Aaron Naparstek

Did you ever see a car advertisement that you thought was so ridiculously irresponsible it should be banned? Well, the people at Adfree Cities, an advocacy group based in the United Kingdom, did, and they decided to do something about it. They went up against Toyota over an ad for the Toyota Hilux SUV that shows drivers ripping through sensitive natural areas and cities—and they won, getting the ad taken off the airwaves and the streets. We talked with two members of the organization, Veronica Wignall and James Ward, about how they’re tackling the auto industry’s most egregious marketing campaigns, as well as their larger mission to create “happier, healthier cities free from the pressures of corporate outdoor advertising.”

***Support The War on Cars on Patreon and receive access to ad-free versions of all our episodes, exclusive bonus content and stickers.***

This episode is produced with support from Cleverhood. Listen to the episode for the latest Cleverhood discount code.

LINKS:

Check out Adfree Cities and their partner organization, Badvertising.

See the Toyota Hilux ad that UK regulators deemed “had not been prepared with a sense of responsibility to society.”

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This is a preview of a special bonus episode for Patreon supporters of The War on Cars

In the last episode of the podcast we spent some time with Baruch, Shawon, and their battery-swapping startup company, PopWheels. When I started working on that episode, I figured I was going to learn a lot about e-bikes, batteries, and the delivery app business. And I did. But over the course of more than a half dozen interviews and conversations between May and December 2023, I also learned a lot about Bangladeshi politics, immigration, and life in New York City as an e-bike delivery worker.

One of my favorite interviews for this episode took place on a crisp, sunny, Tuesday morning last October. I biked out to East New York, Brooklyn to meet Shawon and his friend Fokhrul, a Bangladeshi delivery worker who uses PopWheels battery-swapping network. (Shawon and Fokhrul asked me not to use their last names because they have asylum-seeker cases working their way through the legal system).

We found a park bench and spent the morning talking about the political oppression they faced in Bangladesh, their arduous, months-long journey to the United States, and what their lives are like here in New York City. It was super interesting and I enjoyed it a lot. But, as often happens with these things, only tiny bits of this conversation made it into Episode 118.

So, for this special bonus episode I wanted to share more of my interview with Shawon and Fokhrul with you. I also had some fun additional bits and pieces of tape with Baruch that never made it into the last episode. So, you’ll find some of that woven in here too. I hope you enjoy hanging with Shawon, Fokhrul and Baruch as much as I did.

You can join us as a Patreon supporter to listen to the whole thing.

— Aaron

Baruch Herzfeld is the CEO and co-founder of PopWheels, where he is working to develop New York City’s first e-bike battery-swapping network. PopWheels aims to solve the growing problem of e-bike battery fires. The company believes that giving e-mobility users a quick, convenient, and safe way to recharge their batteries is absolutely essential to pushing gas-burning cars and trucks out of cities once and for all. But Baruch’s really big idea is this: He is betting that the light, clean, electric transportation fleet of the future is already up and running on the streets of New York City. And it isn’t being brought to us by Big Tech, Big Auto or Elon Musk, it is being driven by tens of thousands of immigrant e-bike delivery workers. What if there is a high-tech urban mobility revolution happening right under our noses, but we can’t see it because the people who are bringing it to our city are mostly invisible to us?

You can find the full transcript of this episode here.

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See The War on Cars LIVE at Caveat on NYC on Wednesday, January 31st. In-person tickets are sold out but you can still catch the livestream!

LINKS:

Baruch Herzfeld’s battery-swapping company, PopWheels: Stop Charging, Start Swapping
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Happy New Year! We’re kicking off 2024 by bringing you our conversation with David Zipper, one of the hardest-working analysts on the transportation scene today. You may be familiar with David from his writing at Bloomberg CityLab, Slate and Fast Company, where he relentlessly covers road safety, climate change, and the future of micromobility.

We talked with David about the excesses of the auto industry, our road fatality crisis, the absurd way speed limits are determined on American streets, and whether we might ever be able to swap out our bloated SUVs for electric golf carts. Or if that’s too much to ask, will cities at least start charging people more for driving massive glacier melters?

