even that required some collective action because you had to build those facilities and you had to have cities that sought out contracts with recycling providers and so forth. Right. So it's impossible for any one person to recycle. You have to have a system. Right now we have a system. And it's a system that produces really bad outcomes because it's exclusively designed to optimize car travel. because it's exclusively designed to optimize car travel. Yeah, and this gets back to a point I hit on my show and on this podcast all the time

that there are some problems that you can't solve individually through individual action. I've actually used this to talk about climate change that like, you know, you can't, we can't all make individual choices that'll fix climate change. We need to take collective action as a society to change our way of life in the same way that even if every person in Los Angeles was like, I'm going to I'm going to take the bus and the subway. That wouldn't improve our transportation system by itself because we would have to actually build more train lines, more bus lines.

Like we'd have to pass bond measures. We'd have to elect officials that are going to get those things built. It's not the sort of thing you can just decide to do in order to change the world. You have to like convince the rest of society to prioritize it as well. So, you know, I don't think it's like climate change. I think they're actually the same in a lot of ways. So, transportation, cars specifically, are the number one source of greenhouse gases now in the United States. That's just the emissions from the cars themselves. Then we have a massive infrastructure network, most of which is built for cars, that itself entails production of tons and tons of additional

emissions. Here, I'm talking about roads, I'm talking about parking structures, parking lots, freeways, driveways, all sorts of types of pavement, essentially, that are incredibly wasteful and damaging to the environment because of the runoff and so forth that they cause, but specifically generate a lot of GHGs that bake the earth. And these are not even accounted for when we say that transportation is the number one, that cars are the number one source of greenhouse gas emissions. GHGs are greenhouse gases, correct? That's right. And then you have the greenhouse gases that are produced by making the cars. Making a car and transporting it is a very energy intensive process. And these are heavy, complicated machines, even electric cars. They are slightly less complicated, but the production of batteries is hugely damaging to the earth. is hugely damaging to the earth. So it's a great example of how an individual trying to choose to walk or take a bus is not going to make a big impact.

And if everybody tried to take the bus, we don't really have a way, a system, of ratcheting up the provision of bus service. We do in the driving world. It's called level of service. It's encoded into federal law and state law. And agencies, departments of transportation are meant to expand roads continuously until more and more cars are accommodated if there's a growth in cars. We don't have that kind of principle in mass transit when it should actually be more important.

We should be encouraging people, not just people who are willing to be brave or willing to go out of their way or incur extra expense. But we want everybody to be able to, in a practical and safe way, get around without generating these huge amounts of greenhouse gases. Yeah. And in fact, it almost seems like the opposite. Like I won't get too local here, but in LA, where I live, the, you know, our, our Metro, our public transportation authority, which, you know, should be engaged in trying to increase the number of people riding public transit, given the city's goals, right? The city has very aggressive climate goals and goals about like making sure that less people are driving and more people are taking public transit. That's like what

they want to do in the next couple of decades. At the same time, ridership has gone down because the price of gas has gone down and because of Uber and Lyft and things like that. So they've started cutting service, like they've started running buses less often and trains less often, which is the opposite of what you want to do if you want to increase the number of people riding, because if they come less often, then less people are going to take them because they're less convenient because they're waiting at the bus stop for longer. And so they only really know how to cut service and the things that would improve the service., for instance, taking away,

like, this is going to sound like insanity to a lot of people listening, but taking away the parking on the side of, you know, some of our major thoroughfares and turning them into bus-only lanes, right, would, you know, probably triple the speed of the buses. I mean, you know, that's not exact, but that's off the top of my head. And, you know, like,, you know, that then the buses

would actually be faster than cars that are stuck in traffic. They could run them far more often, far more people could ride them, et cetera. But yeah, you're right. There just doesn't seem to be a legal mechanism like by which a city council or a county planner would do that because we know what would happen. The people who own the expensive cars, who need a place to put their Lexuses, have their city officials on speed dial, and they know how to push back on that really hard. And so our officials are very reactive against making any change that way, and there's no pressure to do it. So it's sort of like, you raise a good point that our political system seems

unable to make that sort of change. Yeah, I agree completely. And by the way, there's data supporting everything you're saying. New York, for example, just this month, barred private vehicle traffic from about a mile and a half of a major east-west street, 14th Street in Manhattan. And what happened was it became a lot quieter, became a lot more pleasant to walk or bike on that street. And the buses moved much faster, so much faster that the transit agency had to tell drivers to slow down. In addition, ridership jumps. It jumped a lot during the week, but it jumped even more on the weekend, which I think was surprising to a lot of people. Number one, our transportation agencies mainly have in mind a 1950s world where, or at least their version, their impression of a 1950s world where you have the male commuter coming in from the suburbs, he wants to get into the city as fast as possible and get out as fast as possible.

And the same, and if they live within the city, then the same, they want to just get where they're going as fast as possible without regard for the impacts on the neighborhood. But that's, of course, a really incomplete picture of who exists in society and what people do in society. First of all, you have men working hours that aren't nine to five, Monday to Friday. But then you also have men, women, children, seniors, and so forth, who are making trips other than from a residential area to a job center. You have them picking up groceries or making caregiving trips or running errands and so forth. These uses are so denigrated or disregarded that there's just no, you know, there's no recognition. So, a lot of places don't even have service on the weekends at all. Anyway, so this was surprising to a lot of folks.

And now to their credit, the New York Transit Agency has upped service. They're going to be adding buses and looking at schedules so that this will become a good thing. But that goes directly to your point. And it was difficult politically. They had to face down litigation. It's still being appealed to the state high court. There are a lot of powerful, wealthy citizens who live close to the street and they park their luxury cars nearby. They want to be able to continue to do that for free, paid for by you and me. Yeah. Yeah, and it's so funny how entitled they feel.

