Episode 162: Dispatches from Book Tour

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Doug Gordon: This is The War on Cars, broadcasting not quite live from downtown Los Angeles, I’m Doug Gordon, and I am here in the studio with Sarah Goodyear.

Sarah: Hey, Doug, how you doing?

Doug: I’m good. We are now done with the first big leg of our book tour, which is why we are here in Los Angeles about to go our separate ways for the Thanksgiving break.

Sarah: Yeah. And it’s been just an incredible tour, and we had a great show in LA last night. But I think that we should start at the beginning, but first we have some business to get out of the way.

Doug: We always have some business to get out of the way.

Sarah: That’s right.

Doug: We are on Patreon at Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod. So please become a member. You’ll get access to exclusive bonus episodes, stickers, early access to live shows—and we have a lot of those coming up still. And also, the whole reason we’re out here right now is because of our book, Life After Cars. You can go to LifeAfterCars.com and order the book there if you haven’t, and find out about all of our book events.

Sarah: So what we’re gonna do in this episode, it’s gonna be pretty casual. We’re really just chatting. We’re both pretty wiped out from being on the road for three weeks, and so this is gonna be just us kind of downloading what we’ve seen and done over the last three weeks, because it’s been hectic.

Doug: Yeah. But it’s been a great way to see different cities, and see what is working, what isn’t working, other things we liked or didn’t like about the cities we’ve visited. We’ve learned so much from being on the ground, talking to advocates, talking to regular transit users and cyclists and government officials. It’s been awesome. So I think what’s gonna be kind of funny about this is that in some cases, we only went to some of these cities for two days, four days. So take this for what it is worth, it is two New Yorkers offering their opinions on cities they barely got to scratch the surface of.

Sarah: Right. But maybe because we came to them fresh in a lot of cases, you know, sometimes you can see things about another person’s place that you can’t see about your own. So I hope we have some insights to offer. And yeah, it’s been amazing. So we did do shows in New York, but you all have heard enough of that.

Doug: We’ve lived in New York long enough to know what’s good and bad about that city.

Sarah: I mean, who needs to hear anything? Yeah. I mean, New York gets enough coverage, so we’re not gonna talk about that.

Doug: Yeah. So I think, like, I’ve been joking about what this episode might be—and kids, if you’re listening, cover your ears for a moment—that this could be a kind of like Fuck, Marry, Kill of cities that we’ve been to. Like, what did we like? What didn’t we like? If we had to leave New York, would we move to any of these particular cities, et cetera?

Sarah: Yeah, I actually thought of it as kind of like speed dating cities.

Doug: Oh, I like that.

Sarah: Yeah. And, like, you know, you’d go to one of the cities and you’d be like, “Oh, this city is kind of cute!” And then go to the next city and be like, “Oh, but this city is really cute!” Yeah.

Doug: Which city ghosted us, is the question for the kids who are dating these days.

Sarah: Oh, no. No, let’s not. None of the cities ghosted us. All of these cities were very respectful.

Doug: Enthusiastic.

Sarah: And enthusiastic. So …

Doug: Vancouver, you gotta stop texting us. No, I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Just gonna push this dating analogy as far as it will go until it breaks.

Sarah: The first of these cities was the great city of San Francisco, California—where I used to live, actually. So this is the one city that I broke up with at one point.

Doug: [laughs]

Sarah: [laughs] But we love San Francisco, and we had a couple of really great events there.

Doug: Yeah, we were at the Litquake Literary Festival, and then we did an event with YIMBY Action. So those were fun.

Sarah: San Francisco’s an amazing town. What did you see, Doug, that you really liked about it?

Doug: Well, I did a 20-mile run, because I’m training for a marathon.

Sarah: Because you’re insane.

Doug: I’m insane. But it was a really great way to see a lot of the city, of course. So I ran along the Embarcadero, the Presidio. I ran over the Golden Gate Bridge and back, made up a little more time because I had to go visit the Yoda statue. So I kind of detoured into there because I’m a Star Wars nerd. You know, I hadn’t been to San Francisco in a very long time, like 10 or 15 years. And that’s true of a couple of the cities that will be talking about as well. So the last time I was there, there weren’t a lot of bike lanes, there was no bike share or anything like that. The thing that stuck out in my mind was San Francisco was the first time I’d ever taken Waymo. You’ve taken it before.

Sarah: Yeah, that’s right.

Doug: So this was my first Waymo experience, and I gotta admit, it was really cool. You know, because Waymo still has the form of a car and you’re seeing the steering wheel move in front of an empty driver’s seat, it obviously feels like a ghost is driving the car. That was cool. It did stop at every stoplight. It never went over the speed limit as far as I could tell. It took turns very safely. It did things like navigate potholes very slowly, go around a few construction sites. It rode alongside a cyclist for a little bit, and you could see it on the display and kept its distance. So as far as the safety argument goes for driverless vehicles, I’m totally down with it.

Sarah: Okay. So it sounds—I mean, it sounds like you liked it.

Doug: I liked it. I think the novelty would wear off very quickly if I took it more than—I took it twice.

Sarah: Right.

Doug: I still believe very firmly that no city is going to be improved with lots of driverless cars. There’s no part of my experience in San Francisco thinking, “Oh, you know what would be great about the Embarcadero? Make it better? If there were just more driverless cars.” No, what’s nice is the water is on one side, and there’s a walking and cycling path, and all of the other people who are walking and cycling are what make it fun and interesting to be on. So no, I didn’t think that this was a solution for much more than the safety problem.

Sarah: And so what did you see that you didn’t like so much?

Doug: This is gonna be a theme, I think, throughout all the cities that we visited. The downtown is struggling. You know, we take for granted, I think, that midtown Manhattan is doing more or less okay. Office vacancy is still not at a great level, but the street life is really not that bad in Manhattan. And in San Francisco, the middle of downtown feels pretty rough. Lots of vacant storefronts, not a whole lot of foot traffic in some places. That’s not true in other neighborhoods that I went to and ran through, but the downtown, especially at night, it needs help.

