I recommend this book largely because it’s a fun read. Like the authors acknowledge at the beginning, they’re building on a large literature. It is not a treatise for traffic engineers. Those deep in the weeds already will learn some details and enjoy the time spent reading. Those who aren’t familiar with arguments in favor of urbanism and switching to other modes of travel will learn a lot more, and hopefully still enjoy it. Give it a shot.
If I knew how to write this well, or had support for it, I’d like to extend some of the ideas pertaining to the politics of cars and the burdens of parenting with cars. Because all children deserve a life after cars.
This isn’t a book review, just a vague collection of thoughts roughly organized by page, so I can refer to it later.
xi-xii: The first couple pages of the intro are a really great summary of the whole problem. If you can’t get somebody to read the whole book, maybe read them these two pages.
xiii: Reading “the fight for better transportation is deeply linked to the fight for a more equitable, sustainable, and just society” reminds me, by contrast, with How the Railways will Fix the Future by Gareth Dennis. So read both. Why we need fewer cars and more rail.
xiv: The history of how the podcast got started with a name like The War on Cars is a reminder to always be pushing the Overton window against autonormativity.
p14: When cars first began to appear, there was widespread opposition to them and the threat they presented from people who weren’t drivers and therefore did not identify with driving. How can we encourage people who do drive, or rely on cars, to stop identifying with them? Maybe we need a new term. Everyone who drives is a driver, drivers who really want more driving are “carbrains”. Maybe drivers who want less driving and more alternatives could be “mode shifters to be”. I’m not a poet.
From the beginning motordom coordinated, raised funds, did advocacy on behalf of cars to block Cincinnati's speed governor ordinance. How can opponents of cars match that scale when one of the advantages of not driving is that people don’t spend as much money on transportation from private companies, and transit agencies are generally banned from electioneering? One opportunity that presents itself, autonomous vehicles, is implied but not articulated at the end on p228.
p35: Talks about how people resist change, even if the proposed change can be shown to have helped elsewhere. So we need fewer rich people burning jet fuel to see bikes in foreign cities, and more rich Americans walking or taking buses through their own cities to see how much damage cars are doing. To see things aren't okay. Toward the end the book mentions talking to jerks who drive an F250 to the grocery store but then fly to Amsterdam to ride bikes, to get through to them. If that works to deradicalize them, great. I just think if you have that sort of influence on that sort of driver that they’re more likely to have a revelation if they personally walk through enough crosswalks in America surrounded by aggressive drivers in f250s.
p44: Bikes and cars are part of the "culture-war-driven media backlash". Book focuses on drivers who are worried about losing parking being louder than the broader group of people who would benefit but don't know to speak up. But the book does not mention, or at least fails to explore, that our media tends to be owned by rich reactionaries, and thus media outlets tend to favor the right in their journalistic posture. Ownership aside, a lot of media advertising is from the auto industry. It’s still good to fight back, but worth noting that the problem is larger than merely individual carbrains who express their need for parking.
p46: Bikelash is inevitable, so "Find your people, and together you can make it through” might be the best one line piece of advice in the book.
p56: incredibly depressing to write “Working parents might drive their kids to school on the way to work simply because it’s one of the few times of the day harried families get to be together. It’s complicated.” There’s a qualifier at the end, and I get it in a very narrow way. There’s a larger aspect of how work burdens the time parents have available to give children, which is a serious problem in American society that is not limited to cars. Yet it is unfortunate to treat time in the car so favorably. That sort of statement needs context about how harmful it is for so many parents to drive kids, versus riding a bus, walking, or riding bikes, like https://politicsofcars.beehiiv.com/p/hot-car-deaths
p61-62: Mentions the importance of including children in planning. Which is great. Parenthood should motivate people to get involved, and parents going to planning meetings should bring their kids. Kids are members of society like anyone else, and unlike adults they can’t even vote so it’s even more important for their voice to be audibly heard.
