Episode 140: How Cars Change Us with Tara Goddard 

 

Sarah Goodyear: I just gotta say I love my Sheyd bag. What is a Sheyd bag, you might be wondering. Well, it’s a stylish backpack and it’s also a double bike pannier. And it converts from one to the other with just a few quick zips. Speaking of zips, the zippers on the Sheyd bag are super smooth and sturdy, and the exterior flaps and pockets stay closed with magnetic fasteners. So whether you’re riding your own bike with a rack, hopping on a bikeshare bike, taking the train or bus or just walking, the Sheyd bag has you covered. It looks terrific, too, either in the original blue or the new black. Plus, Sheyd bags is a small, woman-owned business based in Huntington Beach, California. You can check out the double bike pannier backpack by going to Sheydbags.com/waroncars. That’s SHEYDbags.com/waroncars. Enter discount code 10WARONCARS at checkout to get 10 percent off. That’s the number 10WARONCARS.

 

Sarah: Welcome to The War on Cars. I’m Sarah Goodyear, and I’m here with my co host Doug Gordon.

Doug Gordon: How’s it going?

Sarah: We’ve got a great episode coming up. We’re really excited about this guest, but before we get to the guest, we’ve got a bunch of business we have to get through. First of all, long-time listeners may have noticed that Aaron isn’t with us. He has decided it’s time to move on, and we really want to thank him for his contributions over the years, and we sincerely wish him all the best.

Doug: Yeah, we really mean it. Thanks for everything, Aaron, and good luck with everything.

Sarah: We’ve got a lot of big things to look forward to in the coming months, and in 2025. We are working on a year-end mailbag episode to celebrate our listeners and all the good things that have happened this year. If you’re a Patreon supporter, you should already have gotten an email about that.

Doug: And speaking of Patreon, we are now offering annual subscriptions. This is something a lot of people have asked for. They didn’t want necessarily to do monthly payments and all the credit card fees and stuff that goes along with that. So if you’d like to sign up for the entire year, you will also save 10 percent if you do that. If you’d still like to pay monthly, we are offering a discount through the end of the year, so you can still do that. Go to Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod and sign up today. I gotta say, we are so thankful to our Patreon supporters. You keep the podcast going, you make this possible. So thank you so much.

Sarah: And one of the Patreon benefits is early access to tickets for our live shows like the one that we are doing on Friday, January 31, when The War on Cars will be appearing live on stage at Hunter College in New York City with our friend Ray Delahanty, otherwise known as CityNerd on YouTube.

Doug: I am so excited about this.

Sarah: [laughs] I know.

Doug: I am a huge nerd for CityNerd. I don’t know what his fans are called, like Nerdheads or something. Ray is a really insightful guy, really nice, really intelligent. I’m sure a lot of our listeners also watch and hopefully support Ray on Patreon and on YouTube. Go subscribe, go check him out. It’s gonna be a really great night. We said Patreon ticket sales, but actually now tickets are on sale to the general public. So our Patreoners got first shot, but now we will put a link in the show notes and you can go get tickets to that show in New York. We’re really looking forward to it.

Sarah: And there’s gonna be other live shows coming up. Nothing is on sale yet, but we are gonna be in Minneapolis next spring. We will keep you posted on that. And there’s gonna be a lot more shows coming up because next year we are gonna be publishing a book.

Doug: Dun dun dun dun!

Sarah: In October. and there’s gonna be a book tour because you gotta do that.

Doug: Sarah is being, I don’t know, humble here. We just delivered the manuscript, the final manuscript of our book. We are recording this on a Wednesday. We delivered it two days ago.

Sarah: I think I’m just dazed. Not humble, just dazed.

Doug: Yeah. It’s gonna be great. We’re really excited to get this out. We will not yet reveal the title, although we’ve dropped some hints here and there. You might spy one somewhere. And we will release the cover first to our Patreoners, probably. We’ll let you know.

Sarah: Yeah, there’s gonna be a lot to do with that next year. I’m really excited about today’s guest because she’s somebody I’ve wanted to have on the podcast for a long, long time. Dr. Tara Goddard is one of the top scholars out there studying what it is that cars do to our brains and the way we treat each other in the world. She has also done a lot of research on a topic that is near and dear to our hearts, which is the way that the media depicts traffic violence, and how that influences the way people think about it. Tara is an associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Texas A&M University. She earned her master’s degree in civil engineering from UC-Davis, worked as a transportation planner for the City of Sacramento, and then served as the Bicycle Pedestrian Program Coordinator for the city of Davis, California. After earning her PhD in Urban Studies at Portland State University, she joined the faculty of Texas A&M in 2017. Her research focuses on creating a just transportation system through safe roadway design and inclusive transportation planning. Tara Goddard, welcome to The War on Cars.

Tara Goddard:  Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Doug: I think we should say welcome finally to The War on Cars. I feel like you’re one of those guests we have wanted to have pretty much since the podcast began, so I’m so grateful that you’re here.

Tara Goddard: I’m happy to be here. It’s a coveted interview request, and something that I’ve been looking forward to speak to you for quite a while.

Sarah: The immediate reason that we’re having you on—we’ve been following your work for so many years—most recently, you published a study about a subject that we’ve discussed on the show before. It’s about a phenomenon that is known by many names. You could call it “motonormativity.” You could call it “windshield bias.”

Doug: We call it “car brain.”

Sarah: Exactly. This is a study that replicates the work done by Dr. Ian Walker, who we had on the show back in the beginning of last year in episode 99. Maybe you could explain, Tara, what this study entails, and what motonormativity is and what you learned about it.

Tara Goddard: Yeah, this was a really fun, simple, quick study that I’ve been wanting to do for quite a while after Ian, Dr. Walker’s work came out along with his colleagues. And it’s really, you know, as you say, we’ve—we, you and I and many others—have been using these terms like “car brain.” I use “windshield bias” most of the time just because it builds on the work and the studies I do looking specifically at bias, and I like calling out that term specifically. So the work that I’ve done in the past, including with the media crash reporting, including with some of the driver yielding, it really all—those reflect different aspects of car brain or motonormativity, but this was an opportunity to do a very clean replication study.

Tara Goddard: And I relistened to your episode with Ian, and like you said, there’s things where you want to ask all the questions, but when you’re a social scientist, you want it to be really clean as well so you can feel confident in what it is that you found. So that’s why I took their questions as written and their method as the way they did it, and basically the only changes I made were some minor language tweaks, just to put it in more of a US English versus UK English phrasing. But that was really the only change I made.

