Tech Won't Save Us - Why We Need a War on Cars w/ Doug Gordon and Sarah Goodyear

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

Paris Marx is joined by Doug Gordon and Sarah Goodyear to discuss the many ways cars have negatively affected society, how tech companies seek to entrench those problems, and what can really be done to improve mobility in our communities. Doug Gordon is a TV producer and writer. Sarah Goodyear is a journalist and author. They are the co-hosts of The War on Cars and co-authors of Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile. Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon. The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Also mentioned in this episode: Fighting Traffic by Peter D. Norton Livable Streets by Donald Appleyard Your Six-Year-Old by Louise Bates Ames Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam

Dependence on automotive infrastructure is robbing all of us at every stage of our lives of the normal developmental milestones and pleasures and the things that we need to be healthy. If you name an issue that is vexing society right now, you can probably find a car at the bottom of it. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guests are Doug Gordon and Sarah Goodyear. Doug is a TV producer and Sarah is a journalist. They are co-hosts of the War on Cars podcast and also co-authors of life after cars, freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the automobile.

Now, I'm a big fan of Doug and Sarah's show. I have been on the War on Cars in the past to talk to them about my book and about some other issues. And when I saw that their book was coming out, I said, okay, this is the perfect opportunity to have Doug and Sarah on Tech won't save us because we talk a lot about technology on the show. And obviously, one of the technologies that has shaped our lives immensely is the car, right? It might not be a digital technology, though increasingly it is that as well. As automakers and tech companies try to infuse it with more digital technology, with more apps, with more data collection, because that is the business model of the day.

And so in this conversation, we discuss both the broader effects of the car on our society. You know, if we're thinking about what we have experienced for the past century or so of the car's development and what it means for us today, but also, you know, those newer aspects of it, right? You know, the self-driving car thing and, you know, these other attempts by the tech industry to change the way that we get around. And I think Doug and Sarah have an interesting approach to this and also a reason why it's not discussed so much in the book itself. The book focuses much more fundamentally on the car and the more tangible aspects of this, not the different ideas

that the tech industry has had over the past decade and a half or so for what the future of transportation, what the future of the car should look like. Because fundamentally, it is still a car at the end of the day, right? Sure, it might be changed a little bit, but the effects are still very similar, even if it's being driven by a computer instead of a human being. Or, as we're increasingly seeing, as I talked to Joanne McNeil about recently, maybe it's not so much driven by a computer, but by a human who is actually really far away and is actually connected over the internet to make sure that it's going in the right place. So that's all to say, I had a really great time talking to Doug and Sarah about the book and about this broader issue. As I'm

sure you will well know if you've been listening to the show for a while. This is a topic that I am intensely interested in. I've wrote a whole book on it. So it was really great to have this discussion with them, to have them on the show for the first time, hopefully not the last. And I hope that you enjoy it as well. If you do, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, you can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making tech won't save us every single week, so I can keep having these critical in-depth conversations. And so you can get ad-free episodes of the show and even stickers if you support at a certain level.

You can join supporters like Yago from Galicia, Nate from Denver, Colorado, Michael from Chicago, and George from Bulgaria by going to patreon.com slash TechWon't Save Us and becoming a supporter yourself. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Sarah, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to have you on the show and Doug for you to join us as well. It's great to be here. Yeah, you know, I've obviously been on your podcast, so it's great to now have you on my podcast. And it's a great time to do it because you have this fantastic new book out based around a lot of the work that you have been doing for a long time and that people will

be familiar with from your podcast, The War on Cars. And that is kind of where I wanted to start. I think this podcast is one that a lot of people will be familiar with now. I think it has certainly made a dent in like the conversations about cities and about transportation for people who are interested in that. It's always cool to see people like posting their little stickers and stuff around that they have from the show or even their t-shirts, right? But how did you guys decide to ultimately start this podcast and maybe even like deeper than that? What was it that made you look at cars in cities and be like, this is just wrong? These things are having such a negative effect. Like what was the thing that propelled you in that direction? To answer the last part

first, I grew up in New York and I didn't think that much about cars growing up because I didn't have to use one. And we used one to get out of town, but we'd never used one to get around town. And I got around town on public transportation, started taking the public bus to school when I was eight years old. And, you know, I just didn't really think about it. It's actually moving away from New York to rural Maine, where I lived for several years that really made me see cars in a different way. I suddenly became car dependent. I realized I had no idea what that meant. I quickly discovered that it was really scary, especially driving on snow in the winter, was really terrifying to me.

I was a pretty good driver, but it was just, it was scary. And then also how expensive it was. And I was really broke at the time. And buying gas was something like I would put $5 in the tank and wait until payday and just hope that that was enough to get me back and forth to work. So then when I came back to New York and I continued my career as a journalist, I just was found myself gravitating toward work that looked at the way cities were designed and, you know, how it is that I lived in a city where I could have all this freedom and do all these things,

but most people don't have that in North America. So I would say that was kind of how I got into the ideas that we talk about on the podcast. I had a slightly opposite trajectory. My family is from New York, so we would visit here a lot. But I grew up mostly in a suburb north of Boston, which completely car-dependent on a cul-de-sac with no sidewalks off of a very busy road. So you really couldn't walk or even bike anywhere. And I was always drawn towards going to the city. I would go into Boston, walk around with my friends. I lived in Atlanta very briefly after college and was completely car-dependent down there, similar to Sarah. I was broke. I was like, you know, just out of college in my early 20s and making very little money, my transmission on my used