Doug: And I think, obviously the solution—and we’re going to talk about this, I think, in one of the cities that we went to—is we just need more people living in our downtowns. Like, the affordable housing crisis needs to be solved in part by filling in where we can, downtowns. Some of that might be with office conversions, which is a whole other episode, because it’s not that simple. Some of it is with infill development, but there just isn’t—San Francisco’s struggling, and a lot of cities are.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, that was something that troubled me as well. But one thing that I really loved downtown is Market Street, which used to be open to cars, and now it is not. And it’s a transit corridor, and it’s a bike path, and it is so heavily used as a bike corridor. And that was just really exciting to see. As somebody who used to live and commute by bike in San Francisco, I never dreamed that Market Street would be like a major bike corridor. And it totally makes sense, it cuts through the city in a certain way that gives you access to a lot of different destinations. And it’s flat, and it’s just a natural route. What I don’t like is that I think that they just approved that now ride-hail vehicles and taxis can get back onto Market Street.

Doug: And Waymos, I guess.

Sarah: And Waymos.

Doug: Yeah.

Sarah: And that’s not great. I also saw a lot of other bike infrastructure, new bike lanes that were really terrific. But again, the flip side is some of the backlash that’s happening. And another thing that was happening there that I didn’t like is they just had a member of the Board of Supervisors recalled, basically over the decision to turn the oceanfront highway…

Doug: The Great Highway.

Sarah: The Great Highway, so-called, into a park and waterfront park. And that was very controversial among the people in the Sunset neighborhood, where that’s located.

Doug: Although we did talk to people who said nature is gonna have the final vote there, because they do have to spend a lot of money and time removing sand from those roadways, which is part of why they justified shutting it down to cars.

Sarah: Yeah. So I mean, I think there’s—the things that I saw are great: new infrastructure, opening up new places for people. But that bikelash backlash thing happening is troubling. And so in a city that really should be leading on so many of these issues, a very progressive city, always has been, depressing that that is still a dynamic there.

Doug: I will say one thing I really liked about San Francisco. I have made a point of trying to do multiple forms of transportation in every city we’ve gone to. And so in San Francisco, we took the BART from the airport. I took the cable car, because that’s what one does in San Francisco. Took the streetcar, you know, they have all the vintage streetcars running along a couple lines. Took the Bay Wheels bike share, which was unfortunately very expensive. That’s a big issue with corporate control of bike share systems. It’s really expensive just to go a short distance on bike share. Took the bus. The bus is great in San Francisco, actually. And I think that’s also gonna be a theme throughout this: The bus needs a lot more love in every city, because it’s generally pretty good in most West Coast cities that we experienced. It just needs to be a little better. So I was glad that we were in San Francisco. It’s a great city overall.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, I love it very much.

Doug: And what’s one non-urbanism thing about San Francisco, because we’re only talking about that? I think we should sort of—what did you love even as someone who knows the city very well?

Sarah: We went to Chinatown and just had, like, really good Cantonese-style food, which is something that in New York, you know, it’s just that the Chinese food that you get in San Francisco is a certain style. And this was a really old school place, and they were so friendly and sweet. Yeah, I really liked that place.

Sarah: Okay, so the next city was Washington, DC. We were only there overnight, but I think both Doug and I have been to Washington quite a bit over the years. So I would have to say that for me, the thing that I just really was struck by was the quality of the bike infrastructure. Just the especially—we were staying over by the NoMa-Gallaudet Metro station. There’s a lot of new construction there, a lot of transit-oriented development, which is also a great thing that Washington is doing pretty well, I think. And the streets were just designed with such care to incorporate a bike lane. There were plantings and bioswales to help with runoff. It was all very, very beautifully done. The sidewalks were nice and wide, the roadway was relatively narrow. And there was a lot of ground floor retail and life at the ground floor. So those new streets, those new developments that sometimes can feel kind of blank or sterile—we’ve encountered that in some other cities we’ve been to—I felt like Washington was really doing a great job of giving texture to the place.

Doug: Yeah. I thought the ground floor retail environment wasn’t bad. I think a big issue I have with a lot of that development is because it’s all so new, it’s a lot of chain stores at the ground level. Even if they are smaller, it’s still like a Starbucks, a Pete’s Coffee or a bank or something like that. So it’ll be interesting to see how that new development ages, and how new businesses follow the chains as they turn over. But yeah.

Sarah: What did you see that you—that you didn’t like?

Doug: I’ve been to DC a lot, and we didn’t have a lot of time to explore beyond sort of our immediate area and where the venue was. It’s still really car dominated. And just because of the layout of that city, you just have these super wide streets that can take multiple signal sequences to cross. So I think that needs to be fixed there.

Sarah: Okay. The thing that bothered me that I saw was the National Guard.

Doug: Oh, yeah. Of course.

Sarah: And the militarization of the enforcement on the street, the militarization of the street. That was something that we saw almost right away when we got there.

Doug: Like, right out of the Metro station, there were two or three National Guards people standing around, which is just—I think my reaction at the time was like, this is just ridiculous.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Yeah, it’s absurd.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, we know that the city itself didn’t ask for that, and so I hope Washington can get free of that soon.

Doug: Yeah. This is gonna be such a funny episode because one of my favorite Onion headlines is a woman who quote-unquote, “Loves Brazil, has seen only four square miles of it.” And it’s about a woman who’s, like, gone to a resort and thinks that that stands in for all of Brazil. I feel like there’s a danger with this episode where we’re gonna make some sort of sweeping judgment about just—and DC, even though we’ve been there many times, both of us, we were only there overnight for the show.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Take all of this for what you will.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely.

Doug: All right, next city.

Sarah: Next city was Seattle, Washington. And what a city it is.

Doug: What a gem!

Sarah: I mean, really, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, I think, for just its geographic situation. I mean, it’s just stunning. Everywhere you turn, you see natural beauty, you see mountains, you see water. It’s just an incredible place. And there’s a ton of beautiful, beautiful architecture there, too, dating from the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as some really good new architecture. So I mean, Seattle is incredible. And again, the downtown bike lanes, I have to say, were stunning. We joked a lot on this tour about the fact that so many cities that we went to had concrete curb protection for bike lanes, which is a technology that’s unavailable in New York City. [laughs]

Doug: Yeah, we only have a few places where they have, like, concrete separated, low curb bike lanes. So pay attention, New York City DOT. Step it up. Seattle, to me, I kept describing as one of North America’s cycling mythbusting cities. It’s hilly, it’s rainy, it’s gloomy a lot of the year, and they have one of the best downtown bike lane networks I’ve seen in a North American city. Obviously the Alaskan Way viaduct being replaced and torn down, and that waterfront being turned into a pedestrian esplanade, and some of the cycling infrastructure there is really good. Cascade Bicycle Club took us on a tour of some really good bike infrastructure along industrial areas in West Seattle where they’re starting to build out some stuff.