Tara Goddard: So what I did is there was a series of five questions that were asking about, you know, kind of broadly these public health norms, or whether there should be social responsibility or individual responsibility for some of these behaviors. And then they saw only one version. People didn’t know there was two versions, but I used an online pool just like Ian and his colleagues did. And so they saw one version, and the version either had the car- and driving-related questions or the parallel questions that weren’t about cars. So similar thing. And then I asked them basically their agreement/disagreement on the statements. And then I did collect some additional information: whether they had access to a car, how many days a week they drive, what region of the US they’re in. Because I was curious to look at kind of broad cultural differences—cultural in the sense of geography, mostly—and a few other questions. So I found very similar responses, as you saw, and as you can see in the paper, which is open access, so anybody can find it online, that people excuse any kind of these public health problems or “externalities,” to use the wonky word, when they include a car or driving versus other behaviors. Less so for things that are someone else driving, like the delivery driver, like, just how they found in the UK, but in general some very big disparities. And just like they found in the UK, but to an even stronger extent, the smoking versus exhaust had a real difference in people’s attitudes.

Sarah: Can you explain—just summarize those questions, or specifically the smoking one. I know that’s the one that really jumps out.

Tara Goddard: Sure. So there was a series of five questions. They saw one version or the other. And so the first question had to do with belongings and if they get stolen and what happens—actually, belongings specifically in the street, in public space. So if someone leaves their car parked on the street, it gets stolen, it’s their own fault. The police should not be expected to act, versus just belongings. The second one was it’s okay for a delivery driver to bend a few traffic rules, versus a chef to bend a few health and safety rules. And then the third one was having to do risk. So risk is a natural part of driving. Anyone who drives just has to accept it, versus a part of working. So if you’re working a job, you just have to accept that it’s risky and you can essentially get hurt on the job. The fourth one was there’s no point in expecting people to drive less, so we just need to accept the consequences versus drink alcohol less. And then the fifth question was people should not drive in highly-populated areas where other people have to breathe in their car fumes versus people should not smoke in highly-populated areas where people have to breathe in their cigarette smoke.

Sarah: So that one really jumps out. What was the result on that last question?

Tara Goddard: So just like with the UK study, I found the most significant differences were people were disagreeing that people shouldn’t drive where people have to breathe in the exhaust, but saying they agree that people shouldn’t smoke where people have to breathe in the car fumes. And so, like, 98 percent of my respondents agreed, like, people shouldn’t smoke where people have to breathe it in, but only 25 agreed that people shouldn’t drive where people have to breathe in the exhaust.

Doug: I think I mentioned on our episode with Ian Walker, you can see this play out in real life. If you light up a cigarette outside a schoolyard, you will probably be surrounded by other parents who say “Put it out.” But those same parents would think nothing of idling their cars to run the AC while they’re waiting to pick up their children.

Sarah: Right. And as a matter of fact, if you decided you wanted to call it out, I would feel quite apprehensive about approaching somebody in that situation to tell them to turn off their car. Whereas if it was to put out their cigarette, I think I would feel quite self righteous and proud of myself.

Tara Goddard: Yeah. And this is really important. I wanted to be sure to talk about this a bit, and I thought you did a really nice job on the episode with Ian talking about some of these issues. I love the analogy to the idling and the car pickup. And as well, Sarah, you brought up what I think is an important point of there is a bit of a difference—and this is a challenge with a simple survey like this—where smoking is seen as more discretionary, whereas driving is not. And yet that’s part of this issue, right? Like, of not even being able to envision that driving is anything but what we do. So I think that’s a big piece.

Tara Goddard: I also think there’s—and I and I think you and many others have been talking about this for years. I think there’s a lot of parallels that we can learn from how things have changed around smoking that are applicable to how we think about cars and driving. So you think about with smoking, we’ve made it incredibly inconvenient to buy them, right? You have to, like, go to a clerk and it’s behind the counter. And maybe this varies by state, so I’m not sure entirely. But in general, it’s less convenient than it used to be, right? It’s very expensive. We made it more expensive. So we started kind of taxing people essentially for their use. There’s far limited areas where you can smoke, and that’s very analogous to, like, not allowing cars to go everywhere or to people to drive everywhere, right? So I think that’s analogous. So then it’s just harder to do. Certainly increased awareness of the dangers. You spoke about this on, I think, a few—maybe your episode too with Wes Marshall of, like, really forcing people to reckon with the injuries and deaths and air pollution and all that. And then, you know, we stopped allowing ads on TV and portrayals in, like, a lot of TV and movies or, you know—and those can help to shift culture and whether it’s even acceptable. I mean, it couldn’t be more stark, I think, between having cigarette ads completely prohibited on TV versus the car ads, where, you know, we’ve all talked about this, right? And we do the Super Bowl ads, and look at those, where everybody’s roosting around in these delicate habitats. They’re driving on empty streets, which let’s be honest, doesn’t happen that often. You know, kind of just zooming around. So it’s like kind of the complete polar opposites of how these things are portrayed on TV.

Tara Goddard: And as someone who studies and cares a lot about the idea of culture and car culture, I think that’s just one more piece of it. So I think those are all really interesting things that we can point to. And again, I think there is—we’ve seen some reoccurrence of smoking because you build a better mousetrap. The companies are like, “Well, we can just keep people vaping if they’re not gonna smoke cigarettes.” And then just one final thing that I think is important about what you just said, Sarah, is this idea of being comfortable confronting someone, where I think with smoking, one, I think there’s a sense that if you did confront someone, one, there’s just a shared cultural understanding of yeah, it’s actually not a good thing. But also that if there was other people, they would back you up on that. Whereas if you confronted someone about their idling, I don’t think you would have the sense subconsciously that, like, anyone would back you up on that or also—like, so you’d feel like you were really putting yourself out there being vulnerable in a different way. And again, I think this speaks to this larger issue of car brain.

Doug: Well, I think except in New York City and cities like it, if you were the person going around the school pickup line telling people to shut off their engines, you’d probably be the only person not in a car, right? So that is part of the problem. Whereas with smoking, the majority of people would agree, right? Like, there would be just a lone person smoking, and there would be 20 people saying, “Hey, put it out.” It’s a complete polar opposite in that sense, for sure.

Tara Goddard: Absolutely.