Subaru died, and it was something like a $5,000 or $6,000 repair. And, you know, that was basically like a quarter of what I was making in a year. And it was socially isolating as well. And unpredictable, all the reasons your listeners understand the traffic sucks. It could take me 25 minutes to get to work or an hour. And as soon as I could, after that experience, I moved to New York's where a lot of my friends were. And as soon as I got here, I was like, okay, this just makes more sense to me. I freed up hundreds of dollars a month, you know, that I could pour into an apartment and a social life and all the other things. And I just started getting involved in local advocacy. I was biking around the city. And that was sort of my way into these

issues. I totally get those stories, right? In the sense that for me, it was a little bit different. You know, I'm from, I'm not from one of the big cities in Canada. Let's put it that way. And, you know, we lived like on the, you know, kind of outside the center of the city. So it was very car dependent. And growing up, it was like, if you couldn't get a ride somewhere, you, you know, you were really limited in what you could do, right? There were those frustrations, but you never really had something to connect it to, right? Like, oh, it could be better. It could look like this. And then when I started like actually visiting other places, I was like, oh, wow, like, things can look so much different. And then even learning about the history of my own city and how it had been so different before. And that and that had changed. So, Yeah, like, you know, I'm sure so many people have stories like this, like the ones that you've just recounted. But, you know, like I was saying, you know, you guys have been making this podcast for, I believe it's since 2018 now. What have you made of the response that you have heard from people about the show?

Because as I was saying, like, it does seem to have had quite an impact on these conversations and these discussions. Well, thank you for saying that, first of all, because that is the highest praise that we could have for it. But I've seen things change dramatically in the seven years in terms of just the response that I get when I talk to people about what I do. When we first started, I was a little shy, frankly, about telling people the name of the podcast, even though, you know, I basically came up with the name. But like, I was like, wow, that is really in your face. and, you know, almost apologetic feeling about it sometimes in a social situation.

And the reactions I got, you know, justified that people were sometimes very like, it's what? What are you saying? Like, what do you want us to do, right? What I've noticed has changed, first of all, is the incredible community that's built up around this podcast and the enthusiasm and excitement that people feel, the really positive feelings that we get from our listeners. and the interaction and feedback that we have when we're doing a live show and the way we see people connecting with each other around the podcast is so exciting. And then I don't have to be as shy and apologetic any longer when I talk to people, not just because I've gained confidence from doing it for this time, but because I really find that

the reaction has changed. And a lot of people, even older people, that I sometimes will say like, well, you know, it's about car dependence and the effects on planet and society. And they'll be like, yeah, car dependence is bad. And wow, that was not true, certainly 10 or 15 years ago when I was really getting going, covering these issues. So that's the biggest change that I've seen that and the growth of the community, not just around this podcast, but around many podcasts and other media about this issue. Yeah, I'd like to say it's all a part of the podcast.

But we stand on the shoulders of giants and the many advocates who have been fighting for these issues for decades and the many books that have come before us as well. But just in the last five to six years, you've seen a real seismic change in terms of, you know, COVID changed everybody's understanding of what's possible. There aren't a whole lot of good things that came out of the pandemic. But one of the good things are things like how we look at our streets, outdoor dining, in places that never could have imagined taking time. parking for any purpose. And in fact, restaurant owners who might complain if you took parking switching and saying, I need that parking spot in front of my restaurant so that I can have 10 customers there instead of one car. That's been a real change. The growing awareness of climate change. I think transportation's contributions to climate change have been a little

siloed off from the climate change movement and the environmental movement, you know, over the last 20, 40 years, but really in the last five to 10, you've seen people say, hey, wait a minute, you know, e-bikes are a really good solution to getting people out of cars. I think there's growing understanding that electric vehicles, while necessary in places where people don't have alternatives are not the panacea to solving the problem of cars. So that's been a real change that I've noticed. The cultural and political awareness of these issues has never been higher. Yeah. And I want to come back to electric cars just a little bit later, right? But I've been asking you about the podcast and how you got into this work. But, you know, obviously we're here to talk about the book as well, right? Which I think is, you know, just a great starting point for so many people to get into these issues. But I was particularly struck by the detail that Superman actually hated cars back in the day. And I was like, this is so cool. Yeah. You know, so we start the book in the first chapter of just the history of sort of how did we get here? Almost like where did cars come from? And, you know, I think we're in an era where we're questioning a lot of systems around us and wondering, like, how did we just get to this place where this thing that we take for granted?

And that might not be working so well, you know, that whether that's health care or our constitutional system of government in the United States, you know, we're questioning a lot of systems. But yeah, so, you know, when cars entered the scene in the 1910s and the 1920s, the myth is that, you know, cars rolled off the assembly line with the Model T in 1908, and that was it. America's love affair with the automobile was like signed, sealed, and delivered, and we were off to the races. But that really wasn't the case. Cars were seen as interlopers in cities. They were seen as toys of the rich. They killed a lot of people. We write in the book that they were the original Move Fast and Break Things technology. Literally, they moved faster than anything people had experienced. And they killed. They broke. A lot of people injured them. Children, hundreds of children per year were being killed in New York City, for example. And you had monuments to the dead in Pittsburgh in St. Louis.

