Episode 133: Listener Origin Stories (Patreon Bonus Re-Release) 

 

Sarah Goodyear: When you’re out on your bike, whether it’s for an all-day adventure or just your regular commute, having the right gear can make all the difference. That’s why I love my BullMoose Bar Crawler bag so much. It attaches to my handlebars with handy Velcro straps, and it holds everything I need for my ride securely right where I can get at it—phone, wallet, keys, sunscreen, snack. I’m ready. BullMoose Softgoods is all about making sure you are ready for whatever the road brings you. The Bar Crawler is just one of the handcrafted, high-quality bags from BullMoose Softgoods. Go to BullMooseSoftgoods.com and you can check out all of their bike-friendly bags. Best of all, BullMoose will custom design colors, sizes and styles just for you and your bike, and War on Cars listeners get a 15 percent discount. Just go to BullMooseSoftgoods.com and enter discount code WOC15 when you check out. Again, that’s BullMooseSoftgoods.com, discount code WOC15.

Doug Gordon: Hello everybody, and happy summer. It’s Doug. Aaron, Sarah and I wanted to let you know that our release schedule is gonna be a little slower this month. We have a ton going on right now, and have already lined up some amazing guests for the fall, so we’re busy with podcast production. We’re also writing a book, and that is taking a lot of our time and demanding our full attention. We’re really excited about it, and we are throwing everything we’ve got into writing and editing something that we hope will be amazing. So that means we won’t be back with a new general release episode of the podcast until the beginning of September—not that long from now.

Doug: However, we are still going to release a new Patreon-exclusive bonus in August, so we really appreciate everyone who pitches in to support the podcast. And every time we say it, we mean it. We really couldn’t keep going without listener support, so we want to honor your contributions by delivering on our promise of a new ad-free bonus episode each month. So be on the lookout for that bonus episode in just a couple of weeks. In the meantime, we are dropping this old bonus into the general feed. It’s something we released just for our Patreon supporters, and it features our listeners sharing their origin stories. Basically, it’s all about how people get radicalized into the war on cars. It’s just a sample of the kind of episode you will get when you sign up on Patreon. So go to TheWaronCars.org, click “Support Us” and you’ll get full access to bonus content, ad-free episodes, presale tickets for live shows and we’ll send you stickers. Plus you’ll get to contribute to episodes just like this one. Stay cool out there, and thanks.

Peatónito: Hola, Aaron, Sarah and Doug. I’m Peatónito, the pedestrian luchador vigilante hailing from the chaotic yet beautiful Mexico City. When I was a kid, I used to walk a lot with my grandmother because she didn’t have a car. My grandma was an empowered pedestrian, and I learned survival tactics and how to defend myself while navigating the car-oriented, dangerous streets of my city. Years later, I was hit by a car twice. One incident involved an unintentional car crash while I was riding my bike. It was a sensational event with my bike and me flying, but fortunately, nothing serious happened, and the car driver was very polite. To be fair, it was the fault of the street design, not the driver.

Peatónito: Another time, I was walking on a street without sidewalks, and a car driver became desperate because I was in the middle of the road. He decided to hit me intentionally. Fortunately, nothing happened, but it is heartbreaking to think it was an intentional hit and run. So in 2011, I joined the first pedestrian advocacy group in Mexico. We were a bunch of rebels painting sidewalks, crosswalks and bikeways without any permits from the authorities. One year later, inspiration struck during a lucha libre wrestling match. I envisioned becoming the luchador vigilante of pedestrians.

Peatónito: Armed with a mask and a cape acquired just outside the wrestling arena, I decided to deliver pedestrian justice, assisting people in crossing streets, pushing backward cars obstructing crosswalks, and even controversially, walking atop cars parked on sidewalks. My mom warned me about the last one. Car owners might not appreciate my dance moves. Keep up the fantastic job. Long live The War on Cars!

Doug: This is The War on Cars. It’s Doug here. I’m here with Aaron and Sarah.

Sarah: Hey there.

Aaron Naparstek: Hello.

Doug: And this is a bonus episode. If you’re listening, you’re a Patreon supporter, so thanks so much for your support.

Aaron: Hola.

Doug: [laughs] Well, do you both know who that is? You do know who that is.

Sarah: Yes, I certainly do.

Doug: Peatónito.

Sarah: A hero to pedestrians everywhere.

Doug: Also the nicest guy you’ll ever meet.

Aaron: Yeah, super nice guy. I met him in Mexico City, and not in his lucha libre outfit. He took my family around on a bike tour.

Doug: Did he push back cars even though he didn’t …

Aaron: No, he didn’t do anything that would get us harmed by Mexico City drivers, potentially.

Doug: I met him at a Vision Zero conference here in New York, and he really is a very nice guy doing amazing work.

Sarah: Yeah, I interviewed him a few years ago, and it’s just such a feel-good thing to have him out there in his outfit, fighting for pedestrian rights. What I love about it is that it’s got humor, it’s got cultural resonance with the place that he lives, in Mexico City. And it’s a fun way of showing that people can take control of their streets with a sense of humor.

Doug: Yeah, we need more humor in the work that we do.

Aaron: And also walking on top of cars. We need more of that, too.

Sarah: For sure. [laughs]

Doug: Okay. So last month for our bonus episode, the three of us shared our origin stories, how we got radicalized, so to speak, into the war on cars. And the response to that from our listeners was great. People started sharing their own origin stories, so we decided for this month that that’s what we would do is we would let listeners share their origin story.

Doug: So we put the call out on Patreon, and a bunch of folks responded and sent in voice memos. We won’t be able to include all of them in the body of this episode, but stay tuned ’til the end. We’re just gonna run them all. And if you’re celebrating Christmas with your family, just have it on in the background. Just let this sort of seep into your family’s brains.

Sarah: Kind of like a War on Cars yule log.

Doug: Yeah, just keep it running.

Aaron: Just let yourself fall asleep to this with a cup of eggnog next to you.

Sarah: Yeah. And you’ll wake up transformed.

Aaron: That’s right. That War on Cars spirit.

Doug: [laughs] All right, here’s a voicemail from a friend in the UK.

Stu: Hello, I’m Stu. As I’m speaking to you, some would have you believe that I’m trapped within a 15-minute radius of my house in Oxford, UK. My origin story is really in two parts. Firstly, I spent my teenage years in the English countryside, where the car is king because everything is just so far apart. Even back then, the public transport was terrible, and it got noticeably worse and worse over time. Obviously, I felt this myself because I never learned to drive, but I also noticed its impact on older people living in my area, who obviously, they couldn’t visit other towns as much, but they also couldn’t visit the high street in our own very small town as much because it was so hilly, unless someone gave them a lift in their car. I remember feeling just sick to the back teeth of being disrespected and treated like a second-class citizen, as though my time and independence didn’t matter as much just because I didn’t have a car.

Stu: And part two came when I went to university. It was in a big town where public transport was good, so obviously I was much better off. But a lot of my friends brought their cars with them, and I swear all I ever heard about their cars were complaints. It was hard to find parking on campus. Parking was expensive, fuel was expensive, insurance was expensive, and so on. You know, obviously we were all poor students from a similar economic background, but it just became very noticeable how much more disposable income I had, as opposed to those who were running a car. And that was the moment that it clicked, really, that, wow, cars are actually a pain in the ass, yet a lot of people clearly, they feel that they’re forced to rely on them.

Stu: And from then on, of course, once your eyes are opened and you see the effects of car dependency, you can’t ever unsee it. And that’s how I wound up here 10, almost 15 years later now, as a listener to The War on Cars.

Sarah: I love that, the realization that you don’t have to take on that burden that all your friends have, and the clarity of being able to see it as a burden because he had never, you know, attained it. And I think there’s so many things in our lives that, “Oh, we have to get this. We have to get this because society says that we have to have it.” And then when we actually get it, it becomes a burden, and something that causes a lot of anxiety and stress. And I think a lot of things in our materialistic society are designed to create more anxiety so that you’ll want to buy more things. And cars are obviously top on that list. So I love the clarity in that listener’s response.