I'll get to your essential insight in a second, but I love just continuing to rant about this for a moment that I remember when, I believe it was a while back, but when I still lived in New York and they were taking away parking near Prospect Park, they were removing a lane of parking, and the outcry was, well, you're making it impossible

to have a car here in Brooklyn. And it was like, yeah, that's the point. We don't think that people should be having cars in this densely populated part of the city. It's like not a good use of space. And there's like subways and buses that can get you around. And like, if you do want to have a place to park, like you should pay for it. You shouldn't just be

parking on the street. Like we don't want to subsidize that anymore. But that's such a foreign notion to us as a society. But let's, let's get away from, you know, our sort of, you know, the population's assumptions about this and talk about the law. How does the law actually punish people like myself who don't drive or who are not able to drive and make their lives harder? Yeah, so 100 million Americans don't have a driver's license. Really? That's far more than I would have thought. Yeah, now some of them are children. Others are senior citizens who are no longer able to drive.

Others have disabilities. And then some by choice and also by expense, the expense of going through the process. But also, we have a systemic social problem of punishing poor people. And one way that our court system does that is to take people's licenses, sometimes even for unrelated offenses. So, you know, we have this huge population, almost a third of the country that cannot drive. Even for those of us that do have a license, we really should see ourselves as at best temporary drivers. We really should see ourselves as, at best, temporary drivers.

Because for the first phase of life, it's unlawful for us to drive. We are too young. And then even if we get a license on the very day that we become legally eligible and keep it and are able to afford not just owning but operating and garaging and repairing, maintaining, gassing up a car for our entire life after that. We have maybe 60 years of driving. For many of us, it'll be less. This is assuming that we don't have neurological issues that preclude us from driving or physical disabilities. But then for most of us, our driving life expectancy, that is the age at which it is no longer safe to drive, kicks in about 10 years on average before our life expectancy. So for the final 10 years, we are also, it's not safe for us to drive. We're a danger to ourselves. We're a danger to loved ones in our cars, and we're a danger to others outside the car. So it's really just this middle chunk of life

that we're at best able to drive. And again, that assumes that we have the financial ability to afford a reliable vehicle, which is hardly universal. I think many folks are unaware of that. You mentioned New York and Los Angeles. I'll give you an example of Detroit. I grew up about an hour from there. Detroit is Motown, the capital of the car. They've destroyed their public transit. They used to have a fantastic, like LA, fantastic street car network, one of the best in the world. They uprooted all of that. And only in Detroit, 26% of people don't have reliable access to a car and they don't have good public transit there. So for hundreds of thousands of people, they are unable to take advantage of the very thing that the city is famous for. So, you know, we've precluded all these things. On the law points, we'll just use, you know, one example.

So say you're one of the 100 million people that doesn't have a license. Or say you're in the other group that has a license but isn't in your car 100% of the time. So our criminal law has a special category of homicide for somebody who kills you when the weapon is a car as opposed to, say, a baseball bat or a knife or a gun. Yeah. Right? So that's vehicular homicide. We have a special category for that. It's not just a semantic thing.

It carries a lower penalty, typically, than other types of manslaughter. It's unintentional homicide. types of manslaughter, it's unintentional homicide. So that's a recognition that our system is dangerous, and it produces a lot of deaths. And sometimes the system will assign moral and criminal culpability, but it doesn't want to do it too harshly. We want to provide the special subsidy or cheaper way to commit homicide. Now, I don't think that's what legislators had in mind, right? But that's the effect. If I told you that you could go up to your studio's roof and swing around a baseball bat and let go

and let it fly off onto Hollywood Boulevard and kill somebody, we don't call that baseball bat homicide or being a clown homicide and send you to jail for much less time, if at all, that's just manslaughter and you're going to spend some significant time in prison. So it's, you know, I think it's symptomatic of a larger problem. That's one category in the article. I go through about 10. I can get happy to go through each of them quickly or

however you think is best. Well, I just want to talk about this concept because, you know, I do sort of understand how we got to this place. Right. If you've got a system of transportation where everybody has to drive these deadly vehicles and if you look away for a moment, you're likely to kill somebody. Right. It can. But or if or if you are, you know, you can likely to kill somebody, right? It can, uh, but, or if, or if you are, you know, you can be more grossly negligent than that, right? There are like, there's a spectrum of negligence. Um, but like these are deadly and people are going to kill each other with them. Right. Um, if we were fully punishing every single person who committed one of these, uh, manslaughter or woman slaughters or person slaughters, that would like cause a lot of

strife in the system, right? Because, you know, we'd be levying, you know, fair but harsh punishments on our fellow citizens all the time. And it would like increase, I don't know, the psychic cost of participating in this system. So in order to sort of keep it sane and running smoothly, it's a lot easier just to say, oh, yeah, no, it just happens. Like, don't worry about it too much, right? I think about this a lot. When we were talking about this topic in our Writer's Room for Adam Ruins Everything,

because we did a segment on this topic, and I'm happy for you to, very happy that you're coming in to talk to us in about it in more depth um but you know one of our writers in the room we were talking about it and you know she got a little emotional because she was like well well i have to drive i don't have a choice but to drive and and the idea that like i could become a criminal or like a murderer you know, by driving is like a horrible thing to think of myself. I don't want to think of myself in that way. Like, I can't take that on every time I get behind the wheel. Like, you know, accidents happen. And like, I want to, I would want to classify anything that I did as an accident because I can't take that moral responsibility as a matter of my practical life on a daily basis. It's just too much, you know?

And, and I think that's true. Like she's, she's right about that emotionally. Like, you know, it, it would, it's very difficult for us to, every time we're on the way to the store, think about like, I could, I'm basically taking a load, loaded AK 47 on the streets and I, and I have to like treat it that seriously. And any mistake for me could result in someone's death. That's like we can't handle that on a daily basis. So instead and, you know, imagine, you know, prosecuting every single person in that way as though they were handling a gun like it would be, you know, so taxing for our legal system. And these are folks who are otherwise, you know, upstanding citizens, right?