Like, there was nothing that people had experienced like this except for the Great War. And it's not an accident that in the 1920s, these monuments that resembled memorials to the Great War that had just ended were popping up. And so, you know, cut to 1939 and Action Comics No. 12, this is in an era of Superman where he's a bit more of a, like, literal social justice warrior. He's taking on sort of New Deal era problems related to the depression and class and all of that kind of stuff. And basically, to make a long story short, in the comic, Clark Kent comes out of the daily

planet and he sees that a friend of his has been hit and killed by a driver. And enraged, he, you know, gets into his Superman costume, breaks through the walls of a radio station, commandeers the airwaves, and basically says, henceforth, you know, reckless drivers will answer to me. He declares a, literally he says, he declares a war on reckless driving. And what unfolds is him, you know, going to a used car lot where the dealer is selling known lemons and like destroying all the cars, going to a car factory saying like your products kill and injure countless people and destroying the factory, using his powers to fight this. And eventually he gets the mayor of what is,

is not yet metropolis in the telling then, but he gets the mayor to agree to start taking reckless driving seriously. And if you are only familiar with the James Gunn version of Superman or the Clark Kent version of Superman, you only think of him as like fighting General Zod or Lex Luthor. You don't think of Superman as like, why would he take on these social issues? But it really speaks to the idea

that this period of history, Jerry Siegel and Joel Schuster, created Superman, they would have known a life before cars, a life with fewer cars. And they would have probably known a lot of people who were either killed or injured by cars. And today, we take those things for granted. It's just like, I don't know, if you get hit and killed by a car, it's like a tree limb fell on you. Nothing you can do about it. And it's just a real difference. And we felt that that was a good way to start the book, because it is a very surprising history that most people don't know about and speaks to the 100-year, let's say, attrition that we have seen and sort of our understanding of this public health problem. It's also this character

that people are like really familiar with, right, and not used to in this situation. And as I was reading it, I was like, man, we need to get this book in front of James Gunn and he can like make this part of the next Superman movie. And it's also very American, you know, what's, they're very, they're like, what is, what's American, like baseball, apple pie, driving? And also Superman. Like there's a very patriotic aspect to Superman, even though he is this like, you know, alien from another planet. He just represents America in so many ways. So I really feel like it's a great story of like, wait, the country was not always in love with automobiles.

I think that is fantastic, right? And like I said, like I think it was effective because it really hit me. And I was like, oh, this is fascinating. It really like pulled me into the story. But you're talking about that evolution, right? we have seen over a long period of time about perceptions about cars and also, you know, the way that they have really taken over our cities. And I wonder if you could kind of briefly talk about how that transformation happened, you know, how we went from being like, wow,

these cars are this intruder into our cities that are, as you were saying, killing a lot of people and causing a lot of carnage such that popular culture is responding to it as this very harmful thing to what you were just saying where now we just see this as a completely normal thing. Why would we challenge it? The death and destruction that comes of it is just like completely acceptable. How do we make that, that shift from where we were to where we are now? Well, it was not done without a lot of effort from a coalition of groups, really, that included fossil fuel companies, auto manufacturers, the construction industry, various interests of capital, basically, that had a lot to gain.

And Peter Norton, who's written an amazing book called Fighting Traffic that really has a lot of this history in it, calls this the forces of motordom. And motordom is a real thing, right? And we all see it on our televisions every night, the enormity of the industry and the enormity of the financial forces that are arrayed to promote this lifestyle for their profit. And again, that includes the fossil fuel companies. it includes the insurance industry, it includes the auto manufacturers, and all the politicians that are beholden to those forces for their financial support. So, you know, this is something that was engineered. Even the phrase that you mentioned, America's Love Affair with the car, that was not some folksy saying that grandma and grandpa came up with as they were driving around

in their roadster. That was part of a television program. that Groucho Marx hosted, and it was sponsored by DuPont. And that was a tagline that they came up with that, you know, was going to help promote driving for people's profit. And so, you know, and then also you see in the post-war period in the United States, the construction of the interstate highway system. And there are obviously just huge systemic forces at work here. we talk about it in the book that there was a vision for a nation, a post-war nation that was

increasingly suburban. And this was an opportunity to change cities, right? To blast highways through cities and cover cities with huge parking lots for suburban drivers who would come into the city, do their work, extract money from the city, and then go out to their suburbs. And a lot of it was racially based, right? A lot of the neighborhoods that were destroyed were black and brown, and a lot of the suburbs that were created were pretty exclusively white, and it was white flight. And those things all work together to sort of reinforce these forces of profit and that are invested in maintaining this. And also not just maintaining it, but in arguing that it's inevitable, that this is almost like a law of nature of some kind

that cars are progress, and this is what that progress looks like, and this is the kind of progress that we should just embrace without thinking. And, you know, but that didn't happen by accident. It all happened by design. Yeah. And, you know, on that point, I think, too, that there is this mid-century period of like the 1960s World Fair and even earlier where you have, you know, this vision of the future of like a Le Corbusier, you know, highways running through cities and whisking you from one end to the other with no traffic, almost like teleportation. And, you know, to be fair, cars are and were a technological marvel. And they were in the mid-century period seen as this wave of the future. And it was sort of, you know, I think one of the things I always talk about is

So what's kind of confounding about when you're a bicycle advocate or a transit advocate is people think it's a step backwards. You know, we had horse and buggy, we had the Model T, we had, you know, mid-century like muscle cars, and now we have electric cars, and pretty soon we'll have robot cars, and then we will have flying cars, and then who knows? And then you'll have a chip implanted in your brain, and you'll just teleport yourself to Mars or whatever. And any suggestion that you should use a bicycle or that the solution to congestion in cities is actually a good bus, a good train line, is seen like, oh, you're a Luddite, you're against progress. But you're not. If you look at the places that are solving congestion, it's Japanese bullet trains, it's bicycle lanes in Amsterdam. It's just a good train or tram line in Paris, right? Like those are the places that are solving the problems of the 21st century with 19th century technology.