Aaron: Yeah, it’s a little bit of a war on cars thesis there, you know? And then it includes “Sick to the back teeth.”

Sarah: I know.

Aaron: Which I’ve never heard before.

Sarah: That’s a great expression.

Doug: It’s a great one.

Aaron: Sick to the back teeth!

Doug: I also love that he made the joke about the 15-minute cities controversy, but what he was describing at the beginning is if you don’t have a car in a lot of places, you are living the dystopian nightmare that the conspiracy theorists are talking about. You’re stuck in your home, you can’t access the high street, things like that. So I love that he sort of made that tie to actually, the real problem is that you need a car for everything. That’s the conspiracy that is forcing you into this lifestyle.

Aaron: And he gets into a little bit of the psychic cost, which I think gets underplayed. Just the fact that if you don’t own a car, like, and times when I have owned a car and not owned a car, when I don’t own a car, this whole chunk of my brain is freed up. You know, there’s this cost of just the car is always there, causing you problems, making you think about it. “Oh, I have to move it for alternate side parking” or whatever issues. So yeah, I think he really nails something there.

Carolina: Hi, my name is Carolina, and I live in Miami Beach, but my origin story begins in Weehawken, New Jersey, where I was living in 2006 when my Honda Civic was stolen. I was young, I was broke, and the car was underinsured, and I couldn’t afford another one without going into serious debt. So I found a new job in the city that wouldn’t require a car, and I bought a really fun folding bike that I could take on the PATH train at rush hour. And that bike was complete freedom. It was not just financial freedom, but it was freedom in how I moved around the city, which I began to see in an entirely new way.

Carolina: But what really pushed me to get involved in safe streets advocacy was having kids several years later. There’s nothing like pushing a stroller over a subpar sidewalk or having to navigate hostile infrastructure with a precocious four year old who really, really, really wants to ride his bike to school. So I do it for my kids because I want them to be able to feel the freedom I felt when I first started riding in the city. And I want them to have that independence, to be able to get places on their own, on their own two wheels. Thanks for everything you guys do.

Doug: This is gonna be a theme, by the way. You’ll hear this in some of the voicemails that we’re gonna play: parenting becomes a radicalizing force for a lot of folks.

Aaron: Having kids, and trying to navigate with your kids around the city really changes the way that you see cars in the city. They’re just suddenly this enormous threat.

Tom: Hey, everyone. This is Tom from Hamilton. I ended up in this space because of my kids. One morning, I thought it’d be kind of fun to bike them to school, and was pretty shocked at the imbalance on our streets. Became frustrated with the lack of safety as well as the mainstream narrative around people on bikes and our car-first-at-all-cost culture that’s been completely normalized. 80,000 tweets later, a creative agency, and now more pictures in my camera roll of bike lanes and crosswalks and of my own children, seems things kind of went a little bit sideways. Anyways, grateful to all the amazing, incredibly smart people I’ve met in this space and been lucky enough to learn from. Thanks for what you all do making things better.

Doug: If you don’t recognize that voice, that was Tom Flood, who’s been a guest on a bonus episode of the podcast. And he is an amazing, creative ad-maker, marketer who has turned his career into advocating for pedestrians and for cyclists, and for the children who use our streets, especially.

Sarah: Yeah, he does these amazing videos where he uses footage of his own kids riding in the street and juxtaposes it with the motor forces arrayed against them. And because he’s so good at delivering these messages, you know, you really get the point of, you know, how absurd this system is. And I mean, I think it’s interesting that we see children as, like, this indicator species, right? That for so many people, things that they’re willing to accept for themselves are not things that they’re willing to accept for kids. And I just wish that we could see ourselves as being worth as much as kids are. Like, it’s not okay for adults to have to be terrified of all these things, either.

Sarah: I kind of sometimes wish that people would have the same amount of compassion for themselves as adults and for other adults as they automatically seem to feel for kids.

Doug: Yeah. I mean, a lot of the framing around red light cameras and speed cameras in New York City, for example, was framed around, “but the kids.” You know, it was school zones and things like that.

Aaron: I mean, we were literally only allowed to put these technologies around schools.

Doug: Yeah. And meanwhile, the largest share of people who are killed by cars are senior citizens, way out of proportion with their population numbers. But yes, like, it shouldn’t just be like we only care about eight year olds and 80-year-olds. We should care about the 49-year-old who would just like to go get groceries. Yeah.

Aaron: And if you want to hear more Tom Flood, Doug did a really nice interview with him as a Patreon bonus.

Doug: Yeah, Tom’s a great guy. Also, just to tie it back to Peatónito, these are two people who are just using their particular skills to be advocates. And I think there’s a great lesson there of, like, just use what you’re good at to advocate in your own way.

Sarah: Aaron is good at yelling “Honk!” into a driver’s window. [laughs]

Aaron: Yes.

Sarah: Sorry.

Aaron: Yeah, it’s real skill.

Megan: Hi, y’all. This is Megan Ramey, your disciple from Hood River, Oregon. My origin story, or what I call Robert Frost moments, takes place in three chapters, and I’ll start with the most recent and make my way back to the earliest. So the most recent was me being a student at University of Georgia. I hydroplaned my car during a rainstorm and totaled it. Everybody was okay. The car was not. And my dad said, “Here’s your bike.” So used my bike to get everywhere, including putting it on the bus to go the longer distances. And it was life changing. I felt more connected to my community, lost weight without even trying to. And that forever changed me being a very car-light individual.

Megan: Before that, I spent the summer in London as an intern. Walked in, took the tube everywhere. And when I got home back to Atlanta in the suburbs, I got into my car and felt incredibly lonely. And at the same time, my mom looked at me one day and was like, “Megan, your legs look fantastic!” And I was like, “Oh, okay. Well, this is the way now.” So—and before that, very early on as a kindergartner in northern Wisconsin, I missed the bus, and my babysitter was mad at me for missing the bus. And she said, “You get to school any way that you can.” And so I was like, “Hmm.” So I looked at my bike, got on my bike, and rode the one mile to school, and I felt completely liberated and full of accomplishment. And my babysitter got in trouble. But it is the earliest—it is why I am so passionate as a safe routes to school professional, and what charges me up about changing child’s lives.

Aaron: I mean, I’m kind of glad she went there with the weight loss and good legs, because I mean, I feel that whenever I’m in a car-dependent place for about a week, I really do start to feel—I start to feel out of shape and a little bit bummed out. And I’m just like, “What’s going on?” And it’s like, oh, I’m just not walking around as much.

Doug: Yeah.

Aaron: I’m not walking and I’m not biking. And just even a little bit of walking and biking makes a huge difference for me in terms of, like, physical and mental fitness, I feel like.

Sarah: And then the other thing that she talks about, how she feels more connected to her community, I mean, I really feel this strongly that the effort that I put into getting around and the ways that I have to get around put me into contact with other people constantly. And yeah, sometimes it’s harder, and sometimes I’m walking up a flight of stairs, but then when I’m doing that, sometimes I help someone carry their stroller up the stairs. And then we have a nice moment together. And, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of those moments add up to a life in which I feel super connected to the place where I live, which I think is something that, sadly, a lot of people don’t get to feel.

Charlie: Hi, War on Cars. This is Charlie from Hell’s Kitchen in New York City. My origin story is the birth of Citi Bike. The moment New York City announced the bike share program, I signed up and I was on a bike on day one, thrilled to have access to my own bikes all over the city when I couldn’t store one in my small New York City apartment that was a walk up. All of a sudden, these blue bikes were available to me everywhere, and I went to places all around the city that I’d never been before. I suddenly felt like a tourist in my own city, and it literally changed my perspective. Just being a foot taller and gliding past the cars stuck in crosstown traffic was exhilarating.

