Episode 4: Cars and the Culture Wars
Announcer: There’s some language in this episode that some listeners may find offensive.
Aaron Naparstek: Okay, we’re rolling.
Doug Gordon: Pew pew pew pew!
Sarah Goodyear: [laughs]
Doug: You’re listening to WCAR.
Aaron: The War on Cars’ Morning Zoo with Doug Gordon, Sarah Goodyear.
Doug: Traffic on the Prospect Park West bike lane? Totally fine.
Aaron: Okay, guys. This week I want to—I want to start the show with a clip. This is the late Rob Ford speaking in front of Toronto City Council, May 25, 2009. Here we go. Listen to this.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Ford: Thank you, Madam Speaker.]
Sarah: Oh, yeah.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Ford: I’m gonna be a straight shooter, as I always am. When I drive downtown every day …]
Aaron: As a mayor does.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Ford: … or at least three or four times a week to come to City Hall, there’s no secret, okay? The cyclists are a pain in the ass to the motorists. Like, let’s—let’s be quite frank.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Speaker: Counselor, I remind you of the need to use Parliamentary …]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Ford: Okay, but hold on. Okay, I’ll re—I’ll re—I will—I will retract the word “ass.”]
Aaron: [laughs] He’s so great.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Ford: But the exact same argument I get from the cyclists that say to me—and as soon as I get the emails, the first thing they say is “You’re a fat slob.” They go after my big belly and I say, “Okay, I can understand that. Fine. But what’s the solution?” Okay? Because the cyclists say “I hate you motorists. I can’t stand you guys.” And they flip me the bird as you’re going down Queen Street or Dundas Street. There’s this huge animosity between the motorists and the cyclists. There’s this huge animosity, and it’s never gonna go away, Madam Speaker.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, city councilor: No, it’s about you.]
Aaron: Did you guys hear that?
Doug: Yeah, I love that.
Sarah: “It’s about you.”
Doug: It’s about you. It’s not because you’re in a car, it’s because you’re—you’re the …
Sarah: Because you’re Rob Ford.
Doug: Yeah.
Aaron: They’re only flipping you the bird, Rob Ford.
Doug: Yeah.
Aaron: Okay, just want to play a little bit more Rob Ford. Just fast forward a bit.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Ford: Isn’t it? There’s no secret about it that there’s a war on cars in the city. It’s obvious as the days are long. There’s no secret about it that there’s a—there’s a war on cars in the city. There’s a—there’s a war on cars in the city …]
Aaron: Okay. All right, all right. Enough Rob Ford. Welcome to episode four of The War on Cars podcast that provides a safe, healthy outlet for your blinding rage toward the cars and drivers that are ruining your city. I am Aaron Naparstek, and I’m here for you with my totally nonviolent and emotionally available co-hosts, Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon.
Doug: Hello, everybody.
Sarah: I don’t know if we should let Aaron do the intros anymore.
Doug: That was good. I—did you just come from your therapist this morning? That was really good.
Aaron: No, I just want to emphasize that we’re really not, you know, violently waging war on cars.
Sarah: Not—not violently.
Doug: It’s a metaphor.
Aaron: A metaphor.
Doug: It’s a rhetorical war on cars.
Aaron: We’re not attacking motorists, as Rob Ford accused us.
Doug: Yeah, we’re not flipping anybody the bird.
Aaron: So that opener was—it’s kind of a classic. And I wanted to play it because to me, it’s sort of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand moment of the war on cars.
Sarah: Yeah.
Aaron: And of course, the Archduke was the—you know, his assassination triggered the start of World War I.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Aaron: And that audio clip, when Rob Ford stood up during the Jarvis Street bike lane debate in Toronto, in this sort of far-flung corner of the North American urban empire, and did his war on cars speech, that just started this entire meme of the war on cars. And we saw pretty quickly after the spring of 2009, this whole notion, this idea of a war on cars just kind of popping up in the progressive urban transportation policy debate in cities all over the place: Seattle, Calgary, New York, LA, you know, wherever you were, it was all of a sudden anytime that, you know, you tried to install a bike lane or put in a new bike rack that replaced a car parking spot, it was a war on cars.