Sometimes these things are still really useful, right, even though they've been around for quite a long time. And as your book kind of argues, we probably made a mistake in swerving too much by adopting the car and remaking the cities for the car instead of like keeping the lessons of what was actually working and what made, you know, what was transportation that helped make good communities. And I wanted to pick up on what you were saying there, right? Because, Sarah, you were talking about these narratives of like inevitability and progress. And, you know, for people listening to this show, we'll be very familiar with hearing those things about so many technologies, right? And what you're saying is that this is not just a novel thing that, you know, has arisen in the past couple of decades, but that has been used for so long when it comes to, you know, industry pushing technologies that might be against our interest. And based on what you were saying there, Doug, the book actually doesn't get into a lot of these ideas that the tech industry has pushed forward in the past couple of decades for what transportation should be. And I wonder what the decision was to not focus so much on those and to focus more on the fundamentals and what you have really made of what the tech industry has tried to do to our conversations around transportation over that time. I think there's two reasons. One is just a purely practical reason of like writing a book is a long process. And by the time

it comes out, so much has changed from when you started writing it. So we wanted to be careful not to write ourselves into a corner and have something be immediately wrong. So there is that. But I also think the bigger thing, and we get into this in the book, is that the problem of cars is cars. And, you know, we are not going to solve the problem of cars with other slightly different cars. You know, electric vehicles are, of course, a very good and necessary solution to one of the problems with cars, which is tailpipe emissions. And in places where you have no option, no alternative to driving, yes, every car should be electrified as quickly as possible. Those fleets should turn over at the next available opportunity in places where cars are used,

but there are options like cities, delivery vehicles, buses, emergency vehicles, those should be electrified. So there is a place for electric vehicles. But I think we intuitively know that electric vehicles are not going to make our cities and our towns better. when you go on vacation and you walk through the streets of Paris, you don't think to yourself, this is lovely. You know, it would make it better electric cars or autonomous vehicles. You know, the places we choose to vacation offer a sort of revealed preference about the way we would like to live our lives. And so we don't want to be seen as anti-technology. That's not what this book is about.

But it is about, you know, cars are a geometry problem. They are not a technology problem. They are not a technology problem. The problem with cars is that if you have too many of them in a small space, like a congested, dense city, they don't work. They don't work for the drivers, and they certainly don't work for all the non-drivers. And so that's sort of why we decided to say, like, look, if we really look at the places that are doing this right, including neighborhoods in New York, and neighborhoods in San Francisco, and neighborhoods in Toronto, and neighborhoods in Vancouver, they're not solving these problems with cars. They're making their cities more livable with bicycle lanes, better transit, pedestrian plazas, expanding park access, things like that.

It's not an anti-tech argument. You can layer technology on top of that 19th century technology, right? Like GPS real-time information about where the nearest bicycle share station is or when your next bus is going to arrive. That's all amazing uses of modern technology. But we're not going to get there with Teslas and cyber trucks. I think it's telling that there are technological solutions that are very positive in our view that are not being pursued. For instance, speed governing, which is something that people were looking for back in the

20s and 30s and talking about and was actively resisted by the automobile industry. Now we see situations where e-bikes are speed governed in some places and e-scooters, but not cars, right? And if there were a scheme to put speed governing in cars, and there have been some proposed, including in California, hey, that would be a really positive use of technology that would instantly save hundreds and thousands of lives and prevent injuries and so forth. But it's interesting that the tech industry isn't pushing that, right? And also, e-bikes and, you know, electric vehicles per se, vehicle is a pretty broad term. There are a lot of kinds of electric vehicles like e-bikes and very small personal e-mobility devices that you actually see when I was in Milan a couple of years ago, I was seeing these, you know, very chic millanese businessmen. scooting around on these kind of these electric quad vehicles and you know in their gorgeous suits and it was like oh that's a different kind of e-vehicle that doesn't take up all this space you know so

those are some of the things that I think technology could be doing but instead it's pushing the most expensive solutions that don't solve you know a lot of the problems and I do want to say not just within cities, but land use is, especially from a climate perspective, one of the huge problems with cars, and electric cars don't solve that at all. And we need to not be doing this sprawl green field development. We don't have enough planet left to work with to keep doing that. And so making cities more attractive and livable and bringing green into the city and creating cities that are healthy to live in and not as noisy and not as polluted, that's all part of creating a whole picture where people can live in ways that are sustainable ultimately

and not just eating up farmland and forest. I'd also add, you know, on the subject of robot cars and autonomous vehicles, they have their place and I can hear some listeners. I mean, your audience is pretty sophisticated on this topic. But some people might say, okay, but they'll be safer than human-driven cars. And that could be true. You know, we're seeing Waymo's in San Francisco that, like, conservatively, like, obey the speed limit and stop at stop signs. They're not without their problems, but they are, everybody who's written one that I've experienced and talked to and the studies are showing are, like, a little safer than human environments. But San Francisco is not going to be improved by swapping out all the cars for road.

robot cars. The other problem with autonomous vehicles is that they can generate lots and lots of trips that didn't exist before. So, you know, the example I like to use is imagine you're a family of four. It's like stereotypical family of four. Mom, dad, two kids. And mom has an important meeting. Dad's got to go volunteer at the church. Kid number one has soccer practice and kid number two has ballet practice. Before, you might have had a two-car or one-car household, and that might have been just like one or two trips chained together. I go to the meeting, but first I drop my kid off at ballet. Now you might summon four cars. Pop kid number one in one car, pop kid number two in another car, and you all go your separate ways. That would be a nightmare if it was

adopted at scale. And nobody's lives would be improved by that. And it would only work for that one family if no one else did it. And that is generally one of the problems with cars. It only works if no one else drives. And the problem we're seeing is that everybody drives and it doesn't work for anybody. Totally. You know, it's so frustrating to like see the kind of arguments that they make. Because I feel like we're in this moment where, you know, the prospect of the self-driving car is back. Like I felt like a few years ago, we had kind of like buried it sort of. But then I feel like, I don't know if it's with the AI hype of the past few years or what, it feels like there's this new rush of energy into self-driving cars and Waymo in particular. And it's like, listen,

maybe there's like some rural areas where this can work where it's harder to get a taxi or something. But the idea that we're cramming all these cars into the middle of like cities where, as you guys are talking about, there are so many other options. Like, it just doesn't make any sense to me. No, it doesn't make any sense unless you're a venture capitalist. who's looking to do what those people do. And the subsidies of many of these technologies hide the fact that really they're not economically sustainable anymore than they are environmentally sustainable.