Charlie: Later on, I had children, first getting my own bike with a child seat, and then later getting a cargo bike and eventually an e-cargo bike to accommodate both of my kids. I take my children all over the city in our cargo bike. We go to the Queens Zoo, the Bronx Zoo, Coney Island, places that would not be fun to go to on a long, lengthy subway ride with kids bickering, but are immediately fun the moment we get on the bike. The fun starts as soon as we’re wheels up.

Charlie: I became an advocate largely through you guys, specifically Doug. I was following BrooklynSpoke on Twitter, and it really opened my eyes to my car blindness. All of a sudden, I started realizing that there were people sitting in their cars doing alternate side parking in my neighborhood every Tuesday morning, just sitting there for an hour to move their car and move it back. And I started thinking about the amount of space that we give over to the automobile in our city, and I started getting really angry about it. And as I began on my e-cargo bike and raising children, I really want our city to be building bike lanes and infrastructure that my kids can eventually use themselves without having to be on the back of my bike. Thank you guys for all that you do with the podcast.

Doug: So that was Charlie Todd, former guest of the podcast. Charlie is one of my favorite people in New York City. He’s the founder of Improv Everywhere, which some people may know from the no-pants subway ride that happens every winter, but they do all kinds of really joyous stunts and spectacles in public space, including …

Aaron: Phone booth co-working. That was a favorite, where they turned a couple of, like, New York City phone booths into ad hoc office space.

Doug: [laughs] Yeah, they did one—oh, I did one with him that was we were fake employees of the Department of Transportation that were meant to help usher pedestrians across the street, like, so they could continue looking at their phones or just do whatever they were doing.

Aaron: [laughs] Right.

Doug: Charlie’s a really great guy. He’s also a veteran of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, which is how I met him. He was one of my improv teachers. And so I really do appreciate the shout out he gave to me because I have learned as much from him. And, like, my improv has informed my advocacy in the way I think probably whatever we’ve been talking about has informed his advocacy. So the feeling is mutual, Charlie. Thanks.

Sarah: Yeah, and I love Charlie’s spontaneity and joy. And that’s—you know, that’s that improv thing of, like, just being ready to go and see what happens. And you can hear that, that the bicycle makes that possible for him in space, the way that he does his work. It’s the same kind of thing, but this is like a physical way of manifesting that.

Doug: And the thing is with Improv Everywhere, it’s sort of like what you were saying about the human connection. Like, it’s a kind of group that could only exist in a place like New York City, because where would you do Improv Everywhere stunts in Atlanta or even Los Angeles? It would be a little harder to do. It’s not that you couldn’t do it. And he just uses public space in such a great way as this grand stage and this joy-making machine that brings people together.

Aaron: And the thing he says about putting his kids on the cargo bike, and how getting places becomes the activity, becomes the fun part, I found that to be so true as well. When we got our family cargo bike, and you had two kids on a bike and you’re going somewhere, it kind of didn’t matter if the destination paid off or not as a family visit, because you were just having this great time on the bike as a family.

Scott: Hi, my name is Scott. I currently live in New York, but I grew up in the sprawling, car-infested hellscape of Las Vegas, Nevada, in a car-loving family, of course. At age 16, I proudly failed my first driver’s test, but eventually I tried again and I passed. My dad gave me a pickup truck. As a teenager and a punk—as I was—in Vegas, the truck served us well. My friends and I, all whom had formed punk bands, would organize shows out in the desert. We would load band equipment and generators in our cars and travel to the edges of the desert outside of the city, where we were free to be as loud as we wanted and to do as we pleased.

Scott: This however, changed quite dramatically as I graduated high school and joined the Vegas workforce. The car just became the miserable thing that I used to take myself to work and back in the hateful and violent traffic of a car-centric city. I soon began to loathe my vehicle. I wanted to be punk again. The car was no longer punk. I wanted to protest it, I wanted to subvert the highway and thoroughfares and traffic jams of my city. I wanted to bike. I began bike commuting through Vegas. I became obstinate about it. The heat, the traffic, the hateful motorists, none of them could stop me.

 

Scott: About a year or so had gone by, and I knew I needed to get rid of my car. It was a symbol of oppression to me at that point, and I wanted nothing to do with it. Everyone said I was stupid, that I would regret it, that I’d be buying another car in no time. That was 20 years ago. I’ve never looked back. I’ve never regretted it, and I’ve never bought a car again.

Aaron: I feel like those were the lyrics of a punk song. Like, Scott, you got the lyrics there.

Sarah: Yeah. And I love—I mean, I was not really a punk rocker, but I do have a little punk rock in my background. And, like, the idea of saying “Fuck you” to cars as being, like, the most punk thing ever? I totally agree. So, so good. So happy about that one.

Doug: Yeah. I mean, I also love he sort of gets into, like, these sort of like, I don’t know, transient or, like, liminal qualities of the car, right? Like, the car can be this thing that gets you out into the desert, but it can also be this thing that just, like, crushes your soul. And a lot of what we’re talking about on The War on Cars is that latter type of driving that, like, most of the driving that Americans are trapped into doing is commuting, and it sucks.

Sarah: Yeah. The car is no longer punk.

Aaron: It’s not punk.

Sarah: As in Scott’s words. [laughs]

Doug: Get a bike. Even in Vegas.

Aaron: “I Loathe My Car” by Scott.

Sarah: [laughs]

Aaron: “I Want A Bike” by Scott.

Doug: My favorite thing that he said was, “I wanted to subvert the highway and thoroughfares and traffic jams of my city.” I love that.

Aaron: So good.

Doug: “Subversion of the highways.” So great.

Aaron: “The hateful and violent traffic of a car-centric city.”

Sarah: I’ll have the song done by the end of the recording session.

Bridget: Hi, Aaron, Sarah and Doug. This is Bridget calling from La Crosse, Wisconsin. I managed to avoid having a car without thinking too much about it until moving from Madison, Wisconsin to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Everything was just more spread out there. My partner and I couldn’t find an apartment very close to my job downtown, so I would take an express bus followed by a pretty long hike from the closest stop. This was back in 2000, and there wasn’t the bicycling infrastructure that’s there now. I wasn’t even going to attempt it.

Bridget: The walks from the stop to the job gave me quite a bit of time to observe my surroundings. I took photos of things like elaborate parking garages. I also passed a lot of nearly empty surface parking—very boring to look at, but which made me think about other potential uses for this space, and inspired Spot’s Parking Lot, my children’s picture book featuring a land-use-planning terrier. I also started doing related reading. The books Asphalt Nation and Suburban Nation had recently come out, and I also found a cranky magazine called Carbusters. Though published out of Prague, Czechia, it had at least two regular contributors from the Twin Cities: Andy Singer and Ken Avador. I never met either of them and only stayed in Minneapolis for a couple of years, but I became an occasional contributor as well. The place maybe breeds frustration for artist types. Anyway, thanks so much for The War on Cars. Grateful to be part of it.

Doug: So that’s Bridget Brown. Aaron, you know her book Spot’s Parking Lot. Do you know this book? Sarah, do you know this book?

Aaron: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my Gosh!

Doug: It’s a little kids book. It’s a children’s book. I’m saying it’s a little kids book because it’s a small book about a dog who sees a parking spot and imagines what else you could use that space for, like in a mall shopping parking lot or something like that. And it’s adorable. It’s probably the only children’s book to be blurbed by Donald Shoup.

Aaron: Uh-huh. [laughs]

Doug: It’s a really great—you can get it. We have a link. I’ll put a link to our store and you can get it. It’s really worth it if you have young kids and you want to radicalize them yourself. It’s a really adorable book.

Aaron: Do we not have that one in the Bookshop.org bookstore?

Doug: It’s on there on our kids list. Yeah, it’s there.

Aaron: Yeah. Because that’s like a classic.

