This is a sneak peek of the forthcoming book "Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves From the Tyranny of the Automobile" by Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, hosts of 'The War on Cars' podcast, and Aaron Naparstek, founder of Streetsblog. Pre-order your copy here or wherever books are sold.
Cars ruin everything.
That’s not the message we’ve been getting our whole lives. Since the beginning, the auto industry (along with its best friend, the fossil fuel industry) has assured us that car ownership is a magic portal to ease, comfort, and personal freedom. Car companies and their allies have gotten away with peddling that rose-colored vision because there’s a superficial truth to it: Automobiles do provide mobility to countless people, and they’ve become the backbone of the global economy. What the industry doesn’t want you to think about — ever— is what cars have cost us.
Far from serving as a figurative and literal vehicle for freedom and independence, cars exclude vast numbers of people from full enfranchisement in society —children, older people who have lost the ability to drive, people with disabilities that prevent them from driving, people who can’t afford to buy or operate a car. Automobiles have produced far more collective damage to the world, in terms of death, illness, and environmental destruction, than nearly any other invention in human history.
This rarely acknowledged reality — the true face of cars — is the exact opposite of the image the US automobile industry spends billions on advertising every year (GM alone shelled out more than $3 billion on ads in 2022). You know, the ads that show drivers roaring through empty cities and racing along deserted coastal roads or through sensitive desert habitats in hulking SUVs and sleek sedans. The industry isn’t just selling cars with those images. What they’re really hawking is a fantasy veiled in chrome and steel, the fantasy of power and control and independence. The American dream on wheels, no matter where in the world one lives.
A hundred years later, that dream is running on empty. Instead of unbounded freedom and rugged self-reliance, the never-ending proliferation of automobiles has delivered a host of costs and burdens. Among them are the demolition of our neighborhoods, towns, and cities to make way for expensive car infrastructure like freeways. Sprawling surface parking lots sit empty much of the time, forming millions of acres of desolate asphalt wastelands that amplify the heat of ever-more-brutal summers and generate toxic runoff during increasingly violent rainstorms. Car dependence enforces grinding financial servitude for tens of millions; an epidemic of violent death; a broad range of chronic, often fatal illnesses; countless hours lost in traffic; isolation from our fellow human beings, resulting in loneliness, alienation, and societal polarization; and the ongoing destruction of the natural world.
You could say it’s the opposite of freedom. At this point, we are not driving cars. Cars are driving us. And we’re headed for an existential crash. That’s why we’ve written the book you’re holding in your hands. We want to illuminate the scale of the damage that cars cause, the forces that have created this situation and that are invested in perpetuating it, and the way that the fight for better transportation is deeply linked to the fight for a more equitable, sustainable, and just society. Most important, we want to arm you with the tools you need to implement real transformative change.
And who are we? To put it simply, we’re ordinary people who have been passionate about the need for safe, clean, and sustainable transportation for a long time. Doug, a TV producer and writer, was also a neighborhood safe streets advocate, better known online as Brooklyn Spoke. Aaron was the founding editor of Streetsblog, a news site that launched in 2006 and was dedicated to what was then called New York’s “livable streets” renaissance. Sarah, a journalist and author, joined the Streetsblog reporting team soon after the launch and later went on to cover cities and transportation for publications such as Grist and CityLab. We started making The War on Cars podcast in 2018 because we felt a sense of urgency about communicating one fundamental message: It’s way past time to radically rethink — and shrink — society’s collective relationship with the automobile.
We knew that we could create a podcast that covered cars the way they ought to be covered, from all angles. We wanted to highlight the ways in which people around the world, from elected officials to ordinary citizens, were rising up with solutions to the problem of automobile dominance. We also knew that our podcast wouldn’t just be about policy solutions or advocacy surrounding traffic safety and livable streets. We wanted the name of the podcast to reflect the idea that cars are, without exaggeration, one of the most significant and negative environmental, political, social, and cultural forces in the history of humanity. As we tossed around one idea after another, Sarah blurted out that what we were trying to do was create “a podcast for the ‘war on cars.’”
We had our title.