And I am working on an episode on this that at some point in the next several years I'm going to finish. But, you know, you just, this is full self-driving or the idea that we're going to have autonomous vehicles zipping around throughout all the places that cars are going now. It's just from the people I've spoken to is just not a realistic prospect. And what is realistic is to have them learn these small controlled environments, which are dense urban cores that we don't want more cars in. So unfortunately, the thing that they're best suited for doing at this point in history is not

where we want them to be providing solutions. Yeah, it really comes down to the kind of Silicon Valley ethos, and this is an American ethos especially, I think, of just individual solutions to systemic problems. And, you know, transportation in cities is like a collective action problem, and it can't be solved just at the individual level. But what Silicon Valley promises is like, no, you don't need a bus that can see 40 passengers.

You need, you know, a Tesla bus that can seat four. And that's what you want. Because then we can charge whatever we want for it and the poor people and the brown people, you, the rich folks, don't want to be around. You don't have to be around them. But that's just not how any good city works. And it's not how good communities work. And it doesn't lead towards any sort of like social cohesion that we need to solve the problems of the future. Yeah, I saw some headlines recently being like, Waymo suggests that self-driving cars could be the future of public transit. And I was like, this is not back again, is it?

Like, can we please bury this idea? We have self-driving vehicles that are the future of public transit, and those are driverless trains, right? Like, if you've ever been on a people mover at an airport, that technology exists. And there are subway lines around the world that have, you know, crewless operation, and they look the same as a normal subway or train, and they fit as many people. They just aren't funded by, you know, $7 billion in venture capital. as funds. So, yeah, nobody can make a lot of money off of them, so they're not seen as a

solution. Very well said. And we've talked about the technology, but I want to go back a bit to what we were talking about before, before we move on to, you know, how we might fix some of these problems. And, you know, you were talking about the effects, and you've already talked about a lot of them, that car dependence and just building so much for cars and so little for anything else has had on our cities. But I wonder for each of you, like, what stands out is the thing that you think is most egregious about the way that cars have transformed our societies for the worse. So for me, it definitely has to be the social division and isolation that cars foster. I mean, first of all, you're in your own bubble. It's you against everybody else. Everybody

else is an adversary when you're driving, right? So that in itself, it just creates a mindset right away that I think is very antisocial. And we talked a lot in the book about how that was recognized a long time ago. I mean, people knew that driving turns you into a monster. So now we've committed to this lifestyle where we know that the form of transportation that the vast majority of people are using every day creates antisocial behavior. And then geographically, it divides you from people because it increases the distance that you are from your neighbors. And we talk about the loneliness crisis a lot in the United States of America. And people are constantly saying, well, it's, you know, the screens and online and these toxic online

communities. But what they don't want to acknowledge is the erosion of public space that has happened over generations that has stranded us all far away from each other. And that is the direct result of automotive dependence and automotive infrastructure, it literally divides us from our neighbors, that four-lane arterial road is dividing you, is separating you from all those people over there who might be part of your community. And there's been a lot of research done. Donald Appleyard back in 1969 did a study in San Francisco that's been replicated around the world that shows the people who live on streets that have a lot of traffic, have fewer friendships and connections with people on their own street than people who live on lightly trafficked streets.

And that effect has been accumulating over generations now. And I think that we're really kind of in a sort of almost an end stage illness with this automotive dependence and what it's done to us as a society. and that the polarization that we see in our politics and the sadness and loneliness and anxiety that we see in our children, a lot of these things can be directly attributed to automotive infrastructure and dependence. I just want to emphasize that point because that really stood out to me as well when I was reading the book, right? You know, we talk so much about the problems that have come of the digital technologies and social media and things like that. And I do think

those are real problems, right? But I think it's important, and as your book lays out, to really think about the longer legacy of those problems, right? To not be like, oh, if we just address the digital technology, then it will be fine. But actually, there are a lot of physical reasons why our societies were headed that way in the first place. And then you layer on top these digital technologies and it just further exacerbates that problem. Yeah. My issue, shoe I think is very much related to what Sarah just said and what you're saying, Paris, is it's the effect on children. So I have a teenage daughter and a soon-to-be teenage son, and they are both as addicted to screens as any pre-teen or teenage kids can be. And it's a constant struggle in our

household, and I don't always set a good example either of like getting off my phone. However, my daughter especially can just get up, pick up and go and meet her friends across the street in the park, go grab ice cream, go to the movies, without the need for someone to drive her someplace. So there's never a discussion in our house, really, other than sort of where are you going and what time will you be back? I never have to say to her, look, I can't take you right now. You're stuck at home because I have a meeting or I have somewhere to be. And so the degree of independence and freedom that children have to meet in real life and explore their community and be participants in that community is really important.