Doug: So, you know, despite how car-centric Seattle still remains—and I5 will be a recurring character in this episode. You know, I5 blasts right through the middle of the city, and you’re never not within earshot of it there, which is a real shame. It is relatively easy to get around car free. We took the Link a lot. That was great. I took the monorail, the one stop that it goes. As a Disney fan, that was fun. And I also took a long run there despite the hills, and got to see a lot. So yeah, I think urbanism wise, it did feel like one of the few cities where you could live mostly car free, depending on where you live in the city.

Sarah: Yeah. But then the car infrastructure, I5 in particular, you know, sort of spreads its noise like a stain over so much of the really beautiful part of Seattle, the downtown and the neighborhoods. And it’s a city that is fragmented by water already. And so then the further fragmentation by freeways and off ramps and on ramps, it can make it a little daunting to navigate by public transit. Some of the transit times are just way longer than they should be. And so that was something that was troubling to me.

Sarah: I did have the fun experience of being there on election night on a night when several progressive council members and a progressive city attorney were elected. I was at that party, and that was just super cool to see that these were people who really care about our issues and they got in. And the mayoral election was too close to call that night, but over the next several days, when the votes were counted, Katie Wilson …

Doug: Yeah, it did not get decided until long after we were gone.

Sarah: Yeah. But Katie Wilson, who is champion of the Transit Riders’ Union, was elected mayor. And someone who doesn’t own a car. And that’s really inspiring. So I think the politics there were really inspiring and give great hope for the city’s future.

Doug: And continuing my theme of multiple forms of transportation, we biked, took the Link, took the bus and took a ferry, so …

Sarah: That’s right.

Doug: And I also took the monorail, so I got a lot of transportation in. So what was like a non-urbanism thing that you enjoyed there? I think a lot of this is gonna come down to food, probably.

Sarah: Yeah. What was the best food that I ate? It was a place in Capitol Hill that I went on a very rainy day, and I was walking around and I needed something warm and cozy. And I had one of the best bowls of ramen I have ever had in my life at a place called Rondo in Capitol Hill. And it was, I believe, the black garlic tan tan ramen. And it was so good. I mean, really, it was as good as ramen that I’ve had in Japan. So …

Doug: Yeah.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: By the way, I feel like this episode—I apologize to some of our listeners, because I feel like this is—you and I are both old enough to remember when your neighbors would come back from vacation and show, like, a slideshow. So we’re trying to make this interesting, but we did really want to do a wrap up of each city, because there’s just so many cool things. But yeah, this is two New Yorkers talking about eating bowls of ramen and riding transit.

Sarah: What did you like? What was your non-urbanism thing in Seattle?

Doug: I like a lot of the parks in Seattle. I think there’s some really nice ones. I, again, went on a good long run. And so the waterfront run, you can just go. The trail system there is very good, and you can go for a really long distance without crossing a street or having to interact with cars. And a lot of the folks that I spoke to who bike commute, they will say, like, once I get to a trail, it’s like seven miles and I never have to interact with a car. And I had that experience running. That was really great.

Sarah: So we left Seattle on a train, which is always a great way to enter or leave a city. And we took Amtrak to Vancouver, British Columbia.

Doug: Yeah.

Sarah: And I think we both kind of—if we’re gonna go back to the dating analogy, we both kind of fell in love a little bit.

Doug: Oh gosh, the train? The romance of riding the train up.

Sarah: Oh, no. The romance of Vancouver.

Doug: Oh, I was gonna talk about just, like, how nice it was to take the train, and how busy it was and how the views were beautiful. But yes, we got to Vancouver, and I do think it’s—talk about a real highlight of urbanism alone.

Sarah: As soon as you enter the city on the train, you can see one of the characteristics of Vancouver is that the freeways and highways don’t go into it. That was a decision that the city planners made a long time ago, and it has preserved this beautiful city in a way that so many cities in North America have not been preserved. And so all the subsequent development, which has been enormous, I mean, there’s just a tremendous amount of density, there are a lot of tall towers. But all of that development, I feel like, is informed by the fact that the freeways don’t go through. And so that was one of my favorite things about Vancouver.

Sarah: But I think also what I really admired, and Brent Toderian, who used to be the city planner for Vancouver, took us on a tour that was super informative. And one of the things I really, really loved was the style of building that they have there that brings density to the downtown is like a podium at the first four or five floors, and then a deeply set back tower coming up from that. And that allows the density of the towers, but from the street, you’re not feeling like the building is looming over you. And then …

Doug: You don’t get the urban canyon effect or wind tunnels down the avenues.

Sarah: Right. And then you have views in between the towers, which is really important, because every direction you look in the city of Vancouver is another stunning vista of mountains or sea.

Doug: Yeah. Vancouver was interesting to me because San Francisco, of course, you’ve got the Transamerica Pyramid, the Golden Gate Bridge. You know, as New Yorkers, we have city icons, but Vancouver, to me, didn’t have an icon. The setting is sort of what stands out about the city. It has, obviously, some recognizable landmarks and things like that. That was great. In terms of transportation, so we took the SkyTrain, which is the driverless train. I think it’s made by the same folks who make the AirTrain, the JFK. We took the Hullo Ferry to Nanaimo, which we’ll about in a moment.

Sarah: We took a bus.

Doug: We took the bus.

Sarah: Yep.

Doug: We took Mobi bikes. That was pretty great. And we did a lot of walking, of course.

Sarah: Yeah, it was just really, really stunning. And I will say that it was striking—especially coming from Seattle and other United States cities—the downtown was really hopping at night.

Doug: Yeah. Well, I think that’s a function of the fact that they have so much residential interspersed throughout the city, and there isn’t as clear cut a division between downtown, the business and financial center and the employment center, and downtown the residential center. I mean, there are exceptions to that, there—again, we didn’t see every piece of it. But yeah, everywhere we walked, even late at night, there were other people about. Early in the morning, there were people walking dogs or pushing strollers. So it did feel like having that dense housing interspersed with your office towers. That’s the secret sauce to the vitality of your downtown, for sure.

Sarah: We did see bad things in Vancouver. The advocates who brought us there, Vision Zero Vancouver, took us to the worst intersection, the winner of their worst intersection.

Doug: Yeah, King Street, and I forget the cross street.

Sarah: Broadway? Is that a thing?

Doug: Yeah.