So it's a lot easier and cleaner for everyone involved to just say, no, these kinds of crimes are like, mostly okay. They just happen. It's an accident. Don't worry about it. Take that off yourself. If anything bad happens, hey, you know, a couple of eggs get broken. Don't worry about it. Take that off of yourself. If anything bad happens, hey, you know, a couple of legs get broken. Don't worry about it. It's not on you. And that's like, I get how we ended up with a system that way, but it still means that like when you're walking down the street, your state, the state that represents you is not protecting you from being killed in this manner, like as they are for all other crimes. Like if, uh, you know, the state protects me against someone stabbing me, hopefully most of the time, um, uh, they don't

protect everybody equally, but they do offer that protection of like, if you are murdered, we will punish somebody. Right. That's like one of the points of a government, but it doesn't apply to cars because we're specifically asking every citizen in this country. No, you got to drive this thing. So you know what? We'll go easy on you if you fuck it up. Is that what's going on? I think that's right.

And I think that you're pointing up exactly how the system responded in the 20th century to this problem. So in the 20th century, you suddenly have the ability to go faster than a human could ever have gone before under their own power. Meaning you control the car and you can go 20, 30, 40, 100 miles an hour. That was never true before. It really was a gift of freedom and really empowering. I mean, people must have felt like Icarus 100 years ago when they could get behind the wheel and do this stuff.

And that's great. It has some negative consequences. And so one way to approach it is to say, look, once we've built a system that mandates driving, we can't very well lock people up for the inevitable mistakes that they make because they're human. And so, we're going to have some deaths, but we can't fill our jails with drivers like your writer, right? And I'm sympathetic to that. I think, though, that that's not really a great solution. I think it came's got a, I think it's, it comes from, came from a good place, maybe initially. In fact, these, it was prosecutors that lobbied state legislatures to create the vehicular manslaughter offense because they had trouble persuading juries to

convict people for regular manslaughter. So their view was, look, we can't get people to throw their fellow citizens in jail for mistakes that they fear that they themselves will be making tomorrow. Exactly. And that's exactly how my writer was feeling in that moment. I could make that mistake. And then what happens to me? Yeah. I drive, and I'm fearful of that.

And we could talk about how to sort of be more personally responsible. But as we started the show off by saying it, I don't think that's really the right frame. So I think, you know, that's that is a solution that we arrived at in the 20th century in the US. That's not what's been happening more recently, especially outside the US, but at least as a formal matter, in dozens of cities and states in the US that have formally embraced a different framework. This is a framework of systematic safety. So instead of approaching the transportation system and saying, accidents are inevitable, deaths are inevitable, we're going to not punish them or not punish them severely. We approach the system and saying, look, accidents are really likely, mistakes, deaths are really likely as a

product of this system, lots of millions of people driving around in their own heavy, fast vehicles. So let's design streets so that they're safer, so that we can prevent collisions, especially the most dangerous collisions, and go from there. And that's a reorientation that's happened in the past 20 years under the banner of something called Vision Zero, which is the goal of eliminating road fatalities. A lot of departments of transportation have embraced this. The U.S. DOT has. A lot of cities have. My state, Iowa, has our DOT. And there are specific bills to move laws to move in that direction. Scott Wiener, who's a state senator in California, has sponsored one. It was actually enacted by the California state legislature by a large majority. The governor vetoed it. But we're, you know, the speaker of the New York City Council, Corey Johnson, has authored a master plan for the streets of the city of New York to remake how the city designs its streets. It's a project really begun under Bloomberg and continued unevenly, but continued by de Blasio, the current mayor.

So, you know, there is movement on this and there's been progress, but it's been really slow. Yeah. movement on this and there's been progress, but it's been really slow. And that's the second piece of this, which is the first is the climate destruction. And you're in California, so you're under fire threat as far as I can tell, basically every day. It's very serious. People are losing their homes. Yeah. Fire season is year round now. Yeah. Fire season is, yeah, year round. The other piece though, is just the public health problem that we're already seeing. So there are 89,000 deaths a year from cars. 36,560 last year were from car crashes. But another 53,000 a year come from car pollution.

another 53,000 a year come from car pollution. This is exhaust, but also particulate matter 2.5 and particulate matter 10. Those are technical terms for tiny, tiny objects, basically micro plastics that are about 20 to 30 times thinner than a human hair. These are tiny things. They Tiny things, they get aerosolized by brake design, by brake pads, and by the engine and tires. And then we breathe them in. And so we ingest them. They become embedded in our hearts, in our lungs, our arteries. And they kill people. They also cause a lot of brain damage, asthma, emphysema. So this is a second problem that kills a huge number of people.

It's about the equivalent of 10 Boeing 737 Maxes crashing every single week. Wow. So two of those crashed worldwide, and we grounded them worldwide. Wow. So two of those crashed worldwide and we grounded them worldwide. But we were losing 10 of them a week from cars and we've taken only limited steps. Yeah. And so despite our improvement in the tentative steps we're taking with Vision Zero, this is still another huge way that cars and our reliance on the car is hurting us whether or not we drive drive right even though i don't drive i'm still breathing all of that in um well we're gonna keep unpacking this but i gotta take a quick break we'll be right back with more greg shill I don't know anything.

Okay, we're back with Greg Schill. So, Greg, let's talk about some other ways that our society, our system of laws is structured to force people to drive and to punish people who don't. How does the tax code work to benefit car drivers and owners? So I think this is not intuitive to many people, but our tax code is omnipotent and touches most aspects of life in America. Driving is no different. There are three we do that through the mortgage interest deduction. Now, this is available to you whether you want to buy a condo in Manhattan or you want to buy a farmhouse in Iowa. But realistically, or at least empirically, the benefit has been shown to generate a higher number of houses in sprawl-dependent areas, very sprawly areas that are bad for the environment, bad for the climate, and also compel you to drive. That's because of zoning restrictions, which make it unlawful to build densely, to build apartment buildings. Some of the charming old apartment buildings that we see in our big cities are now illegal to build densely, to build apartment buildings. Some of the charming old apartment buildings that we see in our big cities are now illegal to build.