But The War on Cars? Really? Before we even recorded our first episode, we could already hear people asking, “Isn’t that title too harsh? Doesn’t it turn people off ? Why can’t it be something that brings people along and encourages them to be open to your message? Does it have to be a war?”
But the title didn’t come out of thin air. The phrase has been kicking around for a long time. Paul Fairie, a researcher and instructor at the University of Calgary, unearthed a trove of early news stories with references to a “war on cars” or some variation. One, from 1904, is headlined “Farmers Declare War Against Automobiles,” and describes how a group of rural Wisconsinites placed heaps ofgravel on the road to block the incursion of motor clubs from Chicago. Another, from 1907, is headlined “War on Motorists” and reports that “the opening gun in the fight between Glen Echo [Maryland] and the automobilists of Washington” was a move to reduce the speed limit to six miles per hour.
Eventually, references to a “war on cars” would change their meaning. In 2002, The Economist published a story titled “The War Against the Car” and asked if the then-mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, was purposely making traffic worse so that he could enact congestion pricing the next year. No longer did the stories about a “war on cars” describe put-upon small-town folk fighting back against the scourge of urban joyriders. Instead, the phrase came to encapsulate the way drivers feel downright attacked by any policy or design solution that gives space to pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users — or otherwise addresses the many negative externalities of cars.
It’s a story from Canada, though, that’s the true inspiration for the podcast’s title. In 2010, a bombastic Toronto city councillor named Rob Ford ran for mayor on a platform that included ending what he called the city’s “war on cars.” The city had already invested in a plan to build a comprehensive light-rail network as well as hundreds of miles of bike lanes. Ford had long been an opponent of these efforts. Roads, he declared, were “built for buses, cars, and trucks, not for people on bikes.” The issue loomed so large over the election that when Ford eventually won, he declared during his very first press conference as mayor, “Ladies and gentlemen, the war on the car stops today.”
Rob Ford’s (admittedly masterful) deployment of the phrase war on cars was catnip for a news media hungry for clicks and desperate for eyeballs. It was also a perfect example of how conservative elected officials and their partners in the press hijack our attention and political narratives with wedge issues and culture war nonsense. Think of how a company asking its employees to say “Happy holidays” gets filtered through the outrage machines of cable news and is transformed into the “war on Christmas,” or how an all-female reboot of a beloved 1980s movie gets spun into a “war on men.” That’s how taking a few parking spaces to install a bike lane equals a “war on cars.” To paraphrase a popular saying, when you’re accustomed to driving, sharing the road feels like oppression.
Today, any effort to reclaim streets for people is met with claims of a war on cars. “Paris Mayor’s War on Cars Moves Up a Gear with Ban in the Heart of the City” was how France 24 described Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s efforts to limit cars on the Rue de Rivoli and otherwise make the city friendlier for cycling in 2017. The New York Post published a 2019 story about transformation of curbside car storage into Citi Bike stations, loading zones, public seating, and bike lanes under the headline “NYC’s War on Cars Has Eliminated 6,100 Parking Spots in Two Years.” The story even lamented that one hundred spots would soon be turned into charging stations for electric cars. How turning parking spaces for one kind of car into parking foranother kind of car equals a “war on cars” is puzzling, but once things become fodder for the culture wars, they don’t always make sense.
The three of us think it’s worth fighting to take back the streets of our cities and towns from the automobile. That’s why we decided to take the phrase The War on Cars back for ourselves, and in the process transform it into a weapon in the struggle that we’ve been part offor decades.
As it was at the beginning of the automotive era, today’s war on cars is really about fighting for people.
When we launched, our quest to bring attention to the destructive aspects of car culture felt quixotic. Something profound has happened in the past few years, though, a shift in consciousness sparked by the converging crises of climate change and COVID and bolstered by the hard work of progressive transportation planners,activists, and elected officials around the world.
Increasingly, activists are noting the intersection of the broken transportation system with other inequitable systems. The housing affordability crisis is fueled by land-use regulations that favor single-family homes in sprawl environments. Months of working from home during the pandemic made long, expensive car commutes on congested highways seem ever more punishing and ridiculous. Traffic enforcement takes a disproportionate toll on Black and brown communities. Women bear the burden of navigating a transport network that is still geared toward traditional male commuting patterns. And the climate crisis is now affecting daily life on every continent in every season, from catastrophic floods to wildfires that leave millions of people choking on smoke from our planet’s burning forests. Name an issue affecting society right now, and there’s a good bet it is caused or at least exacerbated by society’s overreliance on cars.