You can find the full transcript of this episode here.

LINKS:

You can find out all about David Zipper’s work, along with links to his writing, at his website.

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In his new book, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet, independent conservation journalist Ben Goldfarb writes about how roads and cars are wreaking havoc on nature across the globe. He reports back about the people trying to save everything from butterflies to deer to wallabies to salamanders from the destructive power of motordom. Plus, he helps us analyze a couple of egregious ads that show how humans use roads to assert our dominion over the natural world…to our own eventual detriment.

You can find the full transcript of this episode here.

Support The War on Cars on Patreon and receive access to ad-free versions of all our episodes, exclusive bonus content and stickers.

This episode is produced with support from Cleverhood. Listen to the episode for the latest Cleverhood discount code.

LINKS:

You can learn more about Ben Goldfarb’s work at his website.

Pick up Ben’s Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet at our official Bookshop.org page.

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This year, 2023, marks the hundredth anniversary of the invention of leaded gasoline. Of all the many harms that the automobile has imposed on the environment and humanity over the last century, the effects of leaded gasoline have to be pretty close to the top of the list.

Science and industry were well aware of the dangers of lead in the 1920s. But adding small amounts of tetraethyl lead to motor fuel made internal combustion engines work better, and that made it possible to turn the automobile into a viable mass market product. As a result, pretty much every American born between 1960 and 1980 was, to some extent, poisoned by lead.

Back in March, bestselling author Steven Johnson wrote a somewhat mind-blowing essay in the New York Times Magazine titled, “The Man Who Broke the World.” In it, Steven told the story of Thomas Midgley, Jr., the chemical engineer who not only invented leaded gasoline — he also invented the chemical compound that made modern refrigeration possible. As with lead (branded as Ethyl to sound innocuous), Midgley’s miraculous chlorofluorocarbons unleashed an almost unbelievably destructive set of unintended consequences. Four decades after their invention, scientists discovered that CFCs were burning holes in the ozone layer of Earth’s upper atmosphere and quite literally threatening human life on Planet Earth.

We’ve been wanting to do an episode on leaded gasoline for a while now. This conversation with Steven accomplishes that and goes so much further, weaving together so many different threads. It was a lot of fun and we hope you enjoy it.

You can find the full transcript of this episode here.

***Support The War on Cars on Patreon and receive access to ad-free versions of all our episodes, exclusive bonus content and stickers.***

This episode is produced with support from Cleverhood. Listen to the episode for the latest Cleverhood discount code.

LINKS:

“The Man Who Broke the World” by Steven Johnson for the New York Times Magazine, March 15, 2023.

Find more of Steven Johnson’s work on his website.

Subscribe to Steven’s newsletter, Adjacent Possible.

Find all thirteen of Steven’s books here. War on Cars fans will enjoy The Ghost Map — it’s a page-turner of a mystery/thriller about urban planning and epidemiology. You can buy Steven’s books at our Bookshop.org store.

Interested in digging deeper into the history of leaded gasoline? Check out Toxic Truth by Lydia Denworth.

Buy official War on Cars merch at our store.

Find us on Mastodon, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and whatever godforsaken new social media platform pops up next.

Follow and review us on Apple Podcasts.

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Check out this episode!

After 16 years of slogging its way through municipal, state and federal government and every imaginable form of public process, congestion pricing is finally on its way to New York City. If all goes as planned, then anyone who wants to cram a car or truck into Lower Manhattan south of 60th Street is going to have to pay somewhere between $9 and $23 per day starting next spring. And all of that money will go toward supporting and improving New York’s transit system. There are still lots of details to iron out and we should never underestimate New York’s ability to blow it when it comes to transportation policy. But Diana Lind of the Penn Institute for Urban Research thinks congestion pricing is a big deal that will fundamentally reshape the relationship between the car and the city, not just in New York but all across North America. “The next 20 years,” Lind writes, “will be the beginning of the end of the private car in cities.”