We have a charming old such building here in Iowa City, population 75,000. It's illegal to build that kind of building today because of zoning. So what that means is when people are borrowing money, yeah. I've often wondered that, you know, like in, you know, the city area, like I love a good city townhouse, you know, nice brownstone, very beautiful. That's what everybody loves. You know, that's the sort of, you know, the Cosby family house from the TV show. You know, that sort of image is like so romanticized. And I often wondered, like, why don't they build those anymore?

And I didn't realize it was actually illegal. Yeah, they don't build them anymore because they're illegal. Um, there are three ways those are illegal. Uh, first we have minimum lot requirements. That's a fancy way of saying you have to have a big yard. Um, so those townhouses, the reason they're townhouses is because they are close to each other. Um, and, uh, they are also, they tend to be relatively close to the sidewalk. But the second requirement kicks in, that's called the maximum floor area ratio or FAR. So that means that you can only build out to a certain percentage of the lot. So you have to have a big lot, big yard, and then you can only build one structure for one person or one family that covers only a certain percentage of the yard, usually a small percentage.

And then third, we make you build parking, whether you want it or not, whether the market demands it or not. So once you have to add a garage or a driveway, it's easy to see how these types of buildings became unlawful across the country. So those are all features that require the housing to be less dense, which means that you're going to have more sprawl, which means people are going to have to drive from place to place simply because cars are the only transportation method that can deal with a lack of density. Is that right? That's right.

And, you know, you mentioned walking a quarter mile to get a jug of milk. For many people, it's a lot further because zoning laws prohibit mixed uses. So it's illegal. Oh, I just meant that the parking lot was a quarter mile. Just getting the parking lot is an extra half. But yeah, no point taken that like, I'm, I'm in a better position than a lot of people. Yeah. So that's the product. All of, all of those things are products of law. The reason there's a gargantuan parking lot is not

because the market wants it. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it's rarely full. Yeah. And so it's, it's mandated by law that they have a certain number of spaces. Houston, for example, has 30 parking spaces per person. Wait, I'm sorry. Oh, like throughout the city of Houston, they've got 30 parking spaces for every person. That's right. And they never mandated that as such. There's no ratio that says you have to have 30 parking spaces for every human in Houston.

But every time you want to build something, whether it's a housing development or an office or what have you, you have to add just an extraordinary amount of parking under the Houston code. They've recently reformed this. Downtown and in a neighborhood called Midtown, adjacent to downtown, they have relaxed or abolished this. And so there is some movement here. San Francisco has abolished minimum parking

requirements. There's been legislation in other places as well, but this is still the norm in most of the country. So as you say, that ends up forcing us all to drive because it's not practical to walk anywhere. Sometimes there aren't even sidewalks. So it's a safety issue. It's also just a practicality issue. And I just got to say, I mean, we talked about this in the very first season of Adam Ruins Everything. The parking is such a dead zone in any city. Think about this for folks listening. Next time you're walking through a parking lot or a parking structure, look around and remember how you feel when you're in those spaces, right? You're unhappy. If you're outside, the sun is beating down. There's no shade. It's hot. You know, there's

heat radiating off from the pavement. It's ugly. It takes a long time to move through when you're in underground parking or in a parking structure. It like smells like gasoline. You want to get out of there because there's fumes. And then think about all the better uses that space could be put to. Like these are places where people could be living or working or shopping or this could be a grassy area where people are able to, you know, in Los Angeles, like in my neighborhood, we don't have a basketball hoop that people can use within a mile of where I live. Right. Like, um, just like kids are hopping the fence, uh, to get into, you know, the local school so they can just like play a pickup game of basketball because there's no, there isn't a single park space. Right. Um, and there's, but there's a ton of parking. And like, if we just had a little bit less of that requirement, like we could be, uh, putting that space to such better use instead of just letting it be a fallow desert in the middle of our own homes. That's exactly right. It's funny when we're driving, we always have anxiety about finding

a space near our destination. And about a quarter of urban traffic is actually people hunting for parking. There's a professor at UCLA named Donald Shoup who's really pioneered scholarship on this point. I know you've spoken to him in the past on the show. And, you know, he's proposed a lot of solutions that would address this. But I just want to sort of back up to a higher level for a moment.

You know, parking is great when you need it, but otherwise it really destroys life, creates these oceans of empty pavement. I think in hell, there is only parking. Yeah, I really like that. But still, you hear people talk about whenever people don't like a new development coming in, they say, well, where are all those people going to park? Like there's people have this stress about parking that it feels like, A, we're all entitled to free parking. We should all get it for free.

And B, we're all stressed out that there isn't going to be enough. So it's just build, build, build, build, build. When that just gets us into a situation where we all need more cars, so we need more parking spaces. Whereas if we all built in a more human-centric way, we wouldn't need parking. And then we could build more dense things, and then we could have more, it would be easier to get to everywhere we have to go without having to get in a car in the first place. Exactly. And that feedback loop, Adam, is fed by a couple other provisions of those tax codes. So the way we set up commuter benefits, we understand that we might have to pay for parking at work.

We want to be able to get that deducted from our taxes. And current law allows you to deduct what you pay in parking at work from your taxes. You pay pre-tax. By the way, that's also true for taking public transit. It was the case for a very long time that you could deduct much less for public transit. Now those are equal. But guess what? If you walk to work or you bike to work, you get no benefit at all.