p81-82: Mentions 6PPD, a tire additive used to protect tires from car exhaust, which then becomes particularly deadly to salmon. Cars are fractal death. They’re so widespread and so powerful, that even the tiniest details add up. Here, due to the harm exhaust does to tires, and the additive added to tires because of the harm from exhaust, we have an interaction that leads to a new type of ecological devastation. A perfect distillation of how there will never be one weird trick to fix cars, such as EVs or Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) (although universal electrification would seemingly avoid the need for 6PPD specifically), because the whole system is unfathomably complex and needs to be wound down.
p83: The harm caused by traffic noise reminded me of An Immense World by Ed Yong. There are so many harms that drivers and roads cause to wildlife, that we can’t even understand because of our limited human senses.
p95: Chapter 5, Cars are Killing Us, asks why the US won't follow the safety policies of other countries, even though so many people have suffered or directly know people who have been killed or severely injured. Americans have been conditioned to defend cars. Even when somebody has a close link to that uniquely automotive risk of hot car deaths, see above, they still recoil from changing our system. It’s deeply sad.
p102: Air pollution kills 100k to 200k Americans per year. Not all from cars, but many. Systemic problems, EVs aren't the answer, sure sure, but anybody choosing to drive ICE is still choosing to kill their neighbors and give kids asthma. Same with gas lawn equipment. People need to stop it.
p126: Mentions "cyclists make better neighbors" and the phrase “politics of cars" but does not link the two to say cyclists make better voters. People are starting to appreciate that density of housing corresponds with electoral patterns. Density of housing is effectively a measure of how many trips can be made without driving. Building more, denser, housing and mode shifting away from driving are both important to electoral politics. Supporting dense housing and alternate modes of transportation should be as fundamental to people involved in electoral organizing as any other policy. Yet as mentioned on page 131, "Auto centrism is one of the few remaining bastions of bipartisanship".
p132: Cops won't charge drivers who hit protestors because many of them think driving into protestors is cool. Sad but true.
p134: Retractable bollards mentioned. They’re my favorite way to rapidly protect streets .
p135: The last paragraph is inconsistent with first paragraph of p136. Marginalized people can't be the problem if it's the elites who are going in vacation to Europe and able to afford comfortable walkable neighborhoods in America. Marginalized people, by definition, don’t have power. Many of them are all too familiar with the inadequate investment in walking, biking, and transit here in American cities without seeing European examples. The elites here in America who can afford to burn jet fuel to see the sights are the problem, and this book pulls punches to avoid blaming them. Here’s the last paragraph of 135, with emphasis added,
“The problem is that many people in our society are too pressed by the requirements of daily life-by the struggle to make the rent, pay for health insurance, figure out how to get the kids to the dentist-to be looking for a paradigm shift. A lot of people aren’t in Europe on vacation, marveling at car-free streets, because a lot of people can’t afford to even think about taking a vacation at all.”
Here’s the first paragraph of 136,
“And in many parts of the world, including the United States, a comfortable walkable lifestyle has become a luxury good. The few cities-and neighborhoods within those cities-where you can get around reliably on public transportation or by biking and walking have become mind-bogglingly expensive (New York, we’re looking at you). In most other places, if you’re walking or riding the bus, it’s only because you can’t afford to go by car. Many of your community’s amenities and advantages will be out of reach for you because the bus doesn’t go there, or it runs just a couple of times a day, or it takes so long that it doesn’t make sense to try using it. As for walking or rolling? To be avoided, unless you have a death wish.
p142: Within a discussion about how the number of cops and interactions with cops has gone up along with the rise of cars across the country, the books cites how in Carroll v United States (1925) SCOTUS decided that cops did not need a warrant to search a car. This was a case of a bootlegger caught with booze during prohibition.
Unmentioned is that the crime was not inherently related to driving. Maybe bootleggers, with more powerful vehicles and an incentive to evade police, were more likely to crash than other drivers. But the case had nothing to do with dangerous driving. There is a century long trend of cars enabling more policing of many types of crime, yet not much policing of driving itself. Today the same thing is true with automated license plate readers (ALPRs) including but not limited to Flock, which are occasionally used to find drivers who have committed crimes while driving, e.g., hit and runs, but generally are used to collect evidence for crimes unrelated to driving. There are some automated cameras used to issue fines related to driving, speed cameras being the most common example. But in America there are many more ALPRs which are intentionally not used to detect crimes related to driving. With a dash of software and maybe repositioning cameras, ALPRs could detect many cases of drivers not stopping for stop signs, holding phones, etc. But there is intense public opposition from drivers against holding drivers accountable. Flock cameras are usually privately funded, e.g. by HOAs, and would be much less popular if residents regularly received fines. It is really a shame that these technologies are intentionally not used to discourage dangerous driving.