Sarah: And it’s interesting how strong this feeling about cars is. I mean, I think the question that people don’t even know what to do with when you ask it as part of this survey, I have a feeling, is if you leave your car in the street, as opposed to other belongings in the street, should the police be called if that thing disappears? I think that it’s very hard for people to even think of cars as their belongings. It’s like a car is something else. A car is a lifeline. A car is so important, so vital, so central to somebody’s identity and ability to engage in society that, you know, even if you left a diamond necklace or something very—it’s not the value that’s different. It’s the nature of the thing itself, and what it does for you and how it positions you in society. I mean, there’s a quite different response, right, when it comes to the leave your belongings in the street or leave your car in the street. Most people think leaving your belongings in the street, if somebody takes them, well, that’s too bad for you. But leaving your car, well no, nobody should touch that.

Doug: Well, certainly leaving your diamond necklace in the street, you’re just irresponsible. But everybody has to leave their car in the street. So I think there’s that too, right?

Sarah: [laughs] Yeah.

Tara Goddard: Well, a couple things on that. And yes, that is, I think, the second most statistically significant difference is on that question. And I think you make a good point about just, like, how it’s just seen as a different type of belonging. But also think about it as a policy issue, because parking a car in the street is where you park it, right? And we provide an inordinate amount of public space for free, many places, like where I live in Texas, to store that. But if you tried to put out a garden shed or something—I’m trying to think of something similar sized, right?

Sarah: Right.

Tara Goddard: A little garden shed Or a little—even for if you’re doing the moving—those moving boxes, you have to do it for a short amount of time, and often you have to get a permit to do it, right? Which you don’t have to get a permit to have your car on the street. So of course, people think of it differently as far as storage on the street, because so much of our streets are used for storing cars. And again, often for free. So I think that’s definitely part of it. One of the most surprising findings to me on the experiment we did with our crash reporting is when we asked people, okay, imagine that the driver who hit a pedestrian is on trial. If they’re—I think we said, if they’re found guilty, what would be the appropriate punishment? And we said a fine, jail time, community service, I think. And one of the questions was impound the vehicle. And people were much more likely to say jail time than impound the vehicle. So I think that also speaks to this idea of how just, like, deeply embedded cars are, and just how they’re a part of an extension of ourselves and necessary for living and everything, that people were more willing to punish their fellow citizen with jail time than taking the vehicle.

Doug: Or that losing access to a car is a punishment worse than being taken out of society itself, right?

Tara Goddard: Exactly. And that’s one of those findings that we didn’t highlight maybe as much just because we were really focused on some of the other work, but also I just think didn’t get noticed or picked up. But when I’ve spoken or presented on the work, I like to highlight it because I think it’s a really important one that needs more exploration.

Sarah: Yeah, for sure. We’re gonna talk more about that in a bit because it is just fascinating to me how people’s behavior changes when you put a car into the situation, and what cars reveal about us, about how they allow an expression of our inner thoughts sometimes or our inner attitudes that is not evident if we’re using other forms of transportation. And one of your earlier studies that I just found so fascinating I think really exemplifies that. And it’s about yielding in a crosswalk. And you did a really important field experiment where you had pedestrians of different races waiting to cross the street in a place where cars were supposed to yield for them in a crosswalk, and according to which race they were, they experienced very different treatment from the drivers. Maybe you could summarize that for us.

Tara Goddard: Essentially, we hired three young Black men, three young white men, kind of similar build. And I bought them the clothes to wear, so it was kind of a neutral sweatshirt and khaki pants because one, I wanted the clothes to be a little bit lighter colored so that no one could say, “Oh, it was just the dark-skinned pedestrians aren’t as visible in the—” you know? And we did this in the middle of the day or in the daylight, so that was also not an issue. And also I didn’t want to signify any kind of status, like higher status or lower status, because previous studies had said that matters also in driver yielding. But basically I cued them when to cross the street based on a traffic signal so that every driver would have the same relative amount of time to make a decision about whether to yield or not. And we found that controlling to the best we can, the best you can in the real world, all those other factors, all else being equal, drivers were less likely to stop for the Black pedestrians. And really importantly, that if the first driver didn’t stop, five times as many drivers would go by without stopping. So there was that kind of like herd behavior as well.

Sarah: So Black people basically had to wait longer to cross the street than white people.

Tara Goddard: Exactly. And so I mean, that’s a form of a microaggression or depending just an aggression. And you might think, “Oh well, it’s just—you know, at any one intersection or any one crosswalk, what does that matter?” But as that compounds, you know, you could see someone’s experience being like, “Well, I’m not gonna wait because no one’s gonna stop for me anyways.” Or, “I’m not gonna walk because no one’s gonna stop for me anyways.” And then in a second kind of follow-up study where we were trying to see about how infrastructure would influence it, so we looked at a location that had a stop bar or not, and we found that, like, the stop bar increased driver yielding overall, but drivers were still more likely to infringe into the space of the Black pedestrians. So they were stopping or slowing to a roll, but more closely to the Black pedestrians, which is another way of just saying, like, “You don’t belong in my space.”

Doug: So it’s a tax essentially on being Black in terms of time, basically, and access to public space.

Tara Goddard: Right. And we know that Black pedestrians are injured and killed at much higher rates than white pedestrians. And so in addition to their time and just this kind of societal, emotional burden of being treated poorly, this may be one more piece of the puzzle of why we see those higher numbers. And the researchers that replicated and built on our work in Las Vegas who had women crossing the street, Black and white women, and they actually had women step out in the street to see if drivers would yield, which I didn’t do. Just I wasn’t comfortable with it from a safety perspective. And they found that drivers were less likely to yield to the Black women who had stepped into the street already. So then it’s a real disparity in the danger.

Doug: Wow!

Sarah: Wow. That’s incredible.

Doug: We’re gonna put links to your research in the show notes. I highly encourage everyone to check them out. I mean, part of your research and what is so brilliant about it, it’s very accessible. It’s very thorough. It’s really well done. But it’s such a fascinating read to dig into any one of your studies. But we’re gonna take a quick break and we’ll be back with more.

Sarah: So we’ve had some strange weather in New York this fall. It’s been very dry. The city is in a drought.

Doug: Yeah. No rain for, I think, one of the longest stretches in recorded history, I believe.

Sarah: Yeah. So then toward the end of November, it rained a few times. And honestly, I was so excited when I could bring out my Cleverhood to get wet because it was like it felt like it was never gonna rain again.

Doug: Yeah. It is the one garment I actually look forward to putting on. Like, I don’t actually look forward to putting on my big, huge winter coat or anything like that. I do look forward to the days when, “Oh, it’s raining? I can go outside and wear my Rover rain cape or my anorak or any of the great garments that the folks at Cleverhood make.”

Sarah: But now there’s another kind of Cleverhood you can wear even when it’s not raining.

