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Like every American younger than 80 years of age, I have lived all my life with cars. When I was a mere tot, my mom used to take my sister and me for rides around town after lunch. Later, it became my preferred way of getting to school, and once I got my drivers' license, a ready and able way to get any place.
In a country where most adults drive to get almost everywhere, our towns have been designed around making driving convenient and parking readily accessible. It's how our world has looked since we were born, and its attributes have been celebrated in advertising and entertainment media. Only with effort can the substantial social costs of all these cars and all this driving become apparent, and it takes even more effort to imagine a different way of designing places.
Life After Cars is a handy survey of all those social costs of driving. I have long been a fan of The War on Cars, an edgy but erudite podcast out of New York City that began in 2018 as a three-way collaboration between journalist-activists Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek. I don't remember how I found out about it, but it can't have been too long after the podcast began. Somewhere on the road to 160 episodes, Naparstek, who also founded the website Streetsblog, withdrew from the podcast, though he is listed as a co-author of the book.
The title of the book is overstated, of course, even though it is not as contentious as the (ironically intended) title of the podcast. Motor vehicles are here to stay. What the authors actually seek is "[a] world where those who truly need to use cars and trucks--workers delivering heavy loads, residents of rural areas, some people with mobility disabilities--can do so without competing for space and resources with people whose use of personal motor vehicles is unnecessary, wasteful, and inefficient," and walking, public transit and cycling are accepted as part of the mobility mix (pp. 225-226).
The social costs of motor vehicles are mostly explored across five chapters in Part II, "How Cars Ruin Everything." Cars make force children to choose between their personal safety and exploring their world (ch. 3); cause a host of environmental, noise, and other public health problems (ch. 4); kill more and more people each year (ch. 5); create social isolation and all the problems attendant to it, not to mention making enemies of our fellow drivers (ch. 6); and create extra burdens for people who are poor, physically handicapped, or otherwise socially marginalized (ch. 7). A lot of these phenomena are explored in more detail elsewhere--they cite a lot of recently published books, many of whose authors they've had on their podcast--but rarely are they presented in one place in such a convenient way.
Are these social costs of driving "worth it?" Have we as a society, somewhere along the line, collective decided that some collateral damage was acceptable given the benefits car provide us? The authors argue otherwise in Part I, "How We Got Here." They spend a lot of Chapter 1 in the pre-World War II era, when cars had to fight for space on streets with pedestrians, streetcars, and so forth. They credit cars' ultimate victories, on the streets and in the halls of government, to powerful and ruthless business interests. Today, with fewer and fewer people around who remember a non-autocentric world, it's easy to see cyclists and other advocates of transportation alternatives as threats, because whatever our ideals, we have to get to work in the world cars have made.
The authors try to end on a hopeful note in Part III, "How We Get Free," although they frequently revert back to Part II world, as in their critique of city-supplied free parking (pp. 162-172). They hail academic studies of the effects of cars, and while noting the difficulties officials have faced even where (Ghent, Paris, e.g.) some space has been reclaimed, argue that politicians can look past the loud objectors to a quieter supportive majority; citizens can make themselves heard; and people in some cases can be proactive, as with tactical urbanism (pp, 205-214).
They have faith, backed up by some experience, that once we are able to provide space for alternatives to cars, people will enjoy and defend it. The trick is overcoming the fears of chaos that are easy to gin up.
It's a beautiful world, this one. A quieter, greener world that is more sustainable both environmentally and economically. It's also a happier world, where people are more likely to let their children roam free, to know and trust their neighbors, or to have spontaneous interactions with friends they bump into on a sidewalk. This is what life after cars could look like. (226)
I'm not sure I share their optimism, but they do lay out the choice urgently before us. The fantasy world of SUV commercials, in which we zip confidently through empty city streets or about the scenic wilderness, is just that--a fantasy. The reality, however, of traffic-choked suburban stroads was constructed to serve those fantasies as well as the economic needs of auto manufacturers. Reclaiming our streets will be strenuous, even if everyone reads this book, just because of how our towns have built those streets for the last 80 years.
Life After Cars webpage
The War on Cars webpage (Patreon)
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