Doug: It’s really great. I have a copy at home. Can’t part with it, even though my kids are much older.

Bob: Hi, War on Cars. This is Bob Sorokanich. I’m an automotive journalist and a former editor at two major car enthusiast publications, Road & Track magazine and Jalopnik. I’m probably the last person on Earth you’d expect to be involved in the war on cars, but as you get closer to the automobile industry, you start to understand how it influences nearly every aspect of our daily lives, and you want to find a way to push back.

Bob: The moment that changed me was the Volkswagen “Dieselgate” scandal. Europe’s biggest carmaker spent years engineering cars that seemed like they were clean, green, and environmentally friendly. In reality, those cars were putting out more than 10 times the legal limit of cancer-causing, climate-changing pollution. If you love cars but you hate their environmental drawbacks, the Dieselgate saga felt like a gut punch. I love cars. I love their evocative design, their intricate engineering, and the feeling of freedom I get on the open road, but I also love to be safe when I’m walking, riding a bicycle or taking public transit. And I want all of those options available for me and for everyone I love. That’s my origin story.

Aaron: Dieselgate.

Doug: That was Bob Sorokanich, who also is a former guest of the podcast.

Aaron: Yep.

Doug: So yeah, good guy, and our man on the inside, I guess.

Aaron: I know. Can we trust Bob? He might be a triple agent.

Doug: [laughs]

Sarah: I think that Bob shows evidence of having some deeply conflicted interior thoughts about cars, and I appreciate that struggle that’s going on inside him, and I’m hopeful that the forces of light are gonna prevail there.

Doug: People should go back and listen to our episode with him. It was a bonus, but then we released it into the general feed so you can hear it. All of you Patreoners have probably already heard it, but definitely take a listen.

Aaron: We need these allies on the inside, you know? Criticizing from the inside. So I like it.

Doug: And we all have these moments of self doubt, so I relate to that.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: One thing I really love about my Rover Rain Cape from Cleverhood, aside from the obvious fact that it keeps me dry, is how lightweight and airy it is. It’s really hot right now in New York, and not even those sudden summer downpours seem to cool things off. So with the Rover Rain Cape, I can stay dry and stay cool when I’m out running errands on my bike or just out for a walk. Listeners of The War on Cars can receive 15 percent off the Rover Rain Cape and everything in the Cleverhood store now through the end of August. Just go to Cleverhood.com/WaronCars and enter code HOTRAIN at checkout. Can we make Hot Rain Summer happen? I don’t know. Anyway, that’s Cleverhood.com/WaronCars, discount code HOTRAIN.

Elise: Hello, War on Cars, this is Elise MacDonald calling from Nashua, New Hampshire. Thank you for all that you do. I was born in New York City, but my parents moved to exurban northern New Jersey when I was very small. I went to college in Boston, and I lived for a bit in Boston South End—transit and walking only, no car. I then moved west to suburban Newton, Massachusetts. I took the MBTA Green Line and bus, and I did buy a car at that point and did some driving. Then northwest to exurban Bolton, Massachusetts, completely car dependent, and then northwest again to a rural small town of Peterborough, New Hampshire, which was car dependent, but I lived in an edge of village location and could do most of my daily routine and errands on foot or by bike. So that was nice.

Elise: During all this time in the ’90s, I remember gas being comparably quite cheap, $1.25 a gallon, something like that. So after that, I finally interrupted my trend away from urban settings. My husband and I moved to downtown Nashua, New Hampshire, which is a city that has some transit and walkability, a city of 100,000 almost. But in order to get to Boston, there is only a bus, which has essentially only commuter hours. Or you can drive to Lowell, Massachusetts, the end of the MBTA commuter rail, which is a half hour drive. The bus doesn’t go to the end of the commuter rail because, of course. [laughs] Next year we are moving to Pittsburgh after a decade of visiting, and we are excited about active transportation there and transit. I am not proud of it, but I didn’t have any particular epiphany. I just experienced nearly every type of community that is available in New England along the urban and rural continuum, and I eventually had the presence of mind to step back from the brink and get some sense.

Ellery: Hello, this is Ellery Klein in Medford, Massachusetts, and I have two stories that I feel like sort of bookend my ongoing life as an activist in safe streets. The first is when I was a kid in Cincinnati, Ohio, and I used to walk to my Catholic school about 10 minutes away. And in between my school and my house was a square, a big square. And I was standing at the light waiting for the walk sign to turn, and when it did, I stepped into the street, and next thing I know, a hand reaches out and just yanks me back to the curb. You know, it scared me. And then a second after that, a driver goes just hurtling by in their car.

Ellery: And now I can explain all the policy and infrastructure decisions that went into that moment, but then I just remember vividly standing there feeling confused. Like, why did the sign say walk, but yet it wasn’t safe for me to go? Like, someone almost just killed me. And then 30 years later, I’m a mom, and I’m walking around East Boston with my toddler, who goes and tries to run into the street, and I have to yank him back to kind of teach him a lesson. Like, you can’t just run into the street. And he starts crying because he’s, like, scared. His mom scared him. And I just feel this dirty feeling, like, why—I just step outside my house, and I have to traumatize my kid to keep him safe because it’s so dangerous. Now my kids are teenagers, and they’re biking around and walking around on their own, but these two stories just show that, you know, this is almost 50 years of unsafe streets for kids, and I just want better. Thanks. Keep up the good work!

Steve: Hi, I’m Steve from Rochester, New York. I’ve had epilepsy since I was a kid. It’s well-controlled, but about four years ago, I had a breakthrough seizure. And when I regained consciousness, the very first thought I had when the EMTs were loading me into an ambulance was, “Oh, fuck! I’m not gonna be able to drive for at least six months. What am I gonna do? How am I gonna get groceries or get around the city?” Looking back on that now, I think it really tells you something about how we’ve set up our society that my biggest concern right after having a seizure, was whether I could drive a car.

Steve: Now at the time, I was definitely car dependent and didn’t even own a bike. But I figured that I didn’t want to be stuck at home or dependent on my family or Uber to chauffeur me around for six months, so I went out and I bought a bike and I got a bus pass, and I used those to get around. I even got involved with our local bike advocacy group, Reconnect Rochester. I’m allowed to drive again, and I’m doing great these days, but I still do most of my trips, including groceries, on my bike. One thing I’ve realized over the last few years is that I’ve always felt more energized and better after biking somewhere, and I’ve never felt that way after driving a car.

Aaron: That’s a good one.

Doug: Isn’t that great?

Aaron: Yeah.

Doug: Yeah. I mean yeah, so the first thought you have being loaded into the ambulance is, “Fuck, I’m not gonna be able to drive.”

Aaron: That’s just wild.

Doug: The second thought is probably, “Will my insurance cover that?” That’s another American problem. But yeah, I love that one. Thank you, Steve, for sending that in.

Sarah: Yeah. And I also loved Ellery’s talking about the feeling you have that as soon as you leave your house with your kid, you realize you have to make them understand how dangerous everything is. And walking around New York City, you see people training their kids this way all the time. And I certainly did it, too. And it often involves yelling in a way that you wouldn’t yell at your kid any other time. And I remember so many times yelling at my son. I did not yell at my son most of the time, but the times that I did, it had to do with him getting too close to the street or crossing the street in a way that he shouldn’t have. And I just remember the mutual trauma that we would feel, and he would just break down in tears, and I would feel really terrible. It’s not the parenting style that I embrace.

Sarah: And just that constant grating thing of everywhere you go with your kid, you’re terrified, and you have to condition them. You’re literally, like, conditioning them negatively about walking around outside. And that is just so damaging, because all the joy and fun that we’ve been talking about of, like, traveling around with your kids and how much fun that can be, we all know the flip side of that, which is often, if they’re on a bicycle and they’re not on the same bicycle that you’re on, you’re yelling at them about that.