Sarah: Yeah. Oh my God, it was so bad.

Doug: Six roads feeding into one intersection or something?

Sarah: Yeah, and I think it can take up to five minutes to cross it if you’re going by the crosswalks, which are not necessarily in the places where they ought to be. And apparently, it’s really dangerous. There have been a lot of crashes there. It was terrible. And, you know, sometimes when you see a terrible intersection like that in a city where you expect a lot of terrible infrastructure, it’s depressing, it’s sad, but you’re like, “Well yep, this is—the whole place is like this.” But when you see intersections like that in a city like Vancouver, it hits different because it’s like, “Come on, man. You guys know how to do this stuff. Why is this part not good?” And it really makes you—that was outside of the downtown where a lot of the wealthier residents can be found. And so, you know, what we heard from advocates was that yeah, the quality of the infrastructure really deteriorates as you …

Doug: The bike infrastructure was outstanding in the downtown, but yes, it gets a little fewer and farther between and less safe and less good as you move out. My non-urbanism thing there was I had the best sashimi I’ve ever had. It was so cheap, it was like my entire meal was, like, $24 Canadian, which at current exchange rates is like 25 cents American, apparently. It was the best sashimi I’ve ever had. Melted in my mouth. Again, it’s all gonna be food related. [laughs]

Sarah: I know. I’m afraid that mine is food also, which is I got a falafel from a cart for I think, like, $7 Canadian, which actually is …

Doug: That’s, like, free. They were paying you.

Sarah: Yeah, they were paying me. And it was—I mean, I have to say, I love falafel. I eat a lot of falafel. There’s a lot of good falafel in New York, but this may have been the best falafel I’ve ever eaten. And it was just I ate it in a park outside and man, I would go back for that any day.

Doug: All right, so then we went to—just for the day to Nanaimo, about an hour ferry ride from Vancouver.

Sarah: Right. And we were brought there by the local Strong Towns chapter. And that was really cool because Nanaimo is a small city, it’s only about 100,000 people, I think. And they had a big crowd there who were interested in talking about these issues. And it just—to me, this may have been my favorite thing about Nanaimo was the enthusiasm that we saw there for these ideas in a place where I think your average person who’s familiar with British Columbia, if you said to them, “Nanaimo is a place that is hungry to talk about urbanism and bikeability and walkability and human-scale development,” I don’t think that most people would say, “Oh, yeah. Like, Nanaimo, that’s a no brainer.” But there was just a huge appetite for it there, and that was really moving and great.

Doug: That was my favorite thing, the people there. And of course, the Nanaimo bar that we had. Thank you Lainey for purchasing those for us. They were very good. Yeah, and we took bike share. They have a dockless bike share system that you can pick up right outside the ferry terminal. So that was great. It’s hilly, and there were some really high quality bike lanes from the ferry terminal up to the downtown. And also a newly installed and not yet quite finished shared street in the downtown. We sat outside, a few cars were coming by at a very slow speed, but it was pedestrian friendly. And a very nice little walkable downtown. It was great.

Sarah: Yeah. And my non-urbanism thing is not gonna be food this time. I walked the waterfront where the marina is, and they have a lot of plaques there. And I’m a plaque reader, not surprisingly.

Doug: I listened to 99% Invisible. And one of their rules is always read the plaque.

Sarah: Always read the plaque.

Doug: Yeah.

Sarah: So I did read the plaques, and one of them was about the indigenous people of that region, and the fact that they were dog lovers and really loved their dogs. And it said on the plaque that they had these little small, long-haired dogs that they treated like children, that they really treasured them, and that they also made things out of their hair. They wove their hair. And so that is my favorite thing about Nanaimo.

Doug: Very cool.

Sarah: So then we went back to Vancouver.

Doug: Went to a Canucks game.

Sarah: Oh, yes! How could I forget that?

Doug: That was really my favorite thing, I got to admit.

Sarah: Oh man, that’s true. That was so much fun. It was such a good mood, man. Like, is the mood just better in Canada?

Doug: I think so.

Sarah: I think so. I wonder why.

Doug: Health insurance. Fewer guns. But to tie it into urbanism, what a great stadium complex. The Rogers arena right there. We just walked from the ferry terminal the entire way over to the arena. And then when we finished, we were just with the wave of people going up to the SkyTrain. And the frequency we saw one- and two-minute headways on the SkyTrain, something we have not experienced in any North American city. So getting back to the hotel from the game was a breeze.

Sarah: Yeah. And let’s just say those headways are on the trains, and they also have really frequent headways on the buses.

Doug: Yeah. I can hear someone from Vancouver typing in saying, “Actually I experienced a 12-minute headway.” But our experience being there for 36 hours was that the headways were excellent.

Sarah: Yeah, And so Vancouver, we definitely were quite smitten with you.

Doug: In the F, Marry, Kill. It’s Marry.

Sarah: Oh, that’s a Marry, for sure.

Doug: Yeah.

Sarah: And then we got on the train again.

Doug: Yes. This was the epic train ride. Eight hours down from Vancouver to Portland, Oregon. A beautiful, beautiful train ride.

Sarah: Yeah. It’s really—it’s really quite lovely. And you ask yourself every time you’re on one of these trains—which are always full of people—how it is that the United States of America can’t figure out that that’s something that we should be investing in more and putting more resources into. People love it.

Doug: Yeah. It’s wild when—we’ve had a couple of interviews where people say, “Oh, don’t you understand? People love their cars.” And first of all, we understand that, that we’ve been doing this for a long time. But my response has been anywhere there is a train in North America, it’s busy. People like taking trains, and if we had more of them, I think we would have more people taking trains. It was just a lovely way to get through the Pacific Northwest. It was amazing.

Sarah: And then we arrived at Portland Union Station.

Doug: Which is beautiful.

Sarah: Gorgeous station.

Doug: Yeah, we should talk about that for a moment, because Seattle’s train station, beautiful. Vancouver’s train station, also very nice. Portland Union Station, absolutely gorgeous. Really incredible.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Return. Return.

Sarah: That’s the thing. Yeah, I mean, that’s the thing. These are stations that were built when we gave transit riders and train riders the respect and dignity they deserved, right? And we built things that were welcoming, that had amenities that were lovely just in their own right, because we used to believe that people who rode these modes deserved respect.

Doug: Yeah.

Sarah: So we could go back to that. That would be cool.