The time has come for a reckoning with the destructive and inefficient mobility system we have built. Our climate and our own health can no longer withstand the assault of the automobile. This reckoning won’t be easy, though.
Cars are everywhere. That’s part of why they can be so hard to see — and why envisioning a world with fewer cars is such a challenge. The pervasive hegemony of auto infrastructure can make it seem like cars are an inevitable part of a “circle of life” that begins with nervous parents driving a newborn baby home from the hospital to mourners escorting a hearse in a highway funeral procession. And because no one alive today has ever experienced the world without cars, some people may find it hard to imagine how we ever did without them.
The cost of our chronic car denialism is steep. Global carbon emissions from SUVs reached nearly 1 billion tons in 2022, which would rank them among the top-ten most-polluting nations. Nearly 43,000 people were killed by cars in the US in 2022, when pedestrian fatalities were the highest they had been since 1981, up 77 percent between 2010 and 2021. In 1969, 42 percent of American children walked or biked to school. In 2017, that number was 11 percent.
The good news is that people around the world are waking up to the fact that the water we swim in is not fine. An international movement to push back against car dominance is gaining ground. Cities including Paris, Bogotá, Montréal, Oslo, and New York are redesigning their streets, putting the needs of pedestrians, people on bikes and other mobility devices, and transit riders over drivers. Gen Z has been slower to embrace driving than previous generations. Positive coverage of bikes, pedestrian safety, parking policy, and related issues has been booming at major news outlets.
Cars as we know them today are unsustainable, and people must take the world back from cars if we are to survive the current existential threats to our society and the environment. We believe that together, we can seize this era in history to reimagine the autocentric landscapes where we live and rethink our own personal relationships with the car.
Maybe you’ve never thought much about it before, other than feeling an underlying sense that automobile dependence is somehow an immutable fact of life, like the laws of physics. Sure, you might say to yourself every now and then, cars suck in a lot of ways, but this is just the modern world and there isn’t anything or anybody who can change it.
This book is for you.
Or maybe you have thought about it, while sitting in traffic. You may have looked around yourself at the wider and wider highways, the taller and fatter SUVs, the choking brown haze on the horizon, the miles of vehicles idling in traffic, and the shimmering heat rising off acres of asphalt and thought, “This system is crazy.”
This book is for you.
Maybe you remember the thrill of getting your driver’s license, the freedom you felt the first time you got behind the wheel, only to discover before too long just how expensive and stressful driving can be. You’d like some options, but it seems too intimidating to think about and you don’t know how to begin.
This book is for you.
Or maybe you are already trying to reduce car dependence where you live, organizing your neighbors to get a bike lane, or some better bus service, or sidewalks that kids can walk on safely to get to school. Maybe you want information and examples to help you convince people in your community and your family that things could be different, and better, and cheaper without so many cars. Maybe you want some moral support in fighting what can seem like an unwinnable battle.
This book is for you, too. Because you’re not alone. Others are fighting back.
In part 1 of this book, we’ll look at the history of how we got to this automotive impasse and dig deep into the psychology of car culture. In part 2, we’ll explore the surprising damage cars do in our world — some of it deeper and more consequential than you might realize — and talk to researchers and activists who are trying to shed a light on those harms, raise the alarm, and rally forces for change. In part 3, we’ll dive into all the ways that people around the globe are fighting back against the tyranny of the car, with tactics ranging from DIY guerrilla street improvements to major government infrastructure projects like freeway teardowns. And we’ll offer insight on how to exert influence on those in power, from the public meeting to the street demonstration to the ballot box.
Life After Cars will tell you everything you always wanted to know about how we got to this point — and most important, about how we can make the transition to a better world, a world that flourishes after cars no longer dominate, and how you can be a part of it.
We don’t have to live like this, and we don’t have to wait for permission to initiate change.
Welcome to the war on cars.
Excerpted from Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek, in agreement with Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, Aaron Naparstek, 2025.