Sarah: And when I rode with a bike bus in Barcelona and seeing what it was like to ride with your kids in this completely safe way as part of your commute, it was just so mind blowing. It wasn’t a special occasion of Summer Streets or something like that, it was just the daily route to school. And to not have to be screaming at your kid and emphasizing to them that the world is a dangerous place that can come out and get you at any time, you know, it just was so nice.

Aaron: I was always a little worried that when my kids were really young and first started biking on their own on the street, I would be so stressed out at times that I was worried that I was, like, rubbing off this terrible—that it was just gonna make biking unpleasant for them forever. It was actually gonna turn them off of biking because I would be so worried about things. But that didn’t happen, fortunately.

Doug: I mean, I just saw a woman yelling at her kid in exactly that way. The kid was five or six, tops. And she did exactly what Ellery said, like, yanked the kid back, got down on her level, pointing in her face. “You do not run into the street!” And I thought, “I’ve done that.” This is no way to live. This is not a great thing, folks. This is bad. Yeah. So I appreciate people sharing those stories.

Chris: Hello, War on Cars listeners. This is Chris dialing in from Delft in the Netherlands to tell you a little bit about my origin story. I was first dipping my toe into cycling advocacy in East Vancouver in and around 2010, riding my upright Dutch-style bicycle to my day job as an architect along the 10th Avenue bikeway each and every day in my normal clothes, without a helmet, at a time where Vancouver was really trying to encourage this transition from sport to transport, to get more people cycling in their everyday attire.

Chris: And well, one snowy December morning, I was riding my bike to the office, and I was pulled over by a police officer in a cruiser with flashing red lights and sirens for the horrible crime of cycling without a helmet. And I was admonished by the police officer, issued a ticket for $29, and made to feel like I was no longer welcome on the bikeways. Well, that sparked a long journey from cycling advocacy into diplomacy. First, a fight against British Columbia’s helmet law, which resulted in an invitation from a local magazine to write an editorial on the foolishness of the helmet law at a time where I had never written anything or considered writing anything. And that really kind of set me along this path to writing dozens, if not hundreds of articles. Editorials in Vancouver brought me to the Netherlands to write some blog posts about Dutch.

Chris: And while the rest is history in terms of writing two books, and now getting to live my dream, working for the Dutch Cycling Embassy. So it can happen to anybody, but without that single police officer, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

Doug: So if you didn’t figure that out, that was Chris Bruntlett. He and his wife Melissa were on episode 77 to talk about their most recent book, Curbing Traffic. They’re great, wonderful people, super positive. They just put forth an incredible vision of what cities can be based on their experience living in Delft and other places in the Netherlands.

Aaron: Apparently, it can happen to anybody. So how about me? I’m ready to go.

Doug: You were already here and radicalized when you most recently got pulled over by a police officer.

Aaron: I’m ready to go to—I’m ready to move to Delft, though.

Doug: It is a lovely place.

Sarah: It’s lovely. But, you know, there is the creeping fascism thing there, too. So let’s just …

Doug: Yeah, no place is immune.

Sarah: No place is immune. And we gotta stick it out here and make this place better, right folks?

Doug: Look, if we’re gonna have the fascism, can we at least get the good bike lanes here? Could we do that, please?

Aaron: It’s an interesting trade-off.

Sarah: You know, they make the trains run on time and they build bike lanes.

Doug: [laughs] Yeah. No, but Chris and Melissa are great. I really recommend everybody read their books. It’s worth your time.

Tony: Hey, War on Cars, this is Tony Jordan in Portland, Oregon. My origin story starts with a ‘Check Engine’ light on my 2000 Ford Focus. In 2008, the car started acting funny, and after a few weeks of trying to figure out what it was, we figured we’d save the money to repair it and put in the garage for six months and see if we could get by on Zipcar and the bus. At the time, we had a young child—I believe he was between two and three years old. Six months later, we decided that we could do it by using Zipcar and walking and taking the bus. We were pretty happy, so we sold our car.

Tony: A few years later, while we were awaiting the birth of our second child, I came across a blog post on Metafilter, an old-school website that was about car parking, and a professor named Donald Shoup at UCLA. And that’s the second part of my origin story is I got a book from the library called The High Cost of Free Parking, read it, and suddenly could never see a parking space in my city again the same way. And for the last 13 years, I’ve been out fighting the war on cars by eliminating costly parking mandates and pricing the curbs. So that’s how it goes. It could happen to you. The first step is just stop driving for a while, and pretty soon you’ll probably be in the trenches with the rest of us. Thanks so much for all you do.

Aaron: That’s Tony Jordan from the Parking Reform Network, no less.

Sarah: True War on Cars celebrity there.

Aaron: One of our top Patreon supporters.

Doug: I’m also just impressed that he got through The High Cost of Free Parking.

Aaron: That is impressive.

Doug: It’s a tough book if you are not totally already on board. But Tony really was on board. But we love Donald Shoup.

Sarah: What I love about this one is so many times you hear people say, “Well, I didn’t have a car until I had a kid. And then with a young kid, how else are you gonna do anything?” And, you know, it was just so great to hear somebody’s story who had a young kid, and still was willing to try to make it work and then did make it work. And lots of people have kids and don’t have cars. And there’s a certain demographic that seems to think that you can’t have one without the other, and it’s just not true.

Doug: I’m mostly an atheist, which is ironic because I’m married to a rabbi. But I can’t tell you the number of times people have said to me, “Oh, when you get older and you have kids or you lose a parent, or when you yourself are getting older, you’ll find religion, you’ll get God.” And the same thing happens with driving. It’s every year someone says to me, “Oh, when your kids get bigger, you’re gonna need a car. They’re little now, and they can get around in the stroller, but when they get a little older, you’re gonna need a car.” Well, my kids are 14 and 11, and I still haven’t done it, and I think we’re gonna make it without getting a car. But people do get very evangelical about both things.

Aaron: Okay, we have another parking one here.

Henry: Hi, this is Henry. My war on cars origin story is that I grew up on Broome Street in lower Manhattan. Now Broome Street holds an important place in the history of New York City planning, because Broome Street was supposed to be the site of Robert Moses’s Lower Manhattan Expressway, the first of his three great cross-Manhattan expressways. This one would have connected the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges, which run over the East River, to the Holland Tunnel, which runs under the Hudson River to New Jersey.

Henry: Now that plan would have demolished much of Chinatown, the Lower East Side and Soho, including the building that I wound up growing up in. But it was defeated in the 1960s by activists including Jane Jacobs. So you could say that I owe it all to the war on cars. I wasn’t aware of this history when I was a kid, but I was aware of the fact that there was a honking, smoggy traffic jam outside our door twice a week that sometimes drowned out the conversation and left a fine layer of black dust on the window sills. So even if the larger history of the neighborhood was not something I knew about until much later, I grew up with a keen sense of the externalities associated with car traffic.

Henry: And in fact, I recently had a friend from Los Angeles visiting over Thanksgiving, and he said to me that he had never seen worse driver behavior than on Broome Street heading into the Holland Tunnel on Thanksgiving Day, so I felt validated to know that what had radicalized me seemed to radicalize even a hardened Angeleno who would have been accustomed to horrendous traffic jams.

Sarah: So that was Henry Grabar, the author of Paved Paradise, and also a former guest on The War on Cars. I can really relate to that one because I grew up at 64th and 2nd in Manhattan, which is basically the approach to the Queensborough Bridge. 2nd Avenue is often clogged with traffic, or at least it was when I was growing up there. Definitely the fine film of soot on everything. And I also got a terrific case of asthma from that. So yeah, I think that growing up around that kind of traffic, it really makes an impression on you. And unfortunately, it made an impression on my lungs as well.

Doug: Although interestingly, I think growing up around that amount of traffic does not make enough of an impression on people, because some of the worst NIMBYs in New York City are on the Upper East Side, which is arguably the worst neighborhood for traffic in Manhattan. I think it’s a form of Stockholm syndrome. They’re just used to it all. Like, you are a special case in some ways.