Doug: I am wearing this right now. It’s the new City Hoody. It is all black. It’s got this awesome, very deep hood, pockets, like a kangaroo pocket that is raised a little higher up so your arms don’t hang down so low. And it is so soft. It’s like a beautiful warm blanket, but it’s not that thick. It layers so well. I love it.

Sarah: I haven’t gotten to try mine on yet, but I can’t wait.

Doug: Listeners of The War on Cars can save 15 percent off of rain gear, the new City Hoody, and everything in the Cleverhood store with code WINTERWONDER. Go to Cleverhood.com/waroncars, and just enter that code at checkout. It’s code WINTERWONDER.

Sarah: Okay, we’re back with Tara Goddard.

Tara Goddard: One more thing I wanted to add about this issue of biases and how being behind a windshield and in a vehicle can sometimes reveal or exacerbate our better or worse angels. I loved, Doug, your comment. I think it was in the episode with Dr. Knoflacher where you said, “No one becomes a better person behind the wheel.” And I think that was a really, really good point. And it has so much to do with a lot of the culture issues we’ve already talked about, and then a lot of the actual design of vehicles themselves, at least I believe, and particularly in the US, right? Just everything about our vehicles puts us literally and figuratively in the driver’s seat. We control the climate, we control our schedule. Vehicles are getting big. We’re literally dominating other people. So I just think that is again, something that’s really important to explore, both for the general citizenry and drivers, but also for the people who make the decisions about street design, about road design, about policy.

Doug: I want to say I can’t be sure that I can take credit for that line, by the way, so I want to give proper attribution. I believe that Tom Vanderbilt, who wrote the book Traffic, which is also fascinating. I believe that he said it first, although he might not have come up with it, I don’t know. But yes, I think my wife will joke it takes about 30 seconds, after which I turn into a monster behind the wheel of a car. Even me.

Sarah: I actually wrote an article for CityLab about how I became a monster in about two and a half minutes when I had to drive around New York City one afternoon. And it just—by the end of it, I was just a terrible person. And really, it took almost no time at all for me to get there.

Doug: And it’s not just, as our listeners know, the design of the cars, but the design of the roads that signal to drivers, the signs, the street markings, the width of the road, everything is built for you and your driving convenience. And nothing says there will be pedestrians here. Unless you are in, like, a very busy urban downtown core, and even then, we know that there are problems.

Tara Goddard: Absolutely. And this is probably one of the things I emphasize the most with my students, is that it’s so much about the allocation of space. And when 90, 95 percent of public space, the space that we all own through our taxes, through being citizens, when 90 percent of that is allocated to cars and driving, then of course you’re gonna think that that is the mode that we should prioritize.

Sarah: So you do research into another phenomenon that I think is part of this kind of wraparound environment that we live in that’s telling us constantly that cars are the norm, that cars are the priority, that cars are inevitable. And that is your research into the way that the media writes about traffic violence, and how that affects our attitudes toward traffic violence, which “traffic violence” itself is a term that not everybody would use, but I use it. Why do we use that term, Doug?

Doug: Well, we use it because, like any other public health crisis: gun violence, domestic violence, traffic violence is traffic violence. If someone is killed by a driver, it is a violent rendering of that person from the world. Like, it is taking a person out of other people’s lives. It is a tragedy. And so I think when we call things—you know, we had Jesse Singer on the show, and we talked about the word “accident” and how we try to avoid that and say “crash” instead. Traffic violence categorizes this problem that we talk about in our advocacy, that Tara talks about in her research, that we talk about on the show as a proper public health crisis.

Sarah: So you studied the effect, Tara, that different news framing has on readers’ perceptions of crashes.

Tara Goddard: It was a series of three studies. So a team of us were working on this for a few years, and it really came out of so many people. And I always want to shout out Families for Safe Streets and the work at TransAlt because I think so much of highlighting this issue really comes from there. And it was great you had Jesse on. You know, Jesse’s been active in this world for a long time. And it goes even further back. So, you know, the British Medical Journal said we’re not going to use the word “accident” in our journal because again, it gives people this idea that it’s not predictable or preventable. And they specifically use the example of car crashes in their editorial where they set that policy out.

Tara Goddard: And Peter Norton has some great examples of things decades before where people are highlighting this issue, again even from the early advent of the motor car, as they said about why these things shouldn’t be called “accidents.” So myself and others had been talking about this, and frankly tweeting about it for a long time. And my friends and colleagues, Kelsey Ralph and Calvin Thigpen and Evan Iacobucci, we said, you know what? Let’s actually study it. So in our first study, we just wanted to see—we felt like this was a problem. We—you know, it was kind of anecdata to see, but we collected 200 articles, real world news articles that you’d just find online, and 100 that involved a pedestrian and 100 that involved a bicyclist who’d been seriously injured or killed in a crash. And then we coded them for passive voice, for whether the driver was even mentioned, whether they mentioned that the driver stayed and cooperated, which you don’t see for any other kind of incidents typically for that.

Tara Goddard: And we found indeed that there is a big disparity about, you know, passive voice. And victim blaming—what essentially results in victim blaming, or these counterfactuals that make it sound like, oh, well, if the pedestrian was just wearing bright clothes, they could have prevented it. But there’s no evidence that that happened. And a lot of these statements come out before there’s even been a real investigation. So then often they’re just either replicating a police report or, you know, people on scene or the driver themselves, who, of course, is not an unbiased answer, because as you say, Doug, it’s violence. So when someone who’s been walking or bicycling gets hit, they’re often not there to tell their story, whether they’ve been killed or they’re incapacitated in a hospital somewhere.

Tara Goddard: And we found no evidence where, like, a reporter had gone and followed up with the actual person who’d been injured. So we said, okay, well, this is really happening. We’re not imagining it. Does it matter? Does it affect then how people view who was responsible or what kind of things should be done about it? So then we did a very kind of classic social science experiment, again with an online survey pool, where there was three versions of an article. People only saw one version, and they did not know there was other versions, so they were purely responding to the version they read. And we had what we called the status quo, which—we wrote it, but we wrote it just like you would see any number of articles explaining a crash between a driver and a person walking. But we used passive voice, we left out the driver, et cetera.

Tara Goddard: And then in the second version, we just minor, minor tweaks where it was like a driver hit a pedestrian, which again, isn’t assigning blame, but that’s what happened. That’s a more factual description, and brings an agent, as they say, into it. We didn’t use the word “accident,” we used the word “crash.”