Right. So you're leaving money on the table. Leaving money on the table. Leaving money on the table. And in fact, you're taking money out of your wallet to pay your colleagues to drive to work because you're subsidizing their parking. We're also paying people to buy electric cars. That might seem socially responsible until you drill down a little bit. You can actually get a check for up to 7,500 bucks, depending on the vehicle from the American taxpayer to buy an electric car, even if it's a luxury car. So if you want to buy a Porsche electric hybrid,

the government will pay you $6,700 to buy that. If you want to buy an e-bike, which the Porsche is like $100,000 and change. If you want to buy an e-bike, it's an electric bike that you can use to get up hills and get around no matter your physical fitness level. You're going to have to pay for that out of pocket. And by the way, if you want to park it, you're just going to have to do your best. You'll find a parking meter or a sign to lock it to. If you're lucky, a bike rack, and you'll use a lock you bought for 50 bucks at the bike shop. And that's that. For a car, we build these extremely expensive, elaborate structures, about $50,000 a space just to build a parking structure. And then there's the maintenance and damage from nature and just deterioration over time. And then, of course, the loss of tax revenue. We could be using that land for a

productive purpose and to generate jobs. But instead, we dedicate it to an ancillary purpose, to parking, which is just very space-intensive use of a land. So I understand why, on the face of it, okay, California or the federal government might want to give a subsidy to someone buying an electric car, especially in California where we have bad air quality. We want to get the air quality to be better. So let's get people to replace their gas guzzling cars with electric cars, you know, or cash for clunkers, that sort of program. I understand that, how that might have an effect. However, if people were, people will do whatever you incentivize them to do via the tax code to some greater extent, right? And so if we were to give people, if we really want to cut

back on emissions, well, then we should be incentivizing people to take the bus or take the train or walk to work, right? Like you should make people think, oh, wait, if I move, if I have to get a new job and I have to move, well, hold on a second. If I live downtown and I walk or take the bus to work, the government will give me a check for five grand or whatever, right? That'll defray the cost of that,

you know, downtown condo I'm gonna get instead of the place off in the suburbs. And that'll factor into all of your reasoning, just like the mortgage interest deduction does, if you're considering, should I buy a house or should I rent, et cetera. And yeah, so why, why not do that? Right? Like, why is it that like, you know, I'm making a, if someone, some, the even better choice we would agree for the climate would be to not buy the Tesla but take the dash bus instead. And why aren't we subsidizing that behavior? That is such a good question, and I've never thought about it before.

Yeah. Well, to be clear, we do to an extent. I mean, public transit agencies receive public funding, and you can deduct your bus pass from your taxes. receive public funding and you can deduct your bus pass from your taxes, but the structure of those subsidies is not as generous to people taking public transit as it is to people driving. And you get no subsidy at all for walking or biking until 2018. You for about a decade, you got a subsidy for biking, but the Trump tax bill did away with that. It was 20, all of 20 bucks a month. They took it away. Oh, wow.

Yeah. I think there's another angle to this as well, which is if you drive a Tesla, it's true that you have no tailpipe emissions. But that's only one piece of the puzzle. You still are generating a lot of these PM 2.5 and PM 10 emissions that are responsible for up to 90% of deadly emissions in traffic. So when you have a high... Where are those emissions coming from? They're coming from the tires, from tire wear, and from the brake pads. You can't see it, but you unfortunately breathe it in and they stay lodged in your heart.

You've seen those pictures of like a whale will wash up on shore and they cut it open, it's full of plastic. Yeah. Unfortunately, our organs are a little closer to that right now than we would like. You might not be able to see it, but that's what's going on. These are microplastics. San Francisco recently found that trillions of them

are washing into the San Francisco Bay every single year just from car tires and brake pads. But directly, these enter the human body through breathing. And they, in traffic, again, so not in the rural area, but in a place like any big city or any suburb, which is where a large majority of Americans now live, big city or any suburb, which is where a large majority of Americans now live, up to 90% of this comes not from the tailpipe, which that's where the Tesla helps you, but from the brake pads and the tires where the Tesla doesn't help you. So we're still paying people to buy cars that produce extremely deadly emissions. So sometimes they'll say zero emission vehicle, and I can't help but shake my head when I see that. And then of course, none of this has anything to do with car crash deaths and

injuries, which are almost 40,000 a year and have been jumping up for people walking and biking. For people biking, they're up over 6% last year, and they were up the year before as well. They were up over 6% last year, and they were up the year before as well. And they generate lots of congestion and make our cities kind of unlivable. The traffic is a nightmare, especially if you're on a bus, like you were saying, because we haven't made the political decision. We have made a political decision. The political decision is we're going to allocate all of our public road space to cars. The political decision is we're going to allocate all of our public road space to cars. And if a bus wants to join the mix, that's fine, but it doesn't get any special privilege, even though there are 100 people on the bus and there's one person in the Tesla.

Right. Have you ever seen one of those charts of how many – if you took every person on the bus and put them each into their own car, how much more space they would take up? It's massive. It's like a full two-city blocks worth of traffic can fit onto one bus. And yeah, so you'd think like, hey, maybe those should get a separate lane, but that almost never happens. What's wrong with,

I know you've written about how we enforce speed limits in America. Walk me through that, please. I'm sure everyone is very interested because speed limits are such a topic for debate. So we think about speeding as drivers. We never want to get pulled over for speeding. But we also know that you're not pulled over for going one, two, or even five or eight miles an hour over the limit most of the time. You know what the limit is, but you also know that the police routinely allow people to go faster. So that's one issue. But how about the adjustment of speed limits?

They are set in the first instance by statute, by the legislature, but then they can be adjusted by departments of transportation. Most DOTs use something called the 85th percentile rule. As far as I can tell, this is a basically unique rule of law. I've been scouring the law books to try to find another example of this. Tell me if you think it sounds crazy. I obviously do. So what happens under the 85th percentile rule is that the speed limit will be raised until only 15% of people are speeding. So 85% of people won't be breaking the law. So just to put this concretely, let's say that a particular type of machine gun is illegal.

machine gun is illegal. But the law says if 16% of people buy the machine gun, then we change the law and we make that machine gun legal. Yeah. Or legal for that number of people to buy it. Or what? Yeah, I see what you're saying. You're saying, well, let's not make a law that will change what people do. Let's just make a law that matches what people do. And then if people do something different, well, we'll change the law because the goal is to just write a law that makes it okay to do what people are already doing. That's not what laws are fucking for. What was going on? Yeah. I think you could talk to a lot of black and brown people behind bars who could attest that that's not how we handle drug policy, for example, or any other area of law. So actually, drug policy is a good counterpoint.