Doug: All right. So Portland, we did take many forms of transportation. We took the bus frequently. We took the MAX, the light rail. I did the Biketown bike share, although I call it bikey-town because that is what it should be called because it’s sponsored by Nike.

Sarah: It’s very cringe-y.

Doug: Great, though. Mostly electric. And I hadn’t been back to Portland in a long time. The time I was there last, the Tilikum Crossing was not yet open. It was built, but nothing was running across it, and you couldn’t walk or bike across it. Did take it this time multiple times. I did a loop running around the waterfront. That was great. I biked back and forth over the Hawthorne Bridge, which was really amazing, the Steel Bridge. Portland is just Bridge City, USA, like Pittsburgh in that sense. And so the river crossings are great. The thing I don’t like about Portland is that on the east side of the river, the esplanade there, you are just under the highway. And even on the west side of the river, all you can hear is the roar of the highways and the cars going over the different bridges. And it’s a crime, and it’s a shame because you’re literally sitting by, like, one of the most spectacular river settings of any city, and all you can hear is not the birds, is not the water, but the traffic sewer running alongside—the multiple traffic sewers. It does have also the highway on the other side of the city, and when I walked that way, that was not pleasant. But man, a constant theme throughout this entire trip is the noise of I5, for example, and the other highways that we experienced.

Sarah: The other constant theme for me is—let’s talk about headways again, and the contrast of going from Vancouver, where you just go up to the platform and you can pretty much be sure that you’re gonna be getting onto a train within the next four minutes, or wait for a bus and have similar experience. In Portland, the headways were ridiculous.

Doug: Especially on the bus.

Sarah: Especially on the bus. And so tragically, I found myself a couple of times we had to get across town to do—we did an appearance on a local TV show or, you know, meet somebody for a meeting, and I miscalculated or got misinformation from Google Maps about when a bus was gonna be arriving. And then I would realize I am just not gonna make it because the next bus doesn’t come for 23 minutes or something. Which is just—it’s not a usable headway in the middle of the day in a city where people—where there’s a river in the middle of it, and people have to cross those bridges regularly to get to many things that they do. It’s not a huge division in many ways between the city. Like, people are going back and forth all the time, and it just is ridiculous, the headways. And so we ended up having to take ride-hail some of the time that it just shouldn’t have been necessary. And that was really—especially I think because we had just come from a place that did that so differently. And indeed, I understand that they want to take more money away from the transit system in Portland and make it even less useful. And, you know, that’s just—it’s just wrong.

Doug: And Portland has a well-deserved reputation as a bikeable city, as the capital of US bike culture. But what I heard from a lot of folks there and what we experienced is that driving is way too easy in that city. There isn’t a lot of traffic, so defaulting to a car, there’s not a whole lot of price to be paid for getting in the car. So that was a problem for me. I did really like the new bike infrastructure as we talked about with Jonathan Moss of Bike Portland and at the Bike Happy Hour, which was amazing. The people there are just incredible. A lot of Portland’s reputation as a bike city historically was built on culture. And they have an incredible bike culture, just some of the best bike advocates, the naked bike ride, Bikeapalooza, all of these incredible events, as well the fact that Jonathan could turn out so many people for Bike Happy Hour every week. But there’s a real danger when your city is based on culture and not infrastructure leading the culture. And the neighborhood greenway system which we experienced is great, but as I remarked at the time, all it takes is, like, one dude in a Ford F150 speeding down that street and you’re gonna feel pretty uncomfortable in the future. Highlight of that trip, however, speaking of the greenway, was meeting up with Sam Balto and the Alameda bike bus, which we talk about in the book. That was maybe the highlight of the trip, I think, just riding with those kids, that was amazing.

Sarah: I have to say that my non-urbanist highlight, although it is urbanist in a way, was going to a really great day spa called the Everett Community Healing Center over in Northeast. And it was just this incredibly beautiful sauna, jacuzzi, steam room set up with a garden where you could sit out. It was all clothing optional, which I really like and is hard to—I said to somebody from Portland, I was like, “Oh—” she said, “Did you know it was clothing optional?” I was like, “Yeah. No, I like that. It’s hard to find.” She’s like, “Not in Oregon, it isn’t.”

Doug: [laughs]

Sarah: [laughs] So I guess that’s the thing there.

Doug: Very Portland, I guess.

Sarah: Yeah. But, like, it was just really, really pleasant. And it was Veterans Day. It was a holiday. There were a lot of people there, a lot of young people. And it was like a great third place, so there is sort of that urbanist feeling of, like, here’s a place where people can come and be in community with each other in this beautiful neighborhood with leafy streets and whatever. And then you go into this spa. And it was—it was pretty—it was pretty ideal. I loved that place.

Doug: And this is all urbanist related, and not at the same time. I had not spent a lot of time previously in northwest Portland. I’d been to the east side of the river and to the neighborhoods over there quite a lot, but I hadn’t spent a lot of time in downtown and northwest. And so I walked around Nob Hill, which is sort of one of the original walkable neighborhoods, streetcar neighborhoods there. And that was great. I went to Ken’s Artisan Bakery, which is great. I mean, Portland is an incredible food town. Another thing that we both remarked about Portland: a great clothing shopping city.

Sarah: Yes, for sure.

Doug: Some of the best men’s clothing I’ve seen out there, and not that expensive. And randomly, like, in just the part of downtown not too far from Powell’s, where we were, where there just was a high concentration of these stores. I think it’s partly, you know, Portland has that maker culture. There was that, too.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, and the people there really do dress well. And that was quite noticeable, that people have a lot of personal style. I’m gonna say Portland’s a very sexy city.

Doug: [laughs]

Sarah: Could be the F.

Doug: They dress well, and they have clothing-optional spots.

Sarah: [laughs] Exactly. Whether they’re …

Doug: Wear your nice clothes to the spa and then take them off.

Sarah: Exactly.

Doug: Also, we ate at Ken’s Artisan Pizza on the other side of the river. And I knew that it was gonna be good, because I make bread and have his cookbook. It was very good.

Sarah: Yeah. Fantastic.

Doug: Yes.

Sarah: All right. And then from there, what did we do, Doug? Oh, right. We had to go to the airport, which was sad. And we had to get on an airplane.

Doug: But Portland also punches above its weight, because we had tons of luggage, and we took Max to the airport, and it could not have been easier.

Sarah: Yeah, that platform level roll on with your huge suitcase full of stuff. And yeah, so it’s very easy getting to the airport. The airport is stunning.