Tara Goddard: But in the third one, we use what we called public health or thematic framing, where not only did we use just more accurate grammar, we also gave some context. So, you know, we said, it’s a busy strip, the person was crossing between a bus stop and a Walgreens or something like that. So it was like, oh, no, this is a place where a driver should expect a pedestrian potentially, there’s a land use, why someone might be walking. And then we said, you know, this is a rising trend, et cetera. And then we just asked them a series of questions. Again, responsibility. And then we asked what was really important is what people thought we should do about it, an education campaign, kind of more enforcement or built environment?

Tara Goddard: And a really important finding from that is that only people who read the third version, which is again, the public health framing, were likely to say, “Yes, I support public investment in infrastructure.” We didn’t use the word “infrastructure.” We said things like sidewalks and lighting and things like that. So while there was a shift that we saw when we kind of just even fixed the grammar as it were, it was really giving this broader context that helped shift people’s thinking.

Tara Goddard: And so that just built on a huge whole field of journalism studies and media and communication studies that said it does matter how we report on these and how we frame them and how we read them. That just builds into everything we’ve been talking about with the kind of culture or understanding of the world and what’s going on and whether we should care about it. And again, our goal wasn’t to say, “Oh, we should just blame drivers,” which we can have a different conversation about that because I personally think that the people with the ability to cause the harm do have more responsibility and should be potentially just the ones who are found responsible. But that’s a different conversation. What we were doing with the language changes wasn’t assigning blame, it was just making it more factual.

Doug: I wonder if we could get into some specific examples. I think our listeners can probably name all kinds of types of headlines that you see: “Car Hits Cyclist,” that kind of passive voice. “Taxi Jumps Curb.” As if it’s like a horse that got spooked by a mouse running out in front of it or something like that. You posted something on Bluesky, I think Bluesky, where all the cool kids are now. And we talk about the passive voice a lot in these headlines. But someone else came up with the phrase “the exonerative tense,” which I really thought—and you had highlighted this as just like a brilliant and evocative way to describe these headlines that essentially just make it seem like an oopsie that the driver couldn’t have done anything to avoid the quote-unquote, “accident.”

Tara Goddard: Yeah, that was a phrase, as I said on Bluesky, that I was kind of amazed I hadn’t come—and I felt a little bad that I hadn’t come across it when we were writing the papers up, or I would have used it and cited where that came from. And I should note—I should have noted this at the beginning. I am not a communications expert or a journalism expert or an English language expert. I came in, as did my colleagues, you know, as transportation safety professionals who just felt that these things were really important. So we’re building on a huge amount of literature in these areas. I just want to say that, and also that I’m not an expert on these.

Tara Goddard: But the exonerative aspect of it is such a, I think, pervasive issue, where not only the headlines, which, like you said, they just kind of obscure that there’s any person involved but the victim, the person who’s been injured or killed, but then when you look at the phrases, particularly from police, is we see this preemptive exoneration. We see this, well, speed was not expected to be a factor. And of course, what they really mean is going over the posted speed limit, because speed is almost always a factor in creating this difference. You know, it’s physics, right? The difference between an actual car hitting a human body. So speed is nearly always a factor in at least severity of crashes, if not causing crashes. So that kind of exonerates. Like, they weren’t doing anything wrong because they weren’t going over the posted speed limit or they weren’t speeding.

Tara Goddard: Even this idea of, like, you know, the driver’s cooperating, the driver stayed on the scene, which one, is the legal requirement. It’s also the just ethical, moral requirement, but it’s—you just don’t see that about other kind of incidents where again, I think that leads into this preemptive exoneration. It’s like, “Oh. Well, if they stayed, they must have not meant to do it. If they stayed, it wasn’t their fault.” Right? So again, it kind of just sets this narrative that these things just happen and they’re not predictable or preventable.

Tara Goddard: Those are the main phrases where I think you can really point to this exoneration. And again, this is another thing that I think is important. And I think it’s—I mean, I’m very—I’m sensitive to the pressures that journalists face, right? There’s a pressure to get something out quickly, to get something in the paper. But they do tend to then quote the police who will make these statements, or they’ll just make statements even if they’re not quoting the police before any actual investigation has happened. And yet then the narrative is set, the idea is set. And I think not just for the public, but for the people who are involved, whether it’s the city planners and engineers who might be—you know, should go and look at that area to see, like, well, what about the environment maybe led to this, or should we do something different? So I think that’s why this idea of avoiding kind of preemptive exoneration is really important.

Doug: You know, the thing that comes to mind for me right now is the story of little Ali Liao, who was three years old, I believe, walking with her grandmother in a crosswalk when a driver turned into them, hitting them both and killing Ali. The story in the Daily News that was reported immediately was that Ali had—you know, very typical framing—darted out into the street or let go of her grandmother’s hand, and the driver couldn’t avoid hitting her.

Doug: I think it turned out later that the driver had had a few drinks and just didn’t yield, didn’t slow down. And it was entirely the driver’s fault, but the narrative was set. And there’s an injustice that is heaped upon these families. I mean, imagine that poor grandmother who did nothing wrong and watched that happen in front of her eyes. And then the story, literally the next day or even that afternoon, is that she was responsible. She let the girl go. And that makes it harder for families to receive justice in court. That is a thing they see online when they google their child’s name. So I think getting that framing right, that first draft of history, is critically important work with your research, the advocacy of so many of our listeners.

Tara Goddard: It’s an important point, because it highlights the many ways that not only is there the initial trauma when there’s an incident like this, but the ways that those traumas are continued through society not recognizing that, or even worse, not recognizing the structural issues that led to that horrible event. But even blaming people, right? Like you said, that for the grandma doing something wrong, which, of course, she did not. And again, even if that driver wasn’t drinking, there’s other things that they did wrong. It still was not this little kid’s fault. One of my magic wand wishes, I guess, would be to get rid of the word “darts out.” That one drives me absolutely crazy. But also, we want to have places, especially in our dense, urban areas, where, you know what? It’s okay if a kid darts out. Like, it shouldn’t be a death sentence if a kid darts out. Kids don’t have fully-formed brains. They’re not making good decisions all the time, but that’s okay. We need to build an environment that is more forgiving of that.

Doug: One line I can take credit for is I say, you know, in a busy urban environment, pedestrians don’t come out of nowhere, they come out of everywhere. And when you’re driving, you need to be aware of that.

Sarah: And as far as darting goes, I’ve said this before. Kids dart. That is literally how they move. That is how children move. Children are part of our society, and we need to take that into account when we build our environment. It’s always so excruciating to me to see people in New York City with their children doing what I did when I raised my kid here: yelling at them constantly, “No! No! No, don’t!” Because the way that they move naturally, which would be safe in a natural human environment, is not safe in this environment.