You know, in the past decade or so, public opinion has really changed on marijuana. And a lot of states have now legalized marijuana. But that's been through a democratic process. What's happened is, it's been different state to state, but basically people or their representatives have enacted laws that say that we are not going to criminalize marijuana, or maybe we'll even legalize it and subject to certain constraints and so forth. But the law was changed through democratic process, following a change in public opinion, but not because public opinion didn't automatically change the law. So here we let people who are lawbreakers, it's not even public opinion,

we didn't have a vote on how high the speed limit should be outside your kid's school. I think most people would say not that high, but right now speeders are setting the speed limit should be outside your kid's school. I think most people would say not that high, but right now speeders are setting that speed limit by reference to the 85th percentile rule. Yeah, the people who are breaking the rule are able to change what the rule is. But again, I sort of understand why it works that way. I remember when I started driving, I started driving at about the age of 30 regularly.

When I moved to LA, I lived in New York my whole life, so I didn't drive there. And I've had bad eyesight, like I told you. So I'm a late bloomer. So when I came to LA, I started driving. I drove daily for three or four years before I said I've had enough of this. So I've had my time behind the wheel, right? I've had enough of this. So I've, I've had my, I had my time behind the wheel. Right.

But I was startled to find when I started driving that the speed limit, you just don't use it. Like, unless you're on, you know, uh, uh, an expressway, you know, on an interstate in the Midwest and you're just going in a straight line and there's no one else around, then you might keep an eye on the speed limit. But like for city driving, you just drive as fast as everyone else. Like, I remember I would, like, like I would, I started driving with my girlfriend and I was like, oh,

the sign says 25. So I'll go 25. She's like, what are you doing? Like you're, you're, why are you driving this way? I was like, I'm following the signs. Like you don't do that. Nobody does that. That's not how you drive. Um, and in fact, there's a really great book I read a couple of years ago called Traffic. I forget the name of the author, but just about the social psychology of driving. And he writes about how no one obeys the speed limit. We actually just pick up on cues from the makeup of the street that we're driving on to figure out how fast to drive. So yes, how fast the other traffic is going, but also how wide is the lane that we're driving on to figure out how fast to drive. So yes, how fast the other traffic is going, but also, you know, how wide is the lane that we're in? Are there obstacles on either side? Do we feel that there are people crossing the street frequently? Are there, you know, for instance, if you're driving through a residential area where there's

parked cars on either side and it's kind of tight and there's a lot of trees and a lot of buildings and there's a lot of people walking up and down the sidewalk, you'll naturally drive slowly. But if you're driving on, you know, a big two, a big four lane and there's a median strip in the middle and there's all, you know, uh, and there's no trees or anything like that. Trees are like apparently a big, a big queue. You'll naturally drive faster. Um, and so I, I get that why, why the people said setting the speed limits might feel like, okay, well, we can't really control these people. People aren't using the signs. So let's just set it to whatever people are naturally using and change the road instead.

But still, we're talking about as a matter of law, that means we don't have a way to prosecute people. If someone is speeding and kills someone, because I mean, the, the, the chances of killing someone go up massively, depending on how fast you're going, going from 35 to 45, I forget how much it jumps, but it's a huge amount. Can't escape physics. That's right. Yeah. Uh, and that means that like, we're not able to prosecute folks, uh, who are recklessly endangering the rest of us by speeding. Yeah, that's a great book. First of all, Tom Vanderbilt is the author. Thank you, that's his name. Yeah, he does a really masterful job of laying out the role of design

and what are known as human factors in shaping our driving behavior. I think this is actually a healthy focus. And that's where things have gone in the 21st century, to some extent, again, in the U.S., but really radically in other countries. So 44 countries now, for example, including dozens of our peer nations, wealthy nations in Europe and elsewhere, but also countries that are a lot less advantaged than us, they require that vehicles now be designed to be safe for people outside the vehicle. So we rate vehicles only for crash worthiness. That's what NHTSA does, National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. So that's a consumer-focused standard um like our fuel economy standards

how likely is it to kill the person in the car is what we is what we're that's right that's right um and you know but we know that suvs are three times as likely to kill pedestrians as regular cars three times wow yeah um so the data on this is just coming up. There was a massive report in the Detroit Free Press last year documenting this. There was a draft regulation in the twilight months of the Obama administration to address it. It got scrapped. So right now we are an outlier. Again, 44 other countries have signed on to this.

It's called GTR 9. Again, 44 other countries have signed on to this. It's called GTR 9. It's a UN regulation that mandates that car makers consider the safety of people outside the car. Now, that might sound a little funny. Like, how do you make a car safe for people that it hits? But there are a lot of design features that car makers can add or avoid, right? So, one big one is leaving space between the hood and the engine so that if you do go on top of the hood uh there's some space for a crumple before you hit uh hit the hard

engine oh okay i see yeah yeah that's one example just make it make it a little bouncier make it a little bouncier yeah i mean you kind of want the eight-year-old to bounce. And unfortunately, car crashes are the leading cause of death for young people, both in the U.S. and worldwide. Well, and I'm guessing if you've got a, like, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm just sort of trying to picture why an SUV would be more dangerous. it's so much higher off the ground and the front of them tend to be so flat that if it hits you, it's like hitting a brick wall that, or it's like a brick wall hitting you, where you're just going to be propelled like onto the ground. Whereas like, if you imagine like, I don't know, like an old Honda Civic, like right, right after they started, you know, after they stopped being boxy and they started being kind of smooth in the front, if it hit you,

started, you know, after they stopped being boxy and they started being kind of smooth in the front, if it hit you, it might knock your legs out from under you. And then your butt falls onto the top of the car. And then you sort of roll your way up. Not a great scenario, but better than, you know, you're going to decelerate more slowly and thus have less damage done to you in that scenario. You're going to go, cause you go up over the hood and you'll sort of roll to a stop. That's right. In fact, I owned one of those Honda Civics. Thankfully, never had quite that experience in it.