As p144 mentions, "the number one place where most Americans encounter the police is in their cars." The best way to reduce interactions with law enforcement, to everyone’s benefit, is to both automate much of traffic enforcement and to reduce driving.
p146-8. Recounts the tragic story of how Raquel Nelson's child was killed by a driver on a 4 lane suburban Atlanta stroad and she was charged. Unmentioned in the book is that the driver had previously been convicted of two hit and runs! We need better transit and pedestrian infrastructure. But if only there had been reasonable repercussions for that driver, he would not have been driving at all on the day Nelson’s child died.
"Guy had been convicted of two previous hit and run accidents. He pleaded guilty to the hit and run that took A.J.'s life and served six months in jail. "
p152 cites a sixteen year old driving a Ford F250 that had been modified to roll coal with diesel fumes, who then hit and severely injured a group of bicyclists. The book emphasizes that he wasn't charged, in contrast with Raquel Nelson, the mom from the previous example. Not emphasized is that the parents, who owned the vehicle, were not charged for the modification or for letting their child drive it. There is an ongoing shift toward holding parents responsible if they let their minor children have access to guns that are used to shoot people. At some point the same should happen with vehicles. It’s one thing if, given our society, a child needs to drive to get to work or school. But it’s different if that child is given a F250 that’s been modified for even more antagonistic behavior.
p159 mentions how driveways were the only curb cuts available, before ADA mandated proper curb cuts for people to use. Unmentioned, and out of scope of this passage, is how harmful driveway cuts are vs proper curb cuts integrated into the sidewalk. Driveway cuts often involve awkward angles for the benefit of drivers turning between the driveway and the street. Making those turns feel smooth to drivers encourages some of them to be even lazier, and occasionally drive over sidewalks not built to withstand the weight, causing cracks in the sidewalk. Also the cuts are often at angles that make it difficult for sidewalk users crossing over the driveway. Pedestrians with limited mobility could trip, kids riding bikes can fall over, strollers and wheelchairs can have jarring jumps. That is, driveways themselves are often a hazard to sidewalks.
p160 Lists reasons that people can't drive, including immigration status. Then the book says people who can't drive get the message that they're "second-class". That's a good model. Carbrains treat non drivers, in some ways, like people who favor very forceful immigration enforcement treat immigrants. They revel in their power and don’t care if people in the other group are physically injured. They sometimes let the other group come to where they live to work, but otherwise want them to be physically distant. Whether physically near or far, they always want the other group to be treated as socially inferior and not worthy of comfort and dignity.
p162: Section about parking, or about getting rid of parking. AVs are not mentioned. However AVs would make it easier for new developments, one plot of land at a time, to credibility commit to not needing parking before citywide transit and bike infrastructure is ready for all trips. That should be part of the conversation.
p177: ending of chapter 8 , "Designing a better world", handles relatively straightforward high levels topics of parking and urban highways. But the messier harder problems are only hinted at. For example, the fear of gentrification, when a poor community is worried that there will be more displacement if the damage caused by a highway is undone. This topic needs more than pushing against elements of the status quo such as parking and highways. It needs aspiration for what will be built, for new housing, for restored wilderness, etc.
p180: Covers the fascinating example of Ghent’s overnight change to traffic patterns to reduce car use in the middle of the city.
p184: Groningen did it in the 1970s, and inspired Ghent. Other cities can copy them.
p228: Correctly notes that EVs and AVs won't solve the problem of cars, we need fewer cars. But misses the key part of "Autonomous cars at scale will require highly regulated, predictable streetscapes". The most under regulated and the least predictable part of our roads now are human driven cars. AVs are a natural competitor to human drivers, and government regulation can encourage that competition between cars and bring the big corporate money behind AVs to the table to reduce car usage overall as long as AV marketshare increases.