Tara Goddard: So I’m not a parent, but I have young nieces, and I think I posted about this online over the summer when I was with them. The only thing that stressed me out with them was when we were out walking somewhere, and I was always having to worry about drivers and exactly what you’re saying. Like, the girls, they want to balance on the edge of the curb and kind of walk and play, and they’re doing things, and it’s constantly having to correct them and say no. And again, it’s not anything they’re doing wrong. I should be supporting that kind of thing. But instead, it was just this level of stress. And I think then, not only does it create the stress like you’re talking about in the immediate term, then kids are just internalizing that, like, hey, why would I want to walk or be out in the environment? Like, that’s just not gonna be something that’s fun or positive in any way.

Tara Goddard: So one additional thing I wanted to say about the exonerative tense—and this is something that, as a researcher, I have to say it needs more study, I think it’s important to study—is how that potentially plays out in an actual exoneration. And without getting into kind of reparative justice and works about that aspect of it, which I think Jesse Singer talks and writes a lot about, one of the most egregious cases I’ve ever seen—and I’ve used this in talks before—is a case where a man was pulled over because he was speeding, and it turned out he was drunk. But the judge excused it because the man said, “I was trying to escape from—” it was like his wife and his girlfriend found out about each other or something, these two quote-unquote “crazy women” coming after him, so therefore he had to flee and drive his car. You know, he’s speeding and all these things. Luckily, he didn’t hit anybody, that he was pulled over before he hit anybody. But again, that’s a very, very egregious case of exoneration that excused poor driving behavior. Because it’s like, oh well, it’s not that big a deal. But I think more generally, this question of why do we care if it’s exonerative tense in a news article? Because then I think it’s like, we need to figure out what does that mean for how we then actually exonerate people’s behavior, you know, if/when they get caught or if/when they actually hurt or kill someone.

Sarah: And I think it has policy implications as well, because our decision makers, our elected officials, our planners are all living in the same media environment, right? Where they’re taking in these attitudes and these norms, and this is how the status quo is built and maintained. And there was an article recently in the New York Times that I think really exemplifies a lot of this. A lot of people got mad about it on social media. It’s about a terrible case in Paris that happened a couple months ago where a young man named Paul Varry was killed by a driver of an SUV after they had argued on the street, and then the SUV driver apparently is accused of deliberately accelerating his vehicle into the young man, killing him. And he’s been arrested on, I believe, manslaughter charges.

Sarah: It’s a big case. I was in France when it happened. There were national demonstrations. It was—the Transport Ministry said that they were going to take action, examine what was going on. Very different result than would have happened in the United States, where that’s just, you know, Tuesday. But the New York Times decided to do sort of a feature article about this. And the headline was, “Death of Cyclist in Paris Lays Bare Divide in Mayor’s War Against Cars.” And the subhead was, “Paul Varry was run over on a city street in what prosecutors suspect was a deliberate act of road rage, as bikers and drivers choose sides.”

Doug: Okay, rant incoming.

Sarah: [laughs] Okay, go for it.

Doug: It acts as if cyclists had never been killed before Anne Hidalgo started limiting car access in Paris. There were deliberate acts of violence against cyclists in Paris before Anne Hidalgo became mayor, before she launched her quote-unquote, “war against cars.” This might have happened on a street outside of the city that didn’t have bike infrastructure, and yet they’re imposing this culture war framing on top of this incident between two people, one of whom is a murderer, essentially. Yeah. It’s infuriating.

Sarah: Yeah. And that the idea that bikers and drivers choose sides. Which side are you choosing? Are you choosing the side of the biker who was just so irritating, or the driver who just couldn’t help killing him because he was so irritated by him. I mean, it doesn’t—I don’t understand what they even mean by “choose sides” there. But I guess what disturbs me, and maybe you could talk about this, Tara, is that by publishing this article, the New York Times is basically framing what is going on in Paris as not a, you know, sort of ordinary back and forth between people who want space on the road, from a policy perspective that drivers get upset when there are bike lanes put in because it means that there are fewer car lanes. They’re literally sort of saying, “Well, this is such a war on cars that, you know, of course cars are gonna fight back.”

Doug: Murder is justified. Yeah.

Tara Goddard: Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot, I think, encapsulated in that horrifying story, and part of it gets back to this framing that is basically almost as old as the car. And partly, as Peter Norton has documented well, that it’s very been an active thing by the automotive industry or some chambers of commerce and early days of AAA, where this idea of oh, shared rules, shared road, shared responsibilities. As though it’s an equal playing field, right? As though there’s sides to choose, as you point out.

Tara Goddard: And of course, that’s absolutely not true, partly because—anymore we’re shoehorning bicycling into a whole system that’s built around and for driving. So how can you have shared rules, shared responsibilities, when they’re just very different needs and very types of moving around through the world? But then again, this idea that a driver’s inconvenience has equal weight as a person’s right to live and not be injured or killed in moving around space. And I think what is alarming to me—and I think you talked about this with Wes Marshall, and it’s a big interest of mine—is how pervasive that idea still is in the practice today, and of course, codified into a lot of our transportation planning and engineering guidebooks and standards and all that, right?

Tara Goddard: And so if you asked maybe a citizen or, you know, certainly a planner or engineer, is it okay to, you know, run someone down with your car because—or even stepping back from that, is it true—or asking something about this idea of which side or this idea of revealing that there’s sides in this war on cars, they would, you know, absolutely not. Like, it’s not okay to do that. But if you start asking or probing their ideas about shared rules and shared responsibilities, you do start, I think, to see, like, oh, but they do hold those things, but they’re not making the connection how those two things are connected.

Tara Goddard: And so I think that is, again, something that is important to understand: how the framing of those continues to build or reinforce the idea, but also how it reflects biases. And I can’t speak—you all are gonna know a lot better than me about the processes of, like, headline writing and headline choosing, which is something that we haven’t really gotten to explore. And I don’t think others, including Laura Laker in the UK, who’s done fantastic studies on this, I don’t think any of us has really explored this issue of the headline versus the article. Because you see this side’s war on car. You see it in both the headline and the articles themselves. But I do think anecdotally, again, a lot of times the headlines are the more egregious than the actual writing because you can—of course, you can get into some nuance or context, but also that’s what people see and often the only thing people read, right? So it is important, those type of headlines.

Sarah: Sadly, in this case, I think the text of the article …

Doug: It’s not better.