But, yeah, that's just right. And this has been shown empirically. A car, a lot depends on the specifics, but typically somebody will go onto the hood and maybe the windshield. That's a lot better than going under the wheels. Yeah. I mean, that's how, that's how you do a stunt hit. Like when you watch, you know, I've been on shows where we do, you know, stunt, someone gets hit by a car and they basically jump onto the hood, right? Like it looks good for camera, but it's not that dangerous because they're sort of sliding. But yeah, going under the wheels or getting blasted right from the front is like, that's much more dangerous.

Yeah, so, you know, encouraging design modalities that are responsive to pedestrians and other vulnerable road users, softer bumpers, hood design, removing structures that are more rigid than they need to be. There's a trend recently of, I think it's probably a psychological thing, people adding what are known as bull bars to the front of their cars and trucks. These are these military-looking grates that you started seeing it on police cruisers, but now it's pretty common, especially on trucks. on police cruisers, but now it's pretty common, especially on trucks. And these are steel items that actually interfere with the car's own ability to absorb shock. So I think they're actually, they may be bad for the driver themselves, but they're not rated for that. Right, because they're harder than the rest of the car. So the car's not going to crumple in the same way. And crumpling is what causes the car to decelerate more slowly, which makes it more safe in a collision.

Right. And if you're in the car, you want it to crumple. Yeah. Nobody wants a high repair bill, but of things being equal, you'd rather that the car absorb more of the force of the collision rather than your body. Right. risks of the collision rather than your body. Right. And also I remember reading that it's now much more common for cars to have a really built up like pillar between the front windshield and the side window, which creates like much larger blind spots that, you know, the sort of scenario where you're, you're turning, making a left turn across an intersection where, you know, you have

to look for people crossing the street, it like puts a blind spot right where they're often crossing. I've experienced this myself. I used to drive a Prius and it has a huge, like, blocked off pillar there. That's another way that cars become more dangerous for pedestrians. Absolutely. What you're referring to is called the A pillar. And these are the pillars on the left and right-hand side of the windshield. They have been hardened and thickened in recent years, partly to make it safer for the occupant in the event of a rollover, but also to absorb collisions from other cars. collisions from other cars. There's just a pretty obvious arms race element to this, right? Where if the government and insurance agencies only rate vehicles from a consumer standpoint, from a driver standpoint, like I want to buy a car, how am I going to keep my family safe? Totally reasonable, right? But if that's the only criterion, we don't consider what

happens when you're driving around a tank, which that is the end point of this in a hundred years. If we continue on this path, we're all going to be in tanks. Um, yeah. Like, is that what we want? Is that, is that the kind of society that we want to live in where if you're outside of the tank, then you're just a goner. I mean, it's already too dangerous. You can just drive over pedestrians and never even notice because they just sort of like crumple under your wheels. Yeah, and it's a good point. Like I subscribe to Consumer Reports and they rate cars

and they rate them on their safety, but they don't rate them on what is their safety to people who they hit. The crash dummies are only inside the car, not outside the car, basically. Well, tell me this. We're getting towards the end here. I want to know, like, this system of automobile supremacy, where our whole system of life is built around the car, and you're penalized for not driving. How did we build it? Where did it come from? And how do we take it apart? Like, I'm sure there's plenty of people listening to this in their cars right now thinking, all right, well, I agree with the program, but what the hell do I do about it? I still need to get to work. And being in a car is the only way

I can do it. So how do we get here? And where do we go from here? I think we got here through an unfortunate series of missteps. There are a lot of stories one could tell about that. Peter Norton has a book called Fighting Traffic where he traces this history methodically. There are others who've written on it as well. century, it was not really welcomed. It was seen as a hazard, a danger. Cars were killing people. That was a new thing back then. The president in 1924 convened a national conference on this. There was a cartoon, really a polemical article, a polemical or editorial accompanied by a cartoon on the front page of the New York Times with the angel of death driving a car over the dead bodies of children. And so like 100 years ago, these things were really controversial, but they were also really appealing, especially once they became affordable and especially once the government was persuaded by the car companies, the oil companies, the cars to observe maximum speed limits and so forth, which was a new idea back then.

And they organized under the banner of Motordom. That was their name for themselves. And Motordom helped create the system we have today. But I don't think it's only a conspiracy sort of story. The reality is, for any individual, it's very rational if you can afford it to get around by car. It's convenient. It's safer than some other methods. You can control the climate and it's comfortable. It's quiet, all those things. But as a society, we're

now feeling the impacts. We're feeling them in the climate space where it's the number one source of GHGs, literally burning California right now. And number two, public health killing almost 90,000 people a year, 10 737 maxes every week, the equivalent. So, you know, that's kind of where we're at. And then how do we change that? Well, step one, I think. Let me just say i i agree i think we're all realizing that our decision uh whether it was based on conspiracy or you know we bought into it to our ourselves as a culture i think it was both was clearly like a like a generational mistake or a multi-generational

mistake like that we you know it's starting to look like what an error we made starting in the late 19th century, early 20th century. And it feels like 200 years from now, they're going to be looking back on this period and going like, my God, whoever thought this was a good idea? Because like, it's going to look like, you know, leeches and snake oil in terms of, oh, you know, the odd things that people of the past did. I know leeches are still sometimes used in medicine today, but, you know, you get what I'm saying. It's going to be like, oh, the follies of our ancestors to have required everyone to buy an expensive two-ton death machine. Yeah, so I agree.