We have in most of the United States and North America and other car-dependent places excluded children from society, almost entirely because they can't get out of the house without someone driving there. So, you know, the effect on children and their perceptions of the world and their ability to foster their own sense of independence. We talk in the book about psychologist Louise Bates Ames, who wrote a series of books starting in the 1970s. each one focused on a different stage of a child's development, year by year, by year. And in 1979, she wrote a book called Your Six-Year Old, Loving and Defiant, and talks about the developmental milestones

that a neurotypical child should have at that moment. And it was some physical stuff, like, how many teeth have they lost? And can they count eight to ten pennies and tell left from right and things like that? But one of them was, like, can your child walk four to eight blocks to run an errand, go see a friend, go to a park, things like that. And I find that just so amazing, because first of all, like, yeah, six-year-olds are

totally capable and certainly eight, nine, ten-year-olds of walking places themselves, walking to the park or to school. But what I found most amazing about that was not so much the expectation that a child could do that, but that, like, parents would be expected to let their kids do it. Today, you know, my friends who live in other places, they wouldn't necessarily even let their 15-year-old walk alone because it would just be too dangerous to cross that big arterial road. They would just say, no, no, come on, honey.

Like, let's get in the car. Let's take the kids where they need to go. I think the freedom and independence, children have been robbed of childhood by cars, and we need to give that back to them. And I would just like to add that so often we can't really understand certain systemic problems in an adult context because it's just like, no, we need to get to work, we need to do this, we need to do that, but we can sometimes see things more clearly when we're looking at children and the effect that things have on children's lives. And so, as Doug said,

our autocentric infrastructure prevents kids from having normal developmental phases and normal sort of progression of increasing agency and independence. If we look at that and we allow ourselves to sit with it and think about it, and then we think about ourselves and our own stage in life, whatever that might be, whether we're a young professional, whether we're trying to meet our life partner and we're in that stage of our life, or whether we're parents ourselves and needing that support of a village, right, to raise that child, or whether we're, toward the end of our lives and, you know, really need social connection, but maybe don't have a workplace that we're going to anymore. The dependence on automotive infrastructure is robbing

all of us at every stage of our lives of the normal developmental milestones and pleasures and the things that we need to be healthy at any stage of life are missing. And certainly in older people, you see it so much where people hold on to those keys to the car because they know that is their lifeline. That is their only connection to society, the only way that they're going to be enfranchised in society, and they hold onto it very often until they can't really operate that vehicle safely anymore. And then they hurt themselves. God forbid, they heard somebody else as well. And it's very sad because those people should be enveloped in a society where everybody is holding each other together, you know, but instead we're in these bubbles and

far and far apart from each other. And it robs all of us. As I hear you discussing that and especially talking about kids, I feel like we think about the safety of children. Often the kind of threat of the car can be downplayed and it's more of this kind of like stranger danger, you know, you don't know who's out there narratives that I feel like have been created for a particular political purpose as well, right? And, you know, it reminded me in the book that you also connected car dependence to the political moment that we're in as well and how there were kind of echoes of that, you know, we see very clearly that as there has been this push to build communities that are less car dependent or even to get people to rely on electric cars rather than gas-powered cars, that there has been this kind of right-wing

movement to keep the gas-powered car like the center of transportation, the center of our communities, and certainly that works really well for the car companies and the oil and gas companies as well. But I wonder how you think about how this dependence kind of plays into the political moment that we're in and what that means. I think it's not an accident that if you live in a dense city or walkable city, and I'm not, you know, I think we should be very clear. We're not saying that every place has to be Manhattan, that every place has to be Brownstone, Brooklyn.

It can be smaller communities, but with a walkable center, a kind of traditional suburb, a streetcar suburb sort of understanding of the definition of suburb. But when you live in places where you have interactions with people who are different from you that aren't just transactional, they aren't just you driving to the grocery store

and the only person you interact with who's different than you in your day-to-day is the cashier, But they're just your neighbors. And that's, again, not to downplay segregation in cities, right? But when you get to know people because they're local business owners and they're your neighbors and they're just the person you happen to walk by every day because they're on the same random commuting pattern as you, they become humans. They become just people like you, navigating life like you.

And you get exposed to that. And again, not that there aren't racist and terrible people in those places, but there's a reason cities, I think, are much more progressive. It can be a little chicken and egg. You move to a place because you're like a queer kid in a small town and there's nobody like you. So you want to move to a place with a really active and welcoming community. But, you know, I like to say that cars are sort of the internet comment section of the real world. You know, you're anonymous. You behave in ways you never would towards your fellow human being. If you had to interact with them face to face, You might even like actively insult them.

I get behind the wheel of a car and I'm like, oh, look at this asshole over there. You're like, that's just a person driving to work like me or whatever. So I think you can't disconnect our current political polarization and the rise of fascism and authoritarianism to this, especially when you factor in the racist legacy of redlining. And as Sarah was mentioning earlier, of how highways were specifically targeted to blast through black and brown communities in the 50s, 60s, and still today. So I really think, you know, if we want more social cohesion, we talk about this in the book. Robert Putnam wrote this incredible book that made a huge splash in 2000, Bowling Alone.

It was about the decline of civic engagement and the lack of participation in community groups and church groups and things like that that connected us. And he makes a very explicit argument that like sprawl and the way that we have designed communities to be spread out from each other has exacerbated this problem. That was 25 years ago. And today, I think someone else writing that same book, we've seen that same book, and it's all attributed to screens and the internet. And cars have nothing to do with it whatsoever. But as we were mentioning earlier, they're linked up. They're in many ways. Yeah.