Sarah: It’s not better. [laughs]

Doug: No. We actually should read some of that. I mean, I think, you know, we’re seeing this infect our politics in lots of ways. You know, I think you see this with trans issues. It’s like, well, one side wants to deny gender-affirming care and bathroom access and just basic liberties to an entire class of people, and the other side sometimes can be a little annoying online, right? And so both sides are equally to blame for where the situation is at the present moment. So in this case, I will read from some of the article.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: I’m not gonna be able to do Sarah’s excellent French accent, so bear with me. “An outpouring of emotion over Mr. Varry’s October 15 death has put a spotlight on the dangers facing cyclists in a city that has seen an explosion in bikes and cycling lanes in recent years. But it has also underscored the frustrations that motorists increasingly feel in a place that has chosen to limit the movement, speed and parking options for cars. In recent weeks, as cycling organizations, spurred by the death of Mr. Varry, have demanded more protections from aggressive drivers, others have complained about Parisian bikers themselves, some of whom have earned a reputation as dangerous risk-takers.” So real both-sides stuff going on there.

Sarah: What’s ironic about that is that riding a bicycle is taking a risk because you’re in an environment with aggressive drivers. That’s why it’s risky. That’s what the risk taking is is, like, daring to actually ride your bicycle in the city. And of course, you’re gonna have a reputation as a dangerous risk-taker. I mean, I just found that really egregious.

Doug: I mean, I really want to highlight here that on one side we have people facing danger, and on the other side we have frustrations.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Those are not equal in my mind or really probably the minds of anybody listening to these words right now. Those are two very different things.

Tara Goddard: Absolutely. And even all the way back to my dissertation back in 2017, when I asked people questions about—like, I actually showed them three different silhouettes of bicyclists. One that looked like a road cyclist, you know, with a helmet and the body position and the bike. One that was like an—I mean, it’s just a silhouette, but you kind of got the impression they were an older adult sitting upright on a Citi Bike, no helmet. And then one that kind of looked like someone on a fixie. They had a backpack, and I think they were doing like a—they were standing on their bike. And people attributed things like “smug” to, like, the fixie rider. And the—a risk-taker of, like, the cyclist who looked like a kind of a roadie, I think I called it. And then the person on the upright bike was slow, but they were, like, maybe more environmentally friendly.

Tara Goddard: So one, people have these attitudes, but then it also serves to, as I think you talked about with Ian a bit, of this justifying our behaviors, right? Like, oh, if they’re smug and they’re entitled and they’re risk-taking, therefore it’s okay for me to honk at them or cut them off or swerve at them or trying to chase them down. So again, I think it’s so pervasive. And that’s why I always—you know, I have colleagues that have spoken about this, colleagues and people in the world who are like, “Oh, it’s only about changing the infrastructure.” And then I have people who are like, “It’s only about individual behavior.” And I think it’s really a “yes-and,” right? We need to be addressing the environment. We need to be addressing car design and, you know, regulation. I actually come down more—I think it was in your interview with Wes where, you know, he kind of said, “If people are going different—” I don’t want to misquote him. Maybe it was someone else. Like, the market, the auto market will change as people—I don’t agree. I come down harder on the side of, like, I think we need more regulation of vehicle design and everything.

Tara Goddard: But I want to draw attention to something you said, this idea of limiting. That word, “limit,” right? And obviously, I’m obsessed with semantics and word choice. That’s the whole thing we’re talking about. “Limit” suggests that the default is full access. And so that speaks again to this idea. And I try to avoid using co-opting language from, say, you know, kind of racial justice or those kind of aspects, but I do think that that phrase that we’ve heard or seen as a meme of when you’re used to being superior, equality feels like oppression, or some version of that. And I think that is exactly what you see there. Again, framing it as oh, we’re restricting cars versus, like, no, actually we’re kind of making it a little bit more balanced. We’re shifting a little bit of this public space to other citizens who have equal right to the space. And it’s not—cars aren’t citizens, or they shouldn’t be treated as such. It’s the people that we want to have access to the space.

Doug: I also want to highlight the word “speed” because I think, you know, there’s a meme as well, or a commonly-held belief that cyclists are “entitled.” You hear that a lot. But that idea of entitlement when it applies to speed is really important. I think that when you drive, there’s a lot of things you are entitled to. You’re entitled to your own environment. You know, you can choose the temperature. You are entitled to your own entertainment. You can listen to the radio or a podcast. You’re entitled to storage space. You have something really heavy that you can’t otherwise get through to your destination? Great. Throw it in the trunk, strap it to the roof of your car. You’re entitled to choose your own passengers, right? You’re not in public transit, and you can decide who goes in the car with you.

Doug: The one thing you’re not entitled to is speed, actually. You are not entitled to go faster than anybody else. Just because you’re in a car and you live in one location and need to get to another location doesn’t mean you’re entitled to get there faster than someone walking, cycling,or taking the bus. And I think we really have to, in these stories and the way we talk about stuff, change the idea that drivers are entitled to go either the posted speed limit, because the conditions don’t always allow you to go the posted speed limit. Weather, for example, might slow you down. Or the city might say, “Hey, look. 15 miles an hour is perfectly adequate.” We are not limiting people with disabilities or mobility issues just by telling them you have to go slowly and carefully. So I think we really need to interrogate this idea of speed as one of the things that drivers are entitled to.

Tara Goddard: Absolutely. It’s an important point. And again, it’s something that I think Peter Norton has done a really good job. He has amazing material showing how early in the kind of growth of the automobile that there was active lobbying to sell this idea of speed. And of course, you can talk about, like, part of the larger capitalist society, right? Speed equals productivity equals value. And so that then also led to this, like, well, we need to get the slower movers out of the way, right? They shouldn’t be in the way.

Tara Goddard: And one of the questions, again, in my dissertation, where I asked people a question about whether they agreed or disagreed, whether if I don’t pass a cyclist going the same way as me, other drivers will get mad at me. And there was a huge agreement with that. I didn’t ask them, and I wish I had, whether if someone else didn’t pass the cyclist, if they would get mad. So I don’t know whether that’s just a perception from them of what other people are thinking, or a projection of how they would feel, or probably a little bit of both. But again, I think that’s part of this cultural idea of, like, if there’s any kind of delay—and I must have 200 or more memes saved because I collect these things because I’m a geek, about memes having to do about don’t drive the speed limit in the first lane or in the inside lane. Like, get out of the way. Especially in Texas, there’s lots of memes about this. So there’s just, like, from every angle, like you’re saying, this idea that speed—and of course, we sell it on car ads, as we talked about before. Nobody’s in your way. Your speed is the most important thing.