Aaron: That’s true.

Doug: Yeah.

Aaron: It also doesn’t make enough of an impression on our policy-making apparatus, because we just let these very broken, never-endingly traffic-choked streets stay that way, which is what always strikes me. I’m just like, how has this gridlock been here for 50 years?

Doug: Right. Like, we don’t have the highway that Robert Moses wanted to put through Manhattan, but we have drivers treating Manhattan like a highway, just like trying to get through from one side to the other and that’s it. Yep.

Sarah: It’s true. The Holland Tunnel, for those of you who’ve never seen the scene at the Holland Tunnel, it really is one of the most appalling things.

Doug: I used to post regular photos from my office.

Aaron: That was your office, yeah.

Doug: Which was three or four stories above the—basically three or four blocks back from the entrance of the Holland Tunnel. And I would post a sort of overhead shot every—started every Friday, but the traffic just became every day. Henry said, you know, twice a week, I think he might have meant twice a day. But yeah, it’s bad. And you could walk on top of the cars and no one would be able to do anything about it.

Sarah: Yeah, that would be a Peatónito moment. But yeah, I think that that could even be sort of a tourist attraction for War on Cars types, you know, that you could go and sort of observe in nature the most extreme manifestation of the policy.

Doug: Of the policy failure.

Aaron: We could lead bike tours through the Holland Tunnel at rush hour.

Doug: You’d have to carry your bike over your head and squeeze in between the cars. But yes, you could do it.

Morgan: Hello, Aaron, Sarah and Doug. My name is Morgan. I live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I actually started biking for a rather boring reason, the reason we all find out is the problem behind everything—parking. When I moved here to Pittsburgh, I was concerned I wouldn’t have a lot of access to park my car because our housing stock is pretty old, and a lot of it doesn’t even have parking. So I decided to leave my car behind in my previous city, Memphis, Tennessee, and just come up here without it.

Morgan: I then realized that I didn’t really need it while I was here, so I sold it and bought an e-bike. I quickly realized how different it was to get around my city by bike. Moving more slowly through the world made such a difference in how I perceived my environment, and let me notice all the little intricacies of my neighborhood just a little bit more. I lived in a really walkable area, Squirrel Hill, and I realized that I could do most of everything that I wanted to do by just stepping out of my door and walking or biking there. It also helped that the new job I got at a local hospital would have charged me about $100 a month to park my car, so I decided to instead ride my bike and park for free.

Morgan: Unfortunately, another thing you quickly learn when you start to get around by bike is how dangerous cars are. I learned what streets are safe and what streets weren’t, and that led me to want to understand why some places felt so much better than others. I watched a couple of Not Just Bikes videos and listened to a couple episodes of The War on Cars, and I was hooked. I started getting involved in my local bike advocacy groups, and after reading about 15 books about cities in three months, I thought maybe I should consider this whole cities and transportation thing for a career. Much to my mother’s chagrin, I abandoned my med school plans, and now I’m studying transportation policy at Carnegie Mellon. I aim to officially join the war on cars as a dedicated soldier by working on local or regional government to make walking and biking safer and parking more difficult.

Sarah: It really makes me so happy to think about somebody who’s obviously super smart, if he was on a med school track, choosing transportation policy as a career, because we need smart people to be making these choices and to be planning these things. And also, I love that he’s coming from the health profession, or thinking about health, because this is a health issue, it’s a public health issue, and I can’t wait to see what Morgan is gonna do. It’s gonna be great.

Doug: I also love that he had a little bit of Shoupian policy action going on there, where he started biking because they charge for parking at work, so that made all the difference for him.

Albert: Albert, from Montreal. My origin as an activist came with an epiphany. As a society, we worship the free market, but car culture is not the result of the free market. It requires a constant stream of Soviet-style central planning, party committees deciding on how much parking is required, state subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, car chargers, and even direct payments to buyers of EVs.

Albert: Every aspect of car culture seems to be divorced from the free market and the rules-based society we purport to have as our core values in the Western world. Bike lanes submit to grassroots public consultations ad nauseam, journalists pore over cost overruns for public transit projects, yet car infrastructure is special. If the state deems a project necessary, it gets built with seemingly no oversight or budget cap. Similarly, killing someone at the wheel of a car has special treatment in the justice system.

Albert: The genius of car culture marketing is convincing most people that this state of affairs is normal. Imagine if the state mandated and subsidized pizza parlors on every corner, no matter the cost. This is how ridiculous car culture is to me. This collective contradiction is fascinating.

Aaron: I love this one because it’s the response to sort of the right winger, the libertarian, the Republican in your life. You know, the person who’s like a free market ideologue of some sort or another. It’s like, this is what you can tell them, you know, this is why cars are bad. If somebody who leans right needs to be convinced, these are the arguments.

Sarah: You just tell them it’s a commie conspiracy.

Aaron: Exactly.

Doug: Although we live in New York City, so we practically do have pizza parlors on every corner. But still, they’re not mandated.

Sarah: They’re not state subsidized.

Doug: Yeah. No, I did love that one, too. It’s a great rant. Very War on Cars rant.

Aaron: Absolutely.

Bailey: Hi, Sarah, Aaron and Doug. Bailey here from Arlington, Virginia, and here’s my origin story. Before I was 28, I used to drive the shortest car trips. I wouldn’t think twice about getting in my car, despite being able to easily walk, bike or take the bus somewhere. Only when I got a job a few miles away when they weren’t gonna pay for parking anymore that I considered biking. I loved it and started riding everywhere. When I had my first child, I started to hate cars. I started to realize how society sacrifices our safety and so much space from among so many other things.

Bailey: I’ve alienated a lot of people talking about how terrible cars are, recently. They took offense to my dislike of cars. My dad told me I’m the only person he knows who hates cars. It made me feel so alone and misunderstood. What advice can you give me? Thank you.

Doug: I love this one, Bailey. It seemed to encapsulate a lot of the previous voicemails that we’ve received. Obviously, there’s the parking angle of not having paid parking at work being the trigger that switches the behavior change. You know, Bailey, you are not alone. You’re in a great place. Arlington, Virginia, Washington, DC. The entire area has some really amazing advocates—the Washington Area Bicyclist Association, WABA. The Bike League is headquartered in DC. They also—I looked this up, hopefully this is still correct. They have the Bicycle Advisory Committee, and meetings are open to the public. There was a meeting, I believe, in December, so it seems like it’s still going on. So Bailey, show up. That’s really, I think, for a lot of folks, their first foray into advocacy is just showing up for a community meeting like that. It was for me in many ways.

Sarah: Yeah. And I want to add Greater Greater Washington …

Doug: Yeah, start reading that.

Sarah: … as another great resource. We’ll put a link in the show notes, but that’s got all the news and policy stuff that’s happening in the DMV area.

Doug: I want to empathize with him saying, you know, that his dad told him that he’s the only person he knows who hates cars, which as you know, we often have to do the kind of disclaimer that we don’t hate cars, we just think the way that they’re deployed in society doesn’t make any sense. So, I think, Bailey, keep sharing your story because what you’re saying really isn’t so much that, like, you hate cars, it’s that driving for the shortest car trips makes no sense.

Aaron: Also, just tell your dad, “Okay, Boomer.”

Doug: [laughs]

Sarah: [laughs]

Aaron: I mean, this is a two word response to that.

Doug: Bailey’s kind of young, so it could be like, “Okay, Gen Xer.”

Aaron: It could be a Gen Xer, actually.

Doug: Okay, so this next one will be the last one that we’re gonna comment on, but please stay tuned because we’re just gonna run the rest of what people submitted. And they were all great. We’re gonna run those at the end. Like we said, just have it on secretly in the background at your holiday gathering.