And I think it's worth looking at what's happening in the United States, right, this red hot minute, right? there is a president who is literally declaring war on the cities in his own country, right, and who is sending troops into cities. Why is that? Because cities are a place where different people meet and ideas come together and new things are born, new social movements are born and sustained and people who are different from the majority can find each other and create solidarity with other marginalized people, right? So there's a huge political stake in breaking that up. And you're seeing the federal government in the United States explicitly do that by removing funding, by clawing back funding that has been appropriated by Congress and taking it away from

things like pedestrian trails and bike lanes and public transportation and even, you know, major pieces of infrastructure like the tunnel that goes under the East River that provides train service for millions of people every day. So these are the things that are threatening to an authoritarian, right? The idea that people can come together and create solidarity. Dividing people is always the authoritarian play, and you do it every way you can, and cars are a great way to do it. And so it's not surprising that that's one of their wedge issues, because it plays exactly into their plan to keep people atomized and angry and poor and blaming each other for that. And so I think it's pretty clear.

It's kind of shockingly clear, actually. I think you're totally on the ball, obviously. We think very similarly on these issues, so it's not a big surprise. There's a reason you were a guest on our show, too. Exactly, yeah. And why I was thrilled when I saw your book was coming out. So we've talked about all these issues, right? But I wanted to pivot for the last section of our conversation to talk about how we address

this issue. Obviously, this is a massive issue, especially when we're looking at North America, where we both are, and, you know, the way that so much has been built around cars for so long and how that has become entrenched. And so I wonder for you, obviously, I'm not asking you to fix the whole thing for us in, you know, a few minutes. But what do you see as the opportunities to really start to shift this in a different direction? And are there kind of hopeful examples that you see that we can maybe draw from for lessons or basically just examples that see this is possible? We've been at this for a really long time, both with the podcast and in our individual advocacy and journalism careers.

And we have seen a lot of reasons to be hopeful. You know, Citibike in New York City and bike share systems wherever they have launched and congestion pricing that just launched last year in New York. Countless examples where we were told a thing was controversial or that nobody wanted it. And then as soon as it switched on, it was popular. And now you can't imagine New York City without Citibike. It would be like imagining New York City without, you know, yellow caps or something like that. And that's true in almost every place that you can think of, outdoor dining being a really good example.

People just want it now. So we need to look at those examples and say, like, let's do more of that. They're also obviously international examples. And I think the good part of technology, right, in social media is that it has connected people who aren't able to travel to Amsterdam or Copenhagen or Paris and say, oh, wow, look at that new school street that they've just installed. and look at that new bike lane, and we can do that here. So I'm optimistic. I think the culture is ahead of the politics, as is often the case. And so that is what leads me to have a lot of hope about where things can go.

The way that people in this movement band together to create change on a local level is really important, because especially as we face these huge global and federal forces, we need to keep hope alive and we need to keep going. and we need to stay organized, right? So organizing around this issue has been very inspiring for me because I've met so many people who understand politics and who are willing to kind of go shoulder to shoulder to make things happen at a very local level, micro level.

And one of the things we say in the book of, you know, like what can you do? One of the top things for me is find your people, find people who care about the same things that you care about, right? You know, whether that means going to a community board meeting, about a bike lane, or it means going to your local bike shop and finding a ride that, you know, will connect you with other people socially. There are so many different ways to find people now that you can create this kind of community with.

And I think that's really important because for every human being on this planet right now, I think the top purpose that we should be thinking about if we want a better world is repair. And the idea of repairing the fabric of our communities by literally making the connecting streets friendly for human beings to be in is such important and vital work. And I can think of no higher calling, really, than to repair your own community. as you can. And so I really do think that especially when the top-down stuff is brutal and you don't have any recourse at that level, which we don't in the United States right now. It's really important to remember that you can continue to heal and repair things in your own community and that that kind of positive

energy is going to bubble up. And I think it already has, and we see it in politics here, And the incredible response that some of the politicians are getting, for instance, Zora Mamdani, who are willing to really take this on and do something new and sort of say like, hey, we need to reset. We need to go back to what the foundations of our communities are, the people in the communities, and we need to work to make their lives better in material ways. And reducing automobile dependence is one of those material ways. If you make public transportation efficient and affordable, it makes working people's lives so much better immediately. It improves family relations. It improves health. There's so many things. And so that's what gives me hope right now. I think that's so well said. And for people to remember as well, right, that power is exerted on so many different levels, not just in the kind of national or federal government or even just on the state or provincial level here in Canada. But there's so much opportunity.

on the municipal level to make these changes. And I feel like one of the criticisms that you hear of, say, urbanists who want to kind of see transportation roll out is to say, especially in North America or somewhere like Australia that has similar cities to us, is like, you're always looking at Europe, but our cities look so much different than Europe. You know, we're just not going to be able to emulate that model. I wonder how you respond to that and how you think, you know, within North America, we actually remake this kind of car dependence to meet the kind of goals that you are both talking about. Yeah, we talk about this in the book.

You know, the two cities that are held up as like the gold standard and like in the urbanist world, right? Amsterdam and Copenhagen are more broadly the Netherlands and Denmark. They weren't always like they are now. And we give the example of the Strait in Copenhagen, which is this like one and a half kilometer long shopping street now. Back in the 1960s, like a lot of European cities, Copenhagen had experimented with car-centric design and letting cars in every nook and cranny of the city. They bulldoze some neighborhoods

just like we did. And there were plans to bulldoze more that thankfully failed. But the Strait was clogged with cars. And a few people, advocates and some city planner folks said, you know, let's shut it down to cars and see what happens. And the shopkeepers flipped out. You know, they said, the stuff that you might be familiar with people saying today, they said, what are you talking about? We are not Italians. We're Danes. We need our cars. We're not going to sit outside. It's, you know, gloomy and dreary here during the winter. No one's going to shop by bicycle. Things that you hear in every city. Toronto is going through this right now with the provincial government. And the planners and the advocate said, look, let's just try it.