Tara Goddard: And so I think that’s difficult because there are so many aspects that we build that in. I mean, I think it was potentially Tony Jordan and I, way back in the day, talked about how even speedometers, like, because they go to 120 or 160 or 180, they give this idea that, one, you should maybe sometimes be going very fast. And also that when you’re going what is safer speeds, like 25 miles an hour, it looks like the needle’s barely moved. So all of a sudden there’s this big gap of, like, oh, I’m really being held back. Look at how little it’s going. Whereas if the speedometer only went to 70, then all of a sudden, 25 looks like a reasonable amount of the needle moving. So lots of aspects where we just kind of build that in. And of course, we’ve forced it on some people because of the way that say, if you have a job where you can’t show up late, but we don’t have a good environment for getting there any other way, then we kind of push people into doing things that they shouldn’t or taking risky behaviors, which is a whole other conversation of the way that it isn’t just like an attitude or a discretionary choice—which it is in many ways—but there is still these kind of both social and physical ways that we also kind of push that on people.

Sarah: So I did want to run this one example past you because it just struck me as being kind of the most extreme example of the exonerative language. And it’s okay to laugh at it because nobody got hurt. But this happened back in October, I think. Early voting had started in Kansas. And Emily Walters posted this on Bluesky. Someone hit a ballot box with their car. They drove into a ballot box. And of course, emotions were very high at that point about, you know, was the vote gonna be safe? Were people gonna be okay dropping their ballots at ballot boxes? So this attracted that attention. And the office of the county clerk in Crawford County, Kansas, issued a statement about what had happened. There was a vehicle accident in the Pittsburg Judicial Center parking lot involving a Crawford County ballot drop box. The driver of the vehicle stated that the glare of the sun caused the westbound vehicle to accidentally jump the curb and strike the ballot drop box. I thought that was, like, kind of the most classic example I’ve ever seen of official language. [laughs] The glare of the sun caused the vehicle.

Doug: Let’s also say that the driver of the vehicle did not state that. The driver of the vehicle did not state, “Yes, my westbound vehicle accidentally jumped the curb.” The police said that after getting a statement from the driver, and then that was passed on to county officials. So you see the way—you know, we’re talking a little bit about how the journalistic official sausage is made. Like, the game of telephone that happens between the driver saying something to the police, the police saying something to a reporter or a county official. Things continue to get watered down every step of the way.

Tara Goddard: Yeah. We have kind of an unofficial collection, and I don’t know, at some point I should compile them of the kind of worst examples. And that one is like a bingo game win that you just said, right?

Doug: [laughs]

Tara Goddard: Like, every possible—it’s almost like if someone were—if I were to purposely try and write the worst possible version, I think I would include a lot of what you included. But I mentioned that we did three studies on the crash reporting, and the third one was actually with police because, again, we, like others, found that a lot of times, you know, because of time and because of journalistic practices, they’re just replicating either an actual official police press release or they’re speaking to an officer on scene. And so Kelsey Ralph, one of my colleagues, she presented our work to a group of law enforcement officials. We were invited. It was like a senior management kind of workshop and training. And then we asked them a series of questions about what do they think about changing the language or talking about this differently. And then what do they see as barriers potentially to reporting or discussing these things differently?

Tara Goddard: And again, that needs some further study because one of the most significant things that they said that they were reluctant to change, to just, again, not blame anyone, just use more active grammar, was a liability. They felt like oh, well, it’ll open us up to liability. And it’s like, if that’s true, how is it not opening you up to liability to victim blame before things are even settled or whatever? So again, this perception of, like, the default needs to be protecting drivers and car use and everything. So again, Laura Laker in the UK has done some really great work with law enforcement that you might want to share in the show notes. That’s just some work that’s come out very recently, but I think needs more work as well. And I love, Doug, I kind of want to—maybe Peter would be the right person to ask about this. You made the point about, like, the jumping the curb as though it was a horse. And I literally almost wonder if we could trace that all the way back to the days of, like, horses jumping curbs or whatever, behaving badly on these kind of Victorian-era streets.

Doug: Or the fact that cars were called “the horseless carriage,” right? That that carries over.

Tara Goddard: Right. Right. Exactly. I was talking with a car salesperson just, like, two days ago and how we still use the term “horsepower,” which is funny. And they’ll even use “horsepower” about electric vehicles because that’s still kind of an analogous term that people get. And yet we’re very far away from those. And when did the Paris incident happen?

Doug: The incident happened in October.

Tara Goddard: So one thing that we haven’t even discussed is where we are just even in the last few years in this kind of COVID era—and I never call it post COVID because we’re not post COVID. But the way that we’ve seen in lots of different parts of society, you know, kind of a greater willingness to be violent or outspoken. I think you talked with Ian about the supermarket analogy. And Doug, it was either you or Aaron who remembered—and there’s—it’s an actual, I think, DoT PSA where there’s two people in a supermarket and it’s like, “Oh, you’d never be this way.”

Tara Goddard: But what I’ve started talking about is I don’t think we can even use the supermarket analogy anymore because people are doing those things in supermarkets or otherwise on the street, and being more willing and feeling comfortable to kind of enact these. And I think, you know, we’ve seen—and this is something that transportation safety folks have been really highlighting and concerned about, is that trends that were kind of getting better before the COVID shutdowns, like, are getting worse. So road rage incidents are up. Shootings are—like, road rage shootings are up. Speeding has not gone down, even as kind of volumes have returned to normal. So we expected to see speeding and greater driving speeds when the kind of roads were empty with shutdowns. But that hasn’t really moderated as much as we would expect as volumes have gone back down. So I think it gets back to this larger issue of the way that cars exacerbate our worst biases is that now when you’re seeing that in this larger context, it just makes me concerned about, like, the Paris thing, where it’s even a worse thing, where people are willing to be like, “Well, I kind of get it. Like, I would have been pissed too.” And kind of, again, exonerate people from these terrible things. So I think we’re gonna have to wrestle—we not only have been wrestling with a lot of these problems for a long time, but I think we also need to be aware of how these larger societal factors are just exacerbating it. Which is a little bit of a downer note, but I do think, as always, when we’re thinking about solutions or interventions, we need to understand the larger context, otherwise we keep building what we’ve always built and getting what we’ve always got.

Doug: Yeah, it’s something Sarah talks about all the time, the idea of that rugged individualism, that if there are problems in society, it’s just completely offloaded onto the individual. I mean, I was—while you were talking, I was also thinking about the uptick in violence against flight attendants on airplanes. You know, that’s really gone up in the quote-unquote, “post-COVID” era, as you were saying, Tara. It’s not really over. And, you know, I worry with some of this stuff that the solutions will be something to the effect of, like, just put every American on the couch. Like, everyone just needs therapy. Everyone needs to work this out. As opposed to, I don’