Rory: G’day, Doug, Sarah and Aaron. I’m Rory from Melbourne, Victoria in Australia. My origin story started around August of 2021. I did a lot of walking during the pandemic, as it was all we were permitted to do. Melbourne had strict lockdowns and nightly curfews. And it was on one of these walks that I became aware of the stresses that cars place on us. I was walking along a stroad, somewhere where I would never ever walk because it is usually too loud and dangerous. But this time it was peaceful, it was silent. I could hear birds. I found myself walking down the middle of this stroad, and there really is something about walking in a place that would normally be a very hostile environment that radicalized me. I felt relaxed, and I started to think about this a lot on subsequent walks.

Rory: I started to look into this, and this is actually where I found out about your podcast. And I wrote about all the issues a car-centric city design places on us, from financial issues to health issues, and the solution to these issues is the humble bicycle. I’ve always rode bikes for fitness and fun, especially when I was a teenager to get to a mate’s house, but never really as an adult to get from point A to B. This has now completely changed, and my goal is to become as car-light or as car-free as possible because I can’t unsee how damaging and suffocating a car-centric transportation system is. Thanks for your podcast. I love it. It has changed my life.

Aaron: That’s nice.

Sarah: I’m getting a little verklempt, I got to admit. I mean, we had somebody saying how alone he felt, and yet we’re not alone. Like, that’s, to me, the message of this—of this call in and of the community that we are lucky enough to be a part of with this podcast. You may think that you’re alone. You may feel alone in your cul-de-sac, in your stroad-contaminated world that you live in, but you’re not alone. And there are more people being radicalized every day. There are more people, and I think the momentum is picking up, and I do get a little teary when I hear people talking about it.

Doug: Yeah. And, you know, we obviously sprinkled in former guests of the podcast into our listener voicemails here, but what I was impressed by was that our regular listeners who sent stuff in were no less articulate and intelligent than people who have written books on the subject, and who think about this as their profession. And so I really value the intelligence of our listeners because it sets a very high bar for us, of course, but it inspires us to continue to do this and makes us feel like we are not just screaming into the void. So thank you for all of your wonderful and just brilliant observations about your own stories.

Aaron: Yeah. Thanks everybody, for taking the time to submit these great voice memos. I was just impressed by how well-written and produced they were. You know, it actually was like everyone was tight and had a real story to tell. I wish my stuff was like that.

Doug: [laughs]

Aaron: It’s just so well done.

Sarah: But here’s the thing is, you know, it just points out that this is a field in which everybody is an expert, everybody is a transportation expert, everybody has to deal with transportation every day of their lives, usually. So just empowering people to look around them and to see their world in this context, it’s just to bring out the expertise that’s already there in people’s experience. Because we know these truths with our bodies and with the routines that we go through every day. We feel it and we know it. So it’s just so terrific that we are increasingly, as a society, developing the language to talk about it. And I think that is a big way that we can move the debate forward.

Doug: So one last thing. This will be our last episode of 2023. So I just want to give a big thanks, obviously, to all of our Patreon supporters for everything you do to keep the podcast going. But to Josh Wilcox, who is sitting here in the studio with us. He’s our recording engineer. And also to Ali Lemer, who edits the overwhelming majority of our episodes, and if we sound smart and brilliant, part of that is because of her. So thank you, Ali, and thank you, Josh.

Bill: Hi, my name is Bill Bruno of Jackson Heights in New York City. My origin was when I got a job that was only a short subway ride from where I lived in 2010. I thought it’d be nice to get a folding bike and do a short bike commute about three miles to the office. Riding in rush hour traffic was tricky and a bit intimidating at first, and I probably wouldn’t have done it if I’d had a longer commute. Wanting a safer ride and more bike lanes led me to Transportation Alternatives. Of course, their wonderful century ride also helped, but I eventually got involved in the Queen’s chapter. I slowly got the confidence to ride more and to ride farther in the city, and I also deepened my involvement in campaigns for bike lanes, open streets, congestion pricing, and I’ve even joined my community board.

Bill: The more I ride, the more I see how much needs to be done and what kind of city we can make if we do it. Reading a bit about the reasons behind all of this via books like Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise and Jeff Speck’s Walkable City has also given me a stronger sense of the potential of what could be done and the arguments for doing so—although reading Shoup cover to cover is likely not in the cards. By the way, my commute has since lengthened to about nine miles, riding in three boroughs, and I feel far more comfortable about it, even in the rain and cold.

Elliot: Hello War on Cars. This is Elliot from Des Moines, Iowa, longtime listener and recent Patreon supporter. I went to college and grad school knowing I wanted to get into city planning, and after grad school I began by interning at a Des Moines suburb and leveled my way up to my current position as a full time city planner, which I’ve been doing almost seven years now. I lived in the city where I work for about three and a half years, but one life event led to another and I moved to a brand new building in a more urbanist area of town near downtown Des Moines during COVID.

Elliot: More recently, I bought a home in the same-ish neighborhood. I was already in the war on cars camp before just deciding to flip the mental switch and become violently radicalized against cars for three primary reasons. First, I try to make the 13-plus mile commute one way to work by bike as much as I can, but even with a Rad Power, the time and surprisingly hilly terrain really takes a lot out of me. Even half-assed bike infrastructure or public transit aligning with my commute would shorten it to nine miles one way, which would make a big impact on my likelihood of two wheeling it to the office.

Elliot: Second, it infuriates me how autocentric policy is baked into municipal codes, and how the law basically requires me to recommend whatever traffic engineers say is the best plan. Around here, that means level of service A at all times. My boss and I get lots of head nods and mm-hmms when talking about the real solutions to vehicular violence and traffic efficiency, but in the end, all we ever do is approve plans we know will guarantee sprawl and encourage driving.

Elliot: Third, the message needs to get out that auto dependency is slavery, not freedom. Having no choices in how you move about is the exact opposite of liberty, and there is no excuse for not doing better. The system forcing you to do something dirty, dangerous and expensive just to feed yourself has failed you. Keep fighting, Sarah, Aaron and Doug. Cheers!

Adam: Hi, this is Adam Knott, and I live in Goshen, Indiana. My story starts a few years ago when I was living in Europe for a few months and had to return home around Christmas time. The first thing that really sent me down the path of I guess activism would be that I was driving my brother home to our house one night, and I just, after being in Europe for so long, looking around my city, going just, “Where’s the buses? Where’s the sidewalks? There’s no buildings here.” It really confused me. And so fast forward a few years now to my time in Goshen, I’m proud to say that me and a few friends here in town, we’ve actually started our own little urbanist group, and we had our first official meeting a few days ago, Elkhart County Urbanists. Whoo!

Adam: But as far as my personal story goes, we are still a two-car household, but that’s hopefully changing soon as I search for a new job that’s within biking distance. Love your guys’s podcast. Keep up the good work.

Mark: Hi, we’re Mark and Kathy from Orange, California. Started listening to your podcast probably five years ago, if you’ve been around that long. But really love the podcast. We initially got interested in bicycling because we started visiting Europe about 10 years ago, and really started to see a movement happening there and thought, “Man, this is so much better than what we have in the United States and even in California.” Even California with its fantastic weather all year long, and yet our bicycle infrastructure pretty much stinks.

Mark: We look at these bike lanes they’re making because of the safe streets movements, and you’ll see where it says “Speed Limit, 45 miles an hour,” and they have a—they’re having to put in a new bike lane that’s just a painted strip. And I just think there’s no way I would ride on this road with these cars not going 45, but going 55 and 60. And so we just pretty much know our way around the neighborhood and all the different streets in our town—in our city of Orange. We ride our bicycles to doctor appointments, eye appointments, get our groceries with them, everything. I’m 67 and my wife’s 65, and people are always saying, “Hey, I saw you on your bikes the other day.” So we’re kind of known for it, but the movement hasn’t spread. Anyway, appreciate your guys’ work. Thanks so much.