Doug: Can we talk, though, about the airport food experience? Because this is, like, a very funny thing, because you match up Portland’s artisan maker culture with “I need to catch a flight.”

Sarah: Oh, yeah.

Doug: And getting coffee at the airport and getting something to eat, it was like all the handcrafted care that goes into making your latte or whatever. I’m like, “No, I just need coffee now. My flight’s leaving soon, and I gotta get to the gate.” That was a kind of funny Portland experience.

Sarah: That was funny. I got an avocado toast. And I ordered it, and I was sort of standing near the counter, and after about two or three minutes, the woman I had ordered from looked at me, and she said, “It’s gonna be about 15 minutes.” [laughs]

Doug: A thing you’d want to know before you order at an airport, for sure.

Sarah: Anyway, so heads up on that. But a stunning building and really a pleasant experience overall. And then we got on an airplane, and we flew to San Diego, California.

Doug: Okay, before we talk about San Diego, we need to talk about the weather, because we had the best weather possible in the Pacific Northwest. We only had one day of intense rain in Seattle. We had generally very good weather in Vancouver. I ran around Stanley Park, which was spectacular, and the weather was great. We only had one night of rain there when we went to the hockey game. Portland, we barely had any rain.

Sarah: Showers.

Doug: Yeah.

Sarah: That was it.

Doug: We were able to walk around, bike around, no problem. And I joked with you ahead of time. I said, “Wouldn’t it be ironic if we got to Southern California and the weather was terrible?” And sure enough, they got a lot of rain while we were in San Diego.

Sarah: Yeah, it was, like, pouring rain. I had brought rain pants with me in anticipation of—because the Cascade Bicycle Club in Seattle had said they were gonna take us on a ride, rain or shine. And I knew they meant it. So I was like—I had my full rain kit, and I think I used it for about two hours in Seattle, and that was it in the Pacific Northwest. And then I spent a whole day in that rain kit in San Diego.

Doug: Yeah, it’s amazing. So San Diego. Transportation wise, we did take a Lyft from the airport because we had a lot of luggage. There is a decent bus system, but it doesn’t go everywhere, and the frequency leaves a lot to be desired. We stayed in Pacific Beach, we had to get to Balboa Park. We had to get to the Normal Heights neighborhood for our live show with Bike SD and the San Diego Bicycle Coalition. And the timing and the frequency and the connections just did not work for most of the trips we needed to make.

Sarah: Yeah, if we had not been staying at the beach, if we had been staying downtown, I think that we would have found that it was easier to do those things. But, you know, here we are, we’re two New Yorkers, we’re in Southern California—not just Southern California, but San Diego, one of the great beach cities in the world. We wanted to stay on the beach. Is that so wrong? No.

Doug: [laughs]

Sarah: So, you know, like, we wanted to stay on the beach. We stayed on the beach, and the price that we paid was that yeah, we had to take Lyfts a lot of the time. And it sort of felt like—I mean, we did take some public transit, but it took …

Doug: Well, we took the bus to the trolley, which is their light rail streetcar. And that was pretty good for some trips.

Sarah: Yeah, I mean it worked as far as it worked, but it took a long time, and you could really feel the strain of it. Like, it was like it was not something that you could have done if you were—like, a lot of these trips were not trips that you would reasonably have made if you were just living there and living your everyday life. It was just—so that feeling of, like, being forced into the car basically by circumstance was really there. And, you know, it’s—there’s a lot of great bike infrastructure.

Doug: The downtown especially. I hadn’t been to San Diego in a very long time, and I was very impressed by the protected and separated bicycle infrastructure, including a lot of concrete protection, very wide bicycle lanes. You know, the rest of the city, this is a vehicular cycling capital in North America. And there are a lot of super sharrows on high speed stroads which no one in their right mind was gonna use. So that was discouraging to see outside the downtown core, but inside the downtown core, I mean, I took the bus from the Hillcrest neighborhood to downtown, because I wanted to go to Padres—to Petco Stadium or Petco Park. And it was a very easy trip on the bus, and it was great. And the bus was packed. So a lot of people are using the bus, it just needs to be more frequent.

Sarah: Yeah. And what one of our hosts who lives in Normal Heights was saying was that in that neighborhood, if you just stay basically in that neighborhood, which is really cool, it’s an old streetcar node and, you know, really nice shops and walkable and feels very neighborly and homey like a Brooklyn neighborhood, really, that if you just stay in that neighborhood, you can be very comfortable without a car.

Doug: Yeah.

Sarah: But it’s that, you know, if you do want to go and do other things, it can be really limiting. And so that was tough about San Diego.

Doug: And Balboa Park, we should talk about, because we met Andrew Bowen of the podcast Freeway Exit from KPBS. We’ve had an episode in our feed of that; everyone should check it out. He took us around Balboa Park and we met—and, you know, the state highway 163 goes through the bottom of that ravine. And so no matter where you are in that park, especially because of the shape of the ravine, all you hear is the noise of traffic.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, what I said about San Diego is that it sort of is like a collision of good intentions and bad habits. Like, there’s all sorts of great stuff happening. The advocacy movement seems really, really strong. There’s some good bike stuff happening. There’s, you know, real energy behind making a better pedestrian environment. But the ingrained habit of driving and of just seeing the car as a solution to everything just keeps bumping up against those intentions. And it’s a tough thing, but boy, the advocacy community there just …

Doug: Absolutely outstanding.

Sarah: Such incredible energy. And really, it gave me faith that San Diego’s gonna keep improving.

Doug: Yeah. I was talking with Ray Delahanty, CityNerd, and he also had a very similar experience in terms of the advocacy community there and being so impressed. And I often find—and Ray and I talked about this—that it’s like the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt are where you find some of the best advocates. I mean, I love the advocacy community across North America and the world. There’s so many great cities, including our own of New York, where just they’re incredible advocates. But in the cities that really feel like they have something to prove, San Diego could be paradise. The best weather, largely flat—obviously there are hills but, like, lots of flat areas where you can get around by walking and cycling if the infrastructure would allow it. The advocates there understand how much better it could be, so that was really great to see. Non-urbanists, the best tacos we’ve had anywhere. I mean, New York, it’s kind of a cliché. We have an incredible population of immigrants, but for some reason, even among our Mexican immigrant communities, we do not have as good Mexican food here. I mean, we are, you know, right by the border.