Let's just, you know, let's say we're going to do it for about two years. And if it doesn't work, we can always turn it back. Well, they did it. And almost immediate, it was incredibly popular. The amount of foot traffic on the street just skyrocketed, the amount of what they call lingering activities, which is people browsing in stores, stopping to get a bite to eat, or just sitting and watching the other people go by, increased by a lot. And so today, if you told somebody, you know, a 20-something person or a 30-something person in Copenhagen, do you know there used to be cars here? They would probably look at you like you had two heads. And that is a kind of example that I like to say, you know, we just have to try stuff. And the other thing I would say is that

this is not an all-or-nothing argument. Like your city, like I said before, it doesn't have to become Manhattan. But like every city, every small town has that one street that people just are like, you know what, I don't let my kids cross there. I don't like to cross there. Well, what if you got a few people together and said, like, let's put in a stoplight, a raised crosswalk? Change is possible at a small scale. And the little small things start to build up. They start to snowball. And I think those are the examples I like to point to. The places we hold up, Paris wasn't the Paris we know today, even as recently as five to ten years ago. It's all because of the political leadership of On Hidalgo that that city has transformed in the way that it has. So change is possible

and it's going to look different in every city. You know, New York has a New York flavor. Los Angeles is different from Chicago, but it is possible. Yeah, and I think there's like the macro and the micro level on this. I mean, we were just talking with somebody yesterday who had just gotten back from China and was talking about the incredible rail network that they've put in in the past 10 years. He was talking about the way that there are a lot of small electric vehicles proliferating on the streets, replacing internal combustion engines, not with other huge cars, but with smaller electric mopeds and so forth. And to remember that there are those examples as well. But, you know, that's a command economy. People say, well, you know, you can't do that in the

United States or Canada. But to go to the micro, there's zoning. And, you know, zoning, the word that makes everyone zone out, because it's like that's the most boring thing ever. But just zoning reform and saying, you know, you can have a corner store in the suburb. You can have a cafe or a bar or a restaurant in the suburb instead of having it zoned completely residential or take this horrible strip that's all zoned for industrial and automotive uses and say no you can't have any automotive uses on this area new automotive uses and try to reclaim some of those places right so I think that zoning is one thing and then another example of this micro level is parking reform right and we've seen and we talk about this in the book that cities across north America

started looking at parking minimums, which, you know, say that you have to build a certain amount of parking in order to build a certain amount of residential or commercial units and saying, like, what if we threw out these parking minimums? Well, it would make it a lot cheaper to develop things, and you could develop them in a way that is more human scale rather than automotive scale. And what's really interesting about parking reform is that cities around North America are adopting it and we're actually have seen academics have looked at this and there's there's kind of a tipping point happening where because legislators in a city can can point to like well but they did it in Birmingham, Alabama, we could do it here.

They have cover to do it. And so you're seeing parking reform. I think it was, you know, 90 cities when we wrote the book, but it's dozens more now. And it's just really happening exponentially. And that's the kind of wonky detail that is maybe hard for the layperson to understand why that is so critical. But those are the ways that we can change the fabric of North American cities, just the way that Europeans have changed the fabric of European cities or the way that other places have created new cities from scratch that have different systems, even in the United States. Most of our cities were founded and begun to be built before there was the hegemony of the automobile that we have today. Sure, there are some cities that were only built and planned after 1950, I guess you could say, but like Los Angeles, go to downtown Los Angeles and hang out without a car, which I did a couple years ago. I spent eight days there without a car. Wow, like they have got a lot of great urban fabric there. And it wouldn't really take that. much and they're doing a lot of this work to make it a lot nicer and where there would be huge areas. Sure, you might need your car to get from one neighborhood to another, but where you could

actually feel like you could just walk and have a coffee, walk and meet somebody for a drink. And that just makes all the difference and makes us see the possibilities in our cities differently. And I really think we can do this. I think it's sad to me when people say, well, like, oh, no, North America could never be nice. Well, I mean, come on, man. Like, we can do better than that. We can make this good, you know? I think to, like, what we're seeing now, we've talked a little bit about how, like, other, these movements have been siloed in the past. But what we talk about in the book is, like, if you name an issue that is vexing society right now, you can probably find a car at the bottom of it. And, you know, so Sarah was mentioning parking reform. That kind of started more as a housing issue.

of like, how do we make housing more affordable? Well, if we don't require developers to build parking, they can make each individual unit cheaper. But it's become a transportation issue as well because when you have the housing development without the parking, you need the better sidewalks, the better bike lanes, the better transit. And then it becomes a climate issue.

Dense housing is one of our solutions to the climate crisis. And it's also a policing issue, which we talk about in the book. You know, where do most people, especially black and brown people interact with police, usually when they're pulled over for a minor or even pretextual driving offense. So I think what we're seeing now is solidarity across movements

is really key if we want to have a better future, if we want to fight our kind of dystopian present. That's what gives me the most hope is the growing understanding of the ways in which our movements, whether it's technology and like the pushback against our Silicon Valley edge lords or it's just sort of like knitting our communities back together. They're all related. Every single one. Transportation is related to everything,

and we can't forget that because it's so integral. It's the thing we all do every day, regardless of who we are. Exactly. You know, I wish you both the best of luck with the book. I'm sure it's going to make such an impact, and so many people are going to learn so much from it. Doug, Sarah, thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show. This was awesome, Paris. Thank you. Thank you so much. Doug Gordon and Sarah Goodyear are co-host of the War on Cars podcast and co-authors of Life after cars, freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the automobile. Tech Won't Save Us is made a partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kyla

Hewson. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash Tech Won't Save Us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.