You can find the full transcript of this episode here.

***Support The War on Cars on Patreon and receive access to ad-free episodes, exclusive bonus content, stickers, and more.***

This episode was produced with support from Cleverhood. Listen to the episode for the latest Cleverhood discount code.

LINKS:

Read Diana Lind’s essay, “Why New York’s Congestion Pricing Plan Matters” and subscribe to her newsletter, The New Urban Order.

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This is a special presentation of the first episode of Freeway Exit, a six-part series produced by award-winning reporter Andrew Bowen of KPBS Public Media in San Diego, California. Freeway Exit reveals the mostly forgotten history of how Southern California’s urban freeway network was built. It tells the story of the citizens and public servants who fought these projects and how decades after that network was finished, some communities are still working to heal the wounds that freeways left behind. While Freeway Exit focuses specifically on the urban highways of Southern California, the story that Andrew tells is universal: Freeways aren’t free. We pay for them in all kinds of ways — with our tax dollars, our time, our environment and our health. In the 20th century we planned, designed, and built highways through the middle of our cities. In the 21st century we can and must plan, design, and build something else better in their place.

Find all six episodes of Freeway Exit right here or wherever you get your podcasts.

Meet reporter Andrew Bowen of KPBS. You can also find him on Mastodon and Twitter.

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Buy some official War on Cars merch at our store. Have you seen the new “Make Love Not Cars” t-shirts?

Subscribe to our newsletter, The Traffic Report, on Substack.

Find us on Mastodon, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Threads, and whatever godforsaken new social media platform pops up next.

Follow and review us on Apple Podcasts.

TheWarOnCars.org

Have you ever been walking across the street when a driver turned into your path and almost hit you? Or riding your bike when a hostile horn-honker laid into you for delaying them to the next red light by a few seconds? If you spend any amount of time on a city’s streets outside of the protective shell of a two-ton automobile, you’ve probably had frustrating, frightening, and infuriating experiences like these. How did you respond? Did you lash out verbally, or give them the finger? Mutter under your breath and walk away? Did you dare lay hands on their precious vehicle? Or did you do the sensible thing and buy a ten-pack of War on Cars stickers to slap up around your neighborhood? In this episode, Doug, Sarah and Aaron share their own experiences of close calls they’ve had with cars, plus strategies for coping. And we hear tips and stories from listeners as well.

You can find the full transcript of this episode here.

This episode is produced with support from Rad Power Bikes.

*** Support The War on Cars on Patreon and you’ll be tipped off to listener participation episodes like this one, you’ll receive access to ad-free versions of all our episodes, special bonus content, stickers, and more! ***

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Pick up official podcast tees and other merch in our official store.

This episode was edited by Ali Lemer. It was recorded by Josh Wilcox at the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio. Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear.

TheWarOnCars.org

Weird things happen when you’re an investigative reporter trying to cover an international oil giant like ExxonMobil. Your plane tickets are mysteriously canceled, your hotel room gets broken into, and the local reporter that you’ve hired is offered a lucrative job to work on something else. In this special bonus episode for Patreon subscribers, investigative journalist and podcaster Amy Westervelt tells us what it was like to report and produce the new season of her podcast, Drilled. It’s called “Light Sweet Crude.” In it, she takes us to the tiny South American nation Guyana where, in 2015, ExxonMobil discovered one of the world’s largest off-shore oil reserves. Seemingly overnight, Guyana began transforming from an international environmental leader and model of sustainable development to one of the world’s fastest growing petrostates.

Why start a brand new oil industry in the middle of a climate crisis in a country that is particularly vulnerable to climate impacts? Do wealthy, western, oil-guzzling nations have any right to tell a nation like Guyana to keep their fossil fuels in the ground? And once a project like this gets going, is there anything that can be done to stop it?

***This is a preview of a Patreon-exclusive, ad-free bonus episode. For complete access to this and all of our bonus content, become a Patreon supporter of The War on Cars.***