Sarah: I just want to say the Mexican food has improved in New York dramatically over the last 15 years.

Doug: But the cheapest and best tacos I’ve had anywhere in a long time.

Sarah: In San Diego. I literally—I lived on tacos. I had four meals that were tacos when I was there, and I had eight different tacos in those meals. And I do not regret a single one of them. They were just superb, every one.

Doug: I’m trying to count the number of tacos I had. I think it was nine tacos in 36 hours. Yeah. No, that was great. And fish tacos and all the rest. So good—you know, food is a constant theme.

Sarah: And the Pacific Ocean just I mean, in all of its glory. And all the surfers. And there was a storm coming in when we were there, and …

Doug: The swells were amazing.

Sarah: The swells were—and everybody was out surfing, and it was …

Doug: Wait, can we talk about the micro-mobility that we saw at the beach?

Sarah: Oh, yeah.

Doug: And that’s the other thing is, like, what gave me hope about a place like San Diego—and this is true in other cities—is that we are a very creative species, and people adapt to their circumstances. So obviously, there were the big trucks. And we saw a lot of lifted pickup trucks, more so—I think I joked at the show more than you would see anywhere outside of Texas, let’s say. But there were a lot of electric bikes with surfboard attachments and carriers and things like that parked at the beach. Lots of golf carts with surfboard attachments and trailers and things like that. So people are getting creative. It’s just that when you get a block or two off of the beach, the pedestrian and cycling environment is garbage. And it’s just—it’s terrible.

Sarah: And here’s where I’m gonna say this is something that we observed in every city we saw, unfortunately. Right turn on red. And, you know …

Doug: Get rid of it everywhere.

Sarah: Everywhere.

Doug: Everywhere, please.

Sarah: I mean, really, like, as New Yorkers, we can tell you that you can live your whole life and not even realize that anyone would think that that was something that you should be able to do.

Doug: I had to retrain myself at every intersection, because I’m so used to seeing the light change and thinking I can just go. And I would step out every now and then, and some drivers would not even come to a stop or a yield and I had to jump back.

Sarah: Yeah. San Diego was particularly bad for this. They were just whipping around those corners. And it’s so dangerous, and lots of people actually die that way. And stop it! It was, you know, supposedly to help save gas during the …

Doug: Supposedly.

Sarah: Supposedly. It never worked. And it’s just—it’s like, stop with that. It has to be made illegal in every city in the world. It just—it doesn’t—it’s bad.

Doug: Okay. So we then took the Pacific Surfliner to where we are now, Los Angeles, which was, of course, a beautiful train ride.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: That train line might not be long for this world, because we were mere inches in some spots from the ocean, and they are working to shore it up. But yes, it was so beautiful.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, it really—they call it the Surfliner, and it literally sometimes seems like the surfers are going to, like, surf into the train as you’re going by. That’s how close it is. But it’s stunning.

Doug: Also packed. Also packed

Sarah: Yes, also packed. People love that train. It’s very convenient.

Doug: And Santa Fe Depot in San Diego? Again, one of the most beautiful train stations in North America, second perhaps only to Union Station in Los Angeles, which was gorgeous to get off at.

Sarah: Yeah. And Los Angeles is a city that I think Doug and I have both spent a fair amount of time in. And I love LA. I used to have to come here as a teenager when my dad was living here, and I had to spend the summers with him and I couldn’t drive and I felt incredibly isolated. And I developed that New Yorker hatred of LA. Which now I’ve spent many, many years shedding, and I now am, like, so fully loving LA. And I have to say, we’re staying in the downtown, we’re recording this in the downtown. And I just love downtown LA. I love the buildings, I love the streets, I love the scale of it. You know, the streets are not as hugely wide as they are in a lot of American cities west of the Mississippi. And there’s just so many stunning buildings. And not just the exteriors, but the interiors, the lobbies and the elevators and everything is just—you know, you can feel like you’re Philip Marlowe walking down these hallways. And there’s just something to me, very romantic about downtown LA. And I guess maybe it’s because it’s where they used to shoot a lot of movies, you know, back in the ’30s and ’40s, but I just think it’s got such great bones. And they are doing a lot of residential conversions here. And that’s a terrific thing. So I love—I just love the downtown of Los Angeles. And I love Los Angeles. I love you, LA.

Doug: Yeah, I like LA a lot. I’ve never spent any time in the downtown. This is my first visit doing so, and it slaps. It’s really great. Look, it has its challenges like everywhere else, and the number of unhoused people and emotionally disturbed people, I think for me, walking around these cities and seeing the number of people who are living on the streets, and you think about where we were: San Francisco, home to the tech industry and just tons of millionaires and billionaires. Seattle, again, another part of the tech industry. Amazon, Expedia, all of these companies that are based there. San Diego, home to some of the most expensive real estate in the country. And now here in Los Angeles, home to the film industry and some of the most financially successful people in American culture and American history. It’s inexcusable that we can’t figure this out, that we can’t come up with a real housing-first solution to what the people who are living on the streets need.

Doug: And obviously, a lot of the people who are living on the streets need drug addiction counseling and mental health counseling, but so much of what they need is just a place to live, because those other problems are aggravated by the cost of housing and the fact that—I just can’t even imagine the mental distress of not being able to have a place to live.

Doug: And so walking around, it’s not the Sean Duffy right wing, oh, downtowns are war zones and all that, it’s just more this feeling of, like, this is the best we can do in the wealthiest nation on Earth, in the wealthiest cities in that nation? It’s inexcusable. And there are easy solutions if we tax the right people.

Sarah: Yeah. And, you know, the venue that we—that we did our show in, Dynasty Typewriter, really super cool venue here in Los Angeles is just a couple blocks from MacArthur Park, which, you know, it should be a real gem of a park. And it has a lot of potential. One of the problems with it is there is a road running through it. There didn’t used to be, and then they drove it on through. And so we were talking about that when we did our show and said, you know, well, there really shouldn’t be a road going through this park. They should reunite the two halves of this park. And somebody who lives in the neighborhood came up to me afterward and said, “You know, I don’t agree with you about that.” And I said, “Well, why?” And she said, “Because if there weren’t a road there, I wouldn’t feel safe walking through the park because the drug crisis is so bad.” And we sure saw it firsthand as we walked on the road through that park. There is, you know, a fentanyl problem that is very visible there. And she, whose—you know, she said, “I feel okay walking through on the road because there’s cars coming through and other people, but if there weren’t that road there, I don’t think that I would walk across the park.”