Sarah: Yeah. So that’s where we’re going with this. We’re gonna look into the origins of not just the phrase “the war on cars,” but also the concept of the war on cars, and how that fits into the culture wars that we’re living through right now.
Doug: It’s probably pretty interesting that you see that language, “The war on X,” used for everything. Right now we’re experiencing what people on the right call “A war on men.”
Aaron: Mm-hmm.
Doug: Because men should be held accountable for, you know, sexually assaulting people. Suddenly it’s “A war on men.” So really what we’re talking about too, is privilege. Like, who is on top, and how has that flipped and changed over the years?
Aaron: Right. And when you try to sort of change the status quo, even in a tiny way, taking away one parking spot from a private car and replacing it with a bike rack in front of your child’s school, as Doug recently did …
Sarah: Yeah.
Doug: I’m still hearing about it every day in the playground.
Aaron: Because you’re waging war on cars. It’s an attack on motorists, just as Rob Ford told us in 2009.
Doug: Yeah.
Sarah: Yeah.
Aaron: So anyways, but before we get to that, before we get to this issue of the war on cars and how it fits into the broader cultural divide, we need to make a pitch for our Patreon.
Doug: Yeah. We need money to keep producing this podcast, and we want to thank—we’ve had dozens of people already just within the first few episodes of this podcast support us on Patreon. We really want to make a big thanks to the law office of Vaccaro and White. They’ve become our top sponsor, so we really thank them—they’re here in New York—for sponsoring us. You too can sponsor us. Go to TheWaronCars.org. Click on the “Donate“button. That will take you to our Patreon page. We have stickers, we have t-shirts, we’re getting more goodies coming your way. So there’s lots of great stuff. And thanks again to everybody who has donated, including the law office of Vaccaro and White.
Sarah: Yeah, we’re really—we’re really grateful to all of you. It lets us know that you care about what we’re doing, and it also helps to pay the bills.
Doug: And when you get those stickers next month, we want to see, you know, the car bumpers that you’ve put them on, the street signs that you’ve put them on. Please send us pictures. You can tweet us @TheWaronCars, and we’ll retweet those.
Aaron: Okay, so here we are. Cars have become this flashpoint in the broader culture war, and the stuff that we work on or have been working on or writing about for a bunch of years now, so bike lanes, better bus service, just improving urban transportation by reducing auto dependence, this has also become a major flashpoint in the broader culture war, and in the whole sort of, you know, increasingly partisan political divide. So how did we get here? What’s this about?
Sarah: Well, what’s interesting about Rob Ford and the way that he was out front on this, he actually also was kind of a preview of the man who’s the president of the United States today. And when you hear him at the top saying, “Oh, I’m a straight shooter, I’m just—I always talk—” you know, he was very much, you know, “I’m an honest guy. You know, I’m just a flawed human being. I’m just like everybody else.” And so he really, I think, was sort of a proto-Trump, in his way. And that’s what makes it interesting that he also previewed this part of the culture wars.
Doug: Even if you listen to that clip that we played, the way that he says the word “ass” and then is chided for it, they say, “Please use parliamentary language,” and he says, “Okay, okay. I’ll retract the word ass.” You hear that in Trump’s speeches where he’ll say something like, “I’m not saying that Democrats are Venezuelan socialists hell bent on bankrupting the country. I would never say such a thing like that. I’d get in a lot of trouble if I said something like that.”
Aaron: Yeah.
Doug: It’s exactly the same kind of rhetoric.
Aaron: And it’s worth noting that the mayor at the time of this speech was a guy named David Miller, who was a super progressive, excellent on transportation policy guy who really kind of—but he sort of represented the downtown Toronto regions. And shortly after this speech, you know, where Rob Ford started running to stop the war on cars, that was a major part of his platform. He went on to become mayor to replace David Miller. So there really was a kind of Obama to Trump analog there in that Toronto mayor’s race.
Sarah: Yeah. And also that he really emphasized the divide between the downtown urban people and the suburban people. He actually even said at one point, “Well, if I lived downtown, I’d be all for bike lanes, too. But I don’t.” That divide between the sort of urban elite and the suburban, you know, regular guy, that was his thing.
Doug: One of the things I’ve always thought about about that, and it’s different now that the seal has been ripped off of the racism model in our country and people are just saying the stuff outright, is that for a long time, you’d see tabloid newspapers exploiting the bikelash, the war on cars, for clicks and for big headlines, and it was, you know, angry residents shouting at each other. Because there was this brief period where we had come out of—especially here in New York—the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, some of the more racially-divisive parts of our history. And it was no longer acceptable to exploit that stuff for eyeballs, basically, for newspaper sales and clicks.
Doug: And so this became a proxy for all of that. It was a really safe way to sow division and exploit conflict. Now, of course, you can just come out and say whatever the hell you want and, you know, it’s awful. But I did notice that, and it did feel like you’re saying that Rob Ford was doing that, that this was a stand in for those, you know, elite, effete downtown liberals are taking away your privilege, and we’re gonna get “our” city back. You did hear a lot of that stuff like, “These are our streets. We need to take back our streets.” Which is, you know, it’s Make America Great Again, just in a different phrase.
Aaron: And I think there’s an interesting element to all this where in a way that—I think we don’t, we don’t acknowledge enough that in a certain way, the car is actually a kind of a—man, this is like so divisive, but, like, it’s kind of a red state incursion on the city, inherently, in the way that if you consider—fuck, that’s not the best way to say this.
Sarah: I think what you’re trying to say is that the car is an emblem of a kind of “personal freedom,” quote-unquote, that is also seen in the house with the picket fence.
Aaron: Yeah.
Sarah: And the suburban lifestyle in which everybody has their family and protects their family and stands their ground. And a man’s house is his castle, and all of that mythology that North America is still in love with, and that cities are the thing that’s seen as against that because that’s where everybody mixes.
Aaron: Right.
Sarah: And that’s where all the immigrants are, and that’s where, you know, you don’t have the freedom to kind of protect your family against the invaders or whatever. And I think that Rob Ford really understood that psychology, and that’s still really, really prevalent in North America in general.
Aaron: And it’s perhaps not a coincidence that not long after Rob Ford made this speech and the idea of the war on cars started bouncing around to Seattle and other US cities, conservative media started picking up on this idea of the war on cars. So you saw, you know, Wendell Cox, the kind of, libertarian urban planner thinker guy, you know, starting to criticize Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, you know, as waging a war on cars and suburbs. And the Wall Street Journal started running, you know, war on cars editorials, and the Heritage Foundation started doing it. And actually, this amazing video popped up, which has, like, almost a million views on YouTube, from what’s called PragerU.—Prager University. It’s actually just a YouTube channel.
Sarah: Yeah. And founded by a talk radio host and funded by fracking money.
Aaron: The video is called “War on Cars.” And one of our missions in life is to, you know, knock it off of Google, so you guys can help us with that.
Doug: Yeah. Well, that’s why we need your subscriptions on iTunes and your ratings so we can get a higher Google ranking. Yeah, so we can knock this one off.
Aaron: Yeah, and the Dennis Prager. But why don’t we play a section of that, because it’s actually a kind of amazing crystallization of car culture, and this sense that, you know, when you try to reduce car use in cities, you’re somehow attacking not just cars, but, like, American freedom itself.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: We may be witnessing the death of America’s car culture. And it’s not dying of old age. People are still buying lots of cars, but there’s been a concerted push by government bureaucrats and environmentalists to transform car ownership from a source of pride to a source of guilt. Ever since Henry Ford built the Model T, cars have been central to the American experience. That’s because cars are more than just another way to get from point A to point B. They allow us to go wherever we want, whenever we want, with whomever we want.]
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Think about it. With trains, planes and buses, the routes are planned and the schedule is timed. Only cars allow you to be spontaneous. When you get behind the wheel you are in control, you are free.]
Doug: You are in control. You are free.
Aaron: You can go wherever you want and sit in traffic.
Doug: That is some Orwellian, messed up language right there.
Sarah: Yeah, only in a car can you be spontaneous. The thing that I don’t feel when I’m in a car is spontaneous. What, you’re supposed to, “Oh, I just want to turn left suddenly!” I mean…
Doug: “Oh look, there’s a great coffee shop over—oh, no parking. I can’t stop by. Okay, bye.” Yeah.
Sarah: Yeah.
Aaron: “There’s a hydrant. I think I’ll go park in front of it.”
Doug: Yeah. Also, like this thing that requires one thousand percent of your concentration or you might kill somebody, or at least scratch and damage your car is the exact opposite of spontaneity.
Sarah: And also, let’s not forget about the car payment that you are making every month, and the insurance that you are paying every month, and the amount of debt that is taken on by people who have to own one or more cars because of the way the society is set up is really—that’s crushing.
Aaron: And all of that is almost nothing compared to the amount of public money that we pay for the infrastructure that the cars run on, which somehow—and that’s the thing I never quite get about the libertarian conservative argument where, like, you know, the government just wants to regulate you in your car as you drive on billions of dollars of government-funded roads and infrastructure.
Doug: Yeah. I mean, I think everybody—everybody is a socialist for cars, right?
Sarah: Yeah.
Doug: The most right wing, right-leaning people who would decry socialism in any form, including Medicaid and Medicare, Social Security even, absolutely are socialists for cars.
Sarah: Yeah, but see, the thing is that when she’s making this argument and when people make this argument, we all know what the subtext is is that you don’t have to get into a train with “those people.”
Aaron: With strangers. With the other.
Sarah: Not just strangers. It’s definitely coded language for people of other races, people of other income levels, people that, you know, are “the other.”
Doug: Yeah, because it’s not really about traveling where you want with whom you want.
Sarah: Yeah. She says—she really hits that.
Doug: It is about where you want, without whom you want, if that’s grammar.
Aaron: Yeah.
Doug: You know, it really is about—because of course I can travel with my family and I can be home with my family. But if I don’t want to be around brown people, if I don’t want to be around poor people, then I can get in my car. On a subway, on a bus, like, you have to mix up with everybody.
Sarah: Yeah.
Aaron: But then what’s weird is that, you know, in our cities currently, we still are doing so much to invite cars in. You know, like, all—almost every North American city currently has policy set up that really is oriented toward making it really accommodating and comfortable for cars, even as much as we’re waging our war on cars with our puny bike lanes and, you know, bike share systems. And I was curious, like, how far back that goes, you know, this notion of people feeling like there’s a war on cars in our city. So I got in touch with University of Virginia history professor Peter Norton, who as you guys well know, he’s the author of this amazing book called Fighting Traffic.
Doug: Yeah, everybody should check it out. We’ll put a link to where you can get it in the show notes.
Aaron: Yeah. It’s so good. It’s The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. And he really recounts, like, what the reaction was to the car when it first started appearing in American cities about a hundred years ago. And so, you know, Peter, of course, came back with this incredible tidbit when I asked. I was like, “Peter, like, where does this idea of the war on cars first come from?”
Sarah: Because he knows everything. [laughs]
Aaron: He does know everything. Yeah. I mean, first he points out that “car,” the word “car,” meaning an automobile or an automobile plus a driver, came along rather late in the 20th century. So before there was a war on cars, there was a war on “autoists,” you know? And so if you look for that, if you do a search for “war on autoists,” you can actually find a lot going way back. And so Peter sent along this article from the Indianapolis News for June 10, 1907, and the headline is “Residents Along National Road Open War on Autoists.” All right? So Indianapolis, 1907, the war on autoists has begun. You know, shots have been fired.
Doug: Yeah, but they didn’t mean it in that case in a sort of defensive, “Wow, we’re being persecuted.” They literally meant pedestrians and people who defined cities were seeing this invasion of cars, right? They’re saying …
Sarah: Well. they’re talking about—it’s actually towns, small towns. I mean, that’s what’s interesting here is that it says, you know, “Towns in the southern part of this county are up in arms against the owners of automobiles which speed along the national road, located along the national highway. In the southern part of the county are a number of small towns, and auto owners seem to delight in showing the citizens how fast they can drive.”
Aaron: So this is the complete flip on the current war on cars. Basically, people were just really upset that, you know, all of a sudden these newfangled, very powerful, poorly-operated machines were being slammed through their towns and villages and cities. The article goes on. You know, “The town of—” it’s the town of Lewisville is upset that the— “And they say the laws shall be obeyed. And when a machine goes through the town at a breakneck speed, its number is noted and it is stopped farther along, and charges filed against the owner. In a majority of cases, the persons guilty of violations are aristocratic citizens of the large cities.” [laughs] So it’s not just …
Doug: It’s the reverse.
Sarah: Yeah.
Aaron: It’s the total opposite.
Doug: That’s amazing. Yeah. But I mean, that’s what cars were for. They were basically you lived in a big city, you walked everywhere, you took trolleys everywhere, and if you wanted to get out to the country, you took a car.
Sarah: Hmm.
Doug: Now we see it in the exact opposite way: it’s suburbanites living in the country, so to speak, who want to come in to—for their entertainment, to take in a Broadway show, to go to dinner. It’s the complete opposite.
Aaron: Right.
Sarah: Yeah. But what was accepted in 1907 was that the idea that cars were scary, were dangerous, were, you know, infringing on humanity. And that is what we have lost. And now it’s when people feel infringed upon, when people like us say, “I don’t want to be in fear of my life because of the way people are driving cars around in this city. People get killed on the sidewalk regularly, drivers lose control and just slam into people on the sidewalk.” When we protest that, we’re told we’re waging a war on cars. We’re the ones who are trying to limit personal freedom and spontaneity. My right to spontaneously walk down the sidewalk without worrying about being killed is elitist or somehow anti-American in the view of people like that.
Aaron: But so why didn’t we call our podcast The War on Cities? Because in a way, right, that’s what we’re talking about. Like, cars are sort of waging a war on cities, and that’s kind of how they looked at it a hundred years ago, too.
Sarah: Because we wanted to take back this idea of the war on cars and say the war on cars is a righteous war. It’s not something to be ashamed of.
Doug: We’re going to film a video of Sarah saying that in some cave with a lot of guns behind her.
Aaron: [laughs] I can’t believe Sarah’s saying that.
Doug: Yeah.
Aaron: I thought you were very uncomfortable with the war rhetoric.
Sarah: I do feel somewhat uncomfortable with the war rhetoric. I’m basically a pacifist, and so sometimes when you guys get going and like, “Then we’re all gonna be generals and sergeants and soldiers, and—” and I’m like, “Oh, I don’t like that.” And I—and some of our listeners have objected to the military imagery.
Aaron: But look, I mean, are we—so now that cars and bikes are—and transit or whatever, now that this is all part of the, you know, partisan Republican-Democrat, red-blue divide, I mean, that actually—I don’t know that that’s a very productive place for it to be. It doesn’t seem like problems are getting solved in that framework right now in this country, right? Like, I mean, I don’t know if there’s anything we can do about that, but …
Sarah: [laughs] No. I mean, I’m feeling kind of fatalistic about that right now. I mean, the truth is that I think that we’re at a point in our society where we have to decide where we stand. We have to stand for what we believe in more than ever. We have to not shrink from taking really strong positions on things of moral import.
Doug: Yeah, I always have this problem. I like the “war on cars” language because it gives me the opportunity when someone says, “You’re waging a war on cars,” to look at them and say, “I want you to explain why there shouldn’t be a war on cars, because we have 200 people in New York City dying every year being killed by cars. Many of them …”
Aaron: 44,000 a year in the country.
Doug: 40,000 people. So I want that person to say, “Okay, you think there’s a war on cars? I want you to explain why there shouldn’t be.” And I think a lot of time we as liberals, as progressives, tend to cede a lot of territory when we have these arguments, like the Second Amendment gun rights or one of those. We always say, “Look, we understand that people need guns,” or “I’m not against the Second Amendment.” It’s like, no, you know what? Just say there are too many fucking guns in this country and we need to do something about that. Don’t start on the other guy’s territory. And I think with cars—and excuse me for swearing, I don’t normally do that, and I know we might bleep that out, but I think with cars we need to stop with this, like, “Look, I understand that cars are good for some people and some people—” no. We have too many cars. Using a car should be the exception not the rule.
Aaron: At least in the city, right? We’re talking about cities here.
Doug: Absolutely. Look, in the suburbs …
Aaron: If you’re up in Vermont or whatever …
Sarah: Yeah. You have to …
Aaron: … feel free to use your car.
Doug: I drive a car to get to see my relatives who live in places that are not accessible by transit or bike. Absolutely. Like, our society is built this way. We can’t blame people for using things within the framework of the society in which they live. But here in the city where you have other options, yeah, we should look at those people and say, “You know, I actually think you’re making not a great choice, given what we know about the dangers of cars.” And I’m not afraid to say there should be a war on cars.
Aaron: And I’m kind of there too now. I mean, I feel like I want people to start seeing the car as—people in cities, I want people in cities to start seeing the car as a kind of red state, suburban/rural incursion on your territory, on your—on your ground.
Doug: On your freedom.
Aaron: And on your freedom. Like, freedom for us in a city is to be able to walk down the avenue and be like, “You know what? This is kind of a long walk. I’m just gonna hop on an inexpensive, reliable bus that’s gonna be here in—oh, look, two minutes. I’m just gonna hop on that and take the rest of this trip on that bus. That, to me, is freedom in a city: inexpensive, reliable, you know, decent, clean transit. You know, that I know is there. Or like a good, safe bike lane that, like, my 11-year-old kid could ride into school and not—and not have me, you know, schlep him back and forth, you know, in my car. That’s not freedom.
Doug: You’re talking about like a real, like, Roosevelt “four freedoms” sort of freedom, and not this conservative, individualistic bullshit of freedom, which is “I have the freedom to buy a very expensive car, and like Sarah said, pay hundreds of dollars to a bank every month.” You’re talking about freedom from fear, freedom to walk around your city and not wonder will I get crushed if I step out into the street?
Aaron: And also having choices. Like, freedom of choice. Like, I have an option. “Oh, I could walk this ride. Oh, I could bike it. Oh, I could use transit.” You know, in a city that’s freedom. And I want—I want people to start seeing the car as a genuine incursion.
Sarah: Yeah, And it not just incurs on your space, it also pollutes the air, it also is incredibly loud. You cannot get away from it, and there is no freedom to even be anywhere without cars roaring and spewing everywhere around you. It’s—it’s oppressive.
Aaron: It does get to this question of, you know, what is it gonna take to—you know, I mean, in a way, it’s like you’ve gotta convince people in cities to actually give up their cars. You know, what—what would it take to get somebody to be like, “You know what? I can give this up. It would be better if I get—I would enjoy my life more without this albatross.”
Sarah: So we’ve talked about—we’ve talked about getting people on and talking to them about quit your car, right?
Aaron: Quit their car.
Sarah: And I think that if anyone out there listening who has a car, who might be willing to talk with us about quitting that car and living a different life, a life of spontaneity and freedom …
Aaron: Email us.
Sarah: Email us, and we might have you on and talk to you about that, and kind of challenge some of your assumptions about why you need that car.
Aaron: Yeah. Email us at TheWaronCars(@)gmail.com. Any questions or comments, and if you want to be a participant in our, you know, upcoming feature, quit your car, we want you. So …
Doug: Yeah. And we also want to hear episode suggestions, guest suggestions, so please send all feedback our way.
Aaron: So we’ve been talking about the war on cars, the phrase, where this whole idea comes from. Let’s just—let’s just go back real quick and remind ourselves what we’re up against. Here’s that PragerU. video again.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Americans are explorers. We value our independence, and we’ve never been good at staying put or being told where to go and at what time. Maybe that’s why, despite the government’s best laid plans, sales of trucks and SUVs are breaking records as low gasoline prices inspire people to drive more and buy bigger vehicles. Why shouldn’t they? Personal car ownership is part of America’s fabric. It brings people together, and makes this big country of ours seem a little smaller and more free.]
Doug: We could easily sit here for an hour point by point by point and go through everything she said and say, “Well, that’s not correct.”
Sarah: That’s not what it’s about. It’s about emotion.
Doug: It is about emotion. And so I think part of what we have to do in the war on cars is just—you can’t convince the other side, necessarily—you just have to activate the people who are already inclined but perhaps not that active to come out and say, “Yeah, actually. This could be a great thing if we change this.” Am I gonna convince a local Rob Ford to stop driving? Absolutely not.
Aaron: Yeah.
Doug: But I might convince that person who’s on the fence who thinks, “Gosh, you know, my car payments are really kind of burning a big hole in my budget every year. Like, yeah, I should probably switch.”
Aaron: And I mean, I don’t even know that convincing is part of this at all. I think—I think cities just have to do things, and the way to convince people in a lot of cases is to just build the infrastructure that a city should have. So, you know, make a local bus run better, make it so that 20 percent of school kids around one middle school can all bike to school safely. Just build that infrastructure, let people see it. And generally, I think what cities have found is that when they do these things, people really, really like having good transportation. They like not being car dependent. And the stuff is popular and politicians benefit.
Doug: Yeah. And I think part of it too is that we’re just swimming in it, right? You look around and cars are everywhere, so we just assume that that is the dominant mode, and that’s the way it’s always going to be. When we were all born, cars were everywhere. Right now, cars are everywhere. It just seems like it’s—that’s what it is. And if you change the status quo and more people are born into a different status quo, you know, my kids will never know a New York City that didn’t have bicycle share. It is as natural to them as the subway or the bus stop at the end of our block. So eventually, you’ll have a critical mass of people who never knew any differently.
Aaron: That’s it for episode four of The War on Cars. Check back soon for episode five. We’re gonna be talking e-bikes with Helen Ho of the Biking Public Project, and that should be really good. Check our website TheWaronCars.org. If you’re enjoying the show, you can review us on Apple Podcasts, on iTunes. Please donate a few dollars on Patreon. You can find that on our website, too.
Doug: And by the way, we gotta give another big thanks to the law office of Vaccaro and White for being our top Patreon sponsor. But you too can pitch in, get some stickers. We’ve got some good t-shirts coming with an awesome design on them. Sarah, do you want to do a shout-out?
Sarah: Yeah. Our logo and our t-shirts are designed by Dani Finkel of Crucial D.
Doug: She’s awesome. Thank you.
Aaron: This episode was recorded by Peter Carl. Music is by Nathaniel Goodyear. Our producer is Curtis Fox. I am Aaron Naparstek with Doug Gordon and Sarah Goodyear.
Doug: Thanks, everybody.
Sarah: Thank you.
Aaron: And we are The War on Cars. Curtis, should I—is there a way to—it would be hard to fix the part where I sound really stupid, right?
Curtis Fox: It would be hard, but let’s try it.
Doug: That’s our—that’s our Easter egg right there.
Sarah: [laughs]
Doug: Do you mean the whole podcast? I’m sorry.
Aaron: Yeah.