Nothing is regulated. A lot of things are regulated. Nothing is regulated as generously as cars. So pharmaceuticals, we'll take that as an example. People say, you know, I have to have a car. I need it to get around. I get it. And in many cases, that's true. A lot of people need pharmaceuticals. They're life saving, whether we're talking about penicillin or opioids or what have you. But these are very closely regulated. No one denies that millions of Americans need opioids, but we've seen in tragic relief how deadly it can be when these deadly items are under-regulated. And we're working hard now to make progress on that. And there's no silver bullet, but the answer surely is not to just keep doing what we're doing. So we can't double down on the mistakes of the 20th century that you alluded to.

I think plane crashes are another example. So flying used to be a lot more dangerous than it is today. Last year, there were 556 crash deaths worldwide in planes, 556. Last year in cars. A lot of those are small planes, I assume, too, that you're not talking about consumer flights. I actually don't have the data at that level of granularity. No problem. I can't comment on that.

Okay, no worries, no worries. Yeah, I want to be careful. I appreciate your honesty. Yeah. So about 556 people died last year in plane crashes, 1.35 million. So 1,350,000 people were killed by cars last year, just from crashes. Pollution deaths were tens of millions. So this is an epidemic and we've not taken effective action. What I would like to do going forward, in addition to changing the areas of law that we've talked about today, I think we have to change how we think about the car. You know, I'm old enough, Adam, and maybe you are too, to remember when you could smoke in restaurants. Mm-hmm. And you could smoke on a plane, even.

And there might be a smoking section in a restaurant. And so the rest of us in the non-smoking section had to put up with it. But it was never that great. Even when there were separate sections. Right. You know, you can't stop the smoke from filtering over. And I remember when Mayor Bloomberg in New York, I was living in New York City at the time, banned smoking in bars and restaurants. And before the ban went into effect, there was hue and outcry about how it's going to

put the nightlife industry out of business. No one will go to restaurants and bars anymore. And of course, the opposite is what happened. People loved being able to go and enjoy themselves and meet with friends and family and not have to breathe in toxic fumes. And I'll be honest, I was a smoker at the time and I was like, I wasn't living in New York, I was living upstate in college, but I was like, ah, this is terrible. And then I realized when you're smoking in a bar, it's fun to go outside and smoke out front. Like if you're smoking, it's like, oh, you go hang out with the smokers in front. Then you go back out. Then you go back inside.

It was not bad even for smokers. Not that you should be smoking. I'm certainly happy I quit. But like, yeah, it was it was fine. Yeah. And that's just the thing is we didn't ban smoking. We banned smoking in a limited number of circumstances where people don't really have a choice. Now you could say, we'll go to a restaurant that doesn't have smoking. But

if you remember, there were very, very few restaurants that banned it outright because they were worried about losing business. This was a collective action problem, not that different from the one we face today with cars. So we didn't ban smoking. What we did was we prohibited smoking in certain public settings to reclaim those settings for public health and for livability. And then we also raised taxes on cigarettes. And now smoking is more expensive. And you also can't do it in schools. You can't do it in restaurants. You can't do it on the plane. Before my time, I was told here that back in the day,

you could actually smoke in the hospital at the university here at the hospital. And that's just appalling to me, but it must've seemed normal at the time. So over time, we've developed better science, but also a better social awareness of the costs of smoking. And we have confined it to places where if you don't smoke, you are relatively unimpeded by smoking, by the activity. And that's improved our quality of life. It's also improved our public health outcomes.

We should do the same for cars. We should think about smoking as something that we have confined, not banned, but we charge for it and we don't allow it to ruin our lives. I hope the step in New York to inaugurate the busway on 14th street, which has been just wildly successful beyond even the dreams of the people who planned it and fought for it for years. San Francisco just approved unanimously a plan for Market Street, just one of the main drags there to fully pedestrianize it and have buses and trams on it. So I think we're seeing movement in this direction. We need to expand that and accelerate it, including outside of big cities, so that everybody has the opportunity to benefit from better public health. And so we can start tackling climate change in a real way. Buying Teslas is not helping address climate change. If we get people walking, biking, taking reliable, safe, fast, affordable buses, that will do so much more. And it's not even that expensive to do. And that way the goal can be, hey, if you live, especially, hey, rural areas or, you know, et cetera, if you like driving into the mountains, you can have a car. That's

wonderful. We have access to that, but we're no longer penalizing people who can't afford or prefer not to drive with pollution, with making them pay extra, with taking their lives into their own hands. And we're not making it mandatory to drive just to get to work or to school. That would be a goal I think we should all be able to share, right? I agree. And I just also want to say, you know, you said as a smoker, you didn't mind the smoking ban. So I drive, I have a, I guess a different, I come to this from a different place maybe than you do. I grew up in Michigan. I was going to the Detroit auto show as a kid before I could walk. I loved having my first car. Didn't come till after college, but I was so happy. And, you know, as a driver, this world would be better for me to drive in.

It would be safer. There would be less traffic. And I could also enjoy other parts of my life that are not driving, right? Even if I like to drive or choose to drive, there may be many times when I don't. choose to drive. There may be many times when I don't. And I think a lot of us, even folks that don't come to this from an ideological place or because they had an opportunity at some point to walk, even folks who've always been kind of compelled to drive are realizing now how much of their life is scripted, how many of their transportation choices specifically have been made by people who are long dead.

I mean, we have a real dead hand problem. So like, you know, we don't let people from the 19th century tell us how to do a lot of things in our lives. We make our own choices, but here we're really handcuffed by the past. Well, I hope one day we can change that. And I really appreciate you coming onto the show to talk to us about it. Thank you so much for being here, Greg. Thanks so much for having me. I hope you didn't kill anybody with your car while you were listening. Pray to God you didn't.

Um, but that is it for us this week on Factually. I want to thank our producer Dana Wickens, our researcher Sam Rodman, and Andrew WK for our theme song. You can find me on Twitter at Adam Conover. You can sign up for my mailing list at adamconover.net, and we'll see you next week on Factually. Thanks so much for listening. that was a hate gun podcast