Doug: That’s interesting.

Sarah: And that was tragic. And I said to her, “Okay. But, like, don’t you agree that, you know, we really just need to deal with the unhoused people situation and the opioid crisis situation, and then if we manage to get that somewhat under control, we should take the road out of the park?” She said, “Absolutely.” So …

Doug: Yeah. But that’s so frustrating because there’s, like, so many compassionate solutions to this that generally start with housing. And we’ve got the money floating around in our society to deal with it. It’s just people need a place to live, and we should be doing better.

Sarah: And over and over again—it happened again last night in LA when they were talking about making improvements to the streets here and, like, well, we can’t do that because we don’t have enough money. And, you know, tax the rich. I’m sorry, that’s just—that’s like, people are like, “Where’s the money gonna come from?” We have, you know, a couple hundred people sitting on piles of money that they couldn’t spend if they lived for a thousand years. So, like, let’s tax the rich. That’s just as simple as I want to make that. Now we had a couple of really interesting things happen. One thing in particular that I want to call out.

Doug: Yeah. So we were sitting under an umbrella at a table in Balboa Park in San Diego, talking, as we mentioned, to Andrew Bowen of KBPS. And this guy comes by on a bike that’s kind of loaded up with, like, camping stuff, a touring bike. And I saw his jaw drop.

Sarah: Yeah. And he said, “Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon?” And I was like, “Yeah, who are you?” [laughs]

Doug: He was a listener. His name’s Aidan. He was biking across the country from—he lives in Hudson County, New Jersey, Jersey City, I believe. And had biked across the country, and was finishing in San Diego, about to head back. I think he heads back the same day that we’re recording this via train, and just happened to be biking in Balboa Park on a rainy day and saw us. He had a War on Cars water bottle on his bike.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: And so we stopped and took a picture. And Aidan, hello. It was great to see you. Congrats on your amazing cross-country bike ride.

Sarah: Yeah, you can see that picture on our Instagram.

Doug: Not the kind of thing that would have happened had he done a cross-country road trip and we had been sitting in a car doing the interview.

Sarah: Yeah, but that was just—that was a really beautiful coincidence. He also rides a Surly Cross-Check, which is the same bike that I ride, which is another weird coincidence. So yeah, so that encounter just was one of many incredibly life-affirming encounters that we had on this trip.

Doug: Well, I think it stands in—Aidan stands in for sort of everybody we met on this trip, because as much as we’re talking about these different cities and what we liked and didn’t like and the food we had, the really most wonderful thing about it is connecting with all of the people at a dark time in our country and in the world in general. To be in rooms with people who care about their cities and love them, and see all the problems that we’re talking about and all of the potential and all of the improvements. You know, when we were in San Diego and I was talking about how wonderful the downtown bike lane network is, I saw all the people nodding their heads and snapping and everything. And then when we talked about right turn on red or all the surface parking, same thing. Like, everybody, every city is different, but all the problems are kind of the same. And all of the good things that we’re working on are the same as well. And I was just so lifted up by everybody. It’s been an amazing experience.

Sarah: Yeah, really. I have to say that every single person that we spoke with as we signed books or as we schmoozed with people, people just had so many stories about how becoming part of this movement has changed their lives for the better, and how they’ve found community and they found a sense of purpose, and they don’t feel alone with the feelings that they have about how our world is built and the way that it is and the way that it could be. It was just so great seeing everybody come together and to be able to be together with those people. And I just want to thank every single person who came out to see us at every one of these stops, and of course, all of the amazing organizations that partnered with us to make this possible. It just really is a privilege to be in solidarity with the people in this movement, and it’s changed my life.

Doug: Yeah. I always say bike people are the best people, and I will extend that to housing people and climate people and all of …

Sarah: Transit people.

Doug: And transit people, because you are all people who understand how much better your cities could be with just slight changes. And how good they already are, because you’re never going to invest in fixing a place that you don’t already love. And that’s what’s shown through in all of the different cities we went to is just how much people love where they live. And that is such a wonderful thing to see.

Sarah: Yeah, so if you want to see more pictures from our trip and …

Doug: Come over to my house tomorrow.

Sarah: [laughs]

Doug: I’ll be doing a slideshow. I’ll have some iced tea and cookies, and I’ll fire up the old Kodak slide machine, whatever those are.

Sarah: Slide carousel.

Doug: Slide carousel. Now there’s a name I’ve not heard.

Sarah: [laughs]

Doug: Thank you so much for indulging us. We sort of wanted to just download and decompress. This is the first leg of multiple upcoming legs of our tour, so thank you all so much to everyone who came out.

Sarah: Yeah. And if you are wondering if we’re gonna come through your city, just go to LifeAfterCars.com, and you’ll be able to see new dates being added all the time. I hope we’re gonna …

Doug: Yeah. If your city is not on there, chances are it will be. Or just reach out and let us know and we’ll let you know. Okay, so that is it for this episode of The War on Cars. Remember, you can support us and get exclusive bonus content, pre-sale access to live show tickets, free stickers and more by signing up on Patreon at Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod.

Sarah: A big thanks to everyone who supports us, including our top contributors: Charley Gee of Human Powered Law in Portland, Oregon, Mark Hedlund, Virginia Baker and Brandon DeCoster.

Doug: And please check out our new book, Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile. It is out now from Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Random House. We’ve loved the response to it so far. We’ve been doing a lot of press. And yeah, so go support your local bookstore and pick it up.

Sarah: Yeah. It might make a great Christmas gift or Hanukkah gift.

Doug: Yes.

Sarah: Or just a gift.

Doug: Yes.

Sarah: Thanks also to our friends at Cleverhood. Listeners of The War on Cars can save 15 percent on everything in the Cleverhood store now through the end of November with code BEAGIVER. For the best gear for cycling and walking, go to Cleverhood.com/waroncars.

Doug: And Cleverhood is a really good thing if you live in those very rainy cities that we’ve been to like Los Angeles and San Diego.

Sarah: Exactly.

Doug: The War on Cars is produced with the generous support of the Helen and William Mazer Foundation.

Sarah: This episode was edited by Samantha Gattsek. It was recorded in Los Angeles at Ice Cream Sound by Vincent Holloway.

Doug: Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear, transcripts are by Russell Gragg, and our logo is by Dani Finkel. I’m Doug Gordon.

Sarah: And I’m Sarah Goodyear. And this is The War on Cars.