Travis: This is Travis, and I live in Boston. For years, I didn’t own a car and just used transit to get around, and I came to biking mostly as a life hack to get around the city faster. You know, back then there were almost no bike lanes, and just keeping myself safe in traffic engendered a kind of cowboy mentality. But what really radicalized me in terms of safe streets and proper infrastructure was having kids and biking around town with them both on the back of my bike and then eventually on their own. And I taught them all the tricks I know about how to stay safe on the road, but nothing lowers my blood pressure more than when we hit a stretch of protected bike lane.

Travis: So we do have a car now, but driving in Boston traffic is such a grueling experience that whenever possible, we bike or use transit because it’s just so much more relaxing for the whole family.

Ben: My name is Ben, I’m from Kansas City. I recently became a bike advocate after I started biking to work and biking to the store and taking my daughter to the park. Historically, I’ve been more of a recreational cyclist, primarily a mountain biker. But as I became a parent, it became more difficult to find the time to go on long recreational road rides or get out to the mountain bike trails. And so for that reason, I’ve become more of a cycling-for-transportation type person.

Ben: In the process of doing that, I have had my eyes opened to just how poor our non-motor vehicle infrastructure is, and how difficult it is to actually do anything other than drive a car somewhere. So for that reason, I became an advocate, and it’s been a very eye-opening experience there as well, because I mean, it is just an incredibly difficult process to get anyone to see the world the way we do in a kind of a motor vehicle optional world where you might choose to ride a bike to school or ride a bike to work. And I never imagined that advocating for something as simple as, you know, crosswalks near schools or slowing down traffic near parks, you know, I never had any idea how difficult it would be to try to get those changes intact. And so it’s really opened my eyes to just how difficult this fight is and how much work we have to do.

Kate: Hi, my name is Kate, I’m calling from Boorloo on Whadjuk Noongar, which is commonly known as Perth, Western Australia. We’re the most isolated capital city in the world, and we have one of the largest urban sprawls with a little over two million people living along 150 kilometers of coast. Here the car is king, with much of our urban area developed in the ’70s around cars. My origin story is one where cars played a role from a very young age. We grew up in Australia as a one-car family, which was common in the ’80s, less common in the ’90s and rare in the ’00s. Our family regularly holidayed at Rottnest Island where the bike is king, and I relished the freedom that it provided me as a child and teenager.

Kate: When I was a teenager, I used to ride to school, my friend’s house and work. My bike gave me some amount of freedom as long as I didn’t cross the highway. But then I turned 17 and it all changed. I got my license, and in Perth a license and car is actual freedom because of our poor transport networks and large urban sprawl. I mostly stopped riding. After uni, we traveled in Europe for a year and then coming home, moved into a flat near the city with my boyfriend. We had two cars and one car spot. It was then we both got bikes and that’s how I’ve been getting to work for 14 years. During the time we lived in the flat, my car battery died at least twice from lack of use.

Kate: A few years later we got married, bought a house and moved a few suburbs over in a location well connected with bike paths and close to the train. We rented our house out for a year, sold both our cars and moved to the UK. We bought bikes almost as soon as we landed. We’re now back in Perth. We are a one-car family of four. Our second car is a cargo bike. Our kids reach for their helmets without a thought when we say get ready to leave. Let the war on cars continue.

Noah: My name is Noah. I currently live in downtown Lowell, Massachusetts, but I grew up in Inwood, Manhattan. And when I lived there I really just took the train or walked everywhere I needed to go and it was great. But when I moved to suburban Worcester, Massachusetts to go to college at WPI, I was really quite stranded without a car, and I didn’t know how to drive or any way to pay for a car or insurance, and the buses really sucked so I just walked everywhere. Like, I walked a mile both ways every time I did my laundry or anything like that. Back then I understood that Worcester was a less pleasant place to live and be than Manhattan, but I didn’t really have the language to describe why.

Noah: When I first moved to downtown Lowell, I thought that the ‘downtown’ part would make it much better, but I was sorely mistaken, like I was having my groceries delivered since it was just too inconvenient to get anywhere without a car, and anytime I did go anywhere, it was entirely on foot. The buses also sucked. However, when I learned how to drive for the first time, I actually read the whole Massachusetts Driver’s manual, cover to cover, and through that found out that people can ride bikes in the road, which was something that I never really thought about doing before, so I tried out a blue bike to replace the trip on Boston’s criminally slow Green Line. and eventually decided to buy a bicycle from a local bike shop, and I’ve been riding around Lowell to do everything I need to do ever since.

Noah: There are a lot of parts about this that are great—I can go grocery shopping on my own. I’m in the best physical shape I’ve ever been in, and I’m having lots of fun. But I’m just in traffic the vast majority of the time, and I’ve gotten pretty used to the traffic stress, but it still gets me a little shaken up when people, like, roll down the windows and start yelling at me. I only really got into this urbanist space after I started cycling and wanted to understand more about why these places suck so much. And I’m planning on moving to Boston when my lease is up so I can have a higher quality of life, but I think I’ll always be grateful for the years I’ve spent in Worcester and Lowell since. I think the magic for making an urbanist is for someone to live somewhere urban, and then just move into the sprawl and realize how awful all this is, not only for the environment or the economy or whatever, but just for the lives of the people who live there.

Mark: It’s Mark from London, also known as the Ranty Highwayman. My origin story was as a kid, I cycled. Probably gave up around 1989, and then for years became a highway engineer, not really interested in cycling or cycling design for many years. And then in 2011, my office moved from right on the edge of suburbia into a busy town center, and I got sick of driving in every single day. So I swapped for bikes, did that for many years, changed my tack of career from general highways design into designing for walking, wheeling and cycling, and I haven’t looked back. Thank you, The War on Cars.

Angie: My name is Angie Schmitt. I was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1982. So at the time, there was a major decline in the American auto industry, and Toledo was really affected by that, really suffering economically. So we moved away, and eventually we ended up in Columbus. And my dad didn’t really know the city very well, and he just listened to his coworkers, and they told him to move sort of out to this suburb that had good schools called Hilliard.

Angie: And we were one of the first houses built in the neighborhood. It was one of those subdivisions where none of the streets connect to each other, and when I was young, my sister and I, we would play in these half-built houses and play with the construction materials. And there was no real public spaces, and there was no access to retail, really. And I, even as a child, found it, like, kind of disappointing growing up there. And I eventually figured out that if I cut through some yards and walked along this busy road with no sidewalks in a ditch up to this, like, suburban-style shopping center, there was one bus stop. And I had no idea where the bus went. My parents never took the bus. I didn’t know anyone that took it. I just got on the bus. I didn’t know where it went, and I just asked the bus driver, “Tell me how to get to OSU’s campus.” So he told me where to transfer. I transferred, I went to campus, and I made it back home. I was 12 or 13, and I told my parents later that night that I had taken the bus downtown. And my dad was supportive.

Angie: As soon as I graduated from high school, I always wanted to be in a city. I lived in Cincinnati for a little while, and then I spent a year living in Atlanta. And I was always riding transit sort of wherever I lived. And I started working as a newspaper reporter. And at first I was reporting on the suburbs of Columbus, which I—again, I found really boring. Eventually, I took a job, and I was working in this rust belt city called Youngstown that had experienced a lot of population loss, deindustrialization.

Angie: One thing that really struck me was just the amount of inequality we had in Ohio between the cities and the suburbs. Like, the suburbs of Columbus, they were building these suburban office parks and drawing this job sprawl out of the city. And there was this real winner-take-all competition between the suburbs and the city. And the city was mostly losing at the time, you know? And I thought it was really unjust. So I thought our land use and transportation decisions were contributing to that, and I wanted to get involved with promoting a solution, or pushing for sort of a more equitable development pattern, and helping some of the cities in Ohio that had suffered so much recover so that I could be sort of around my family, be in the same state, that I could have relationships with my extended family the way we sort of didn’t growing up, because we had to sort of move away from family. Love you guys at War on Cars. Thanks for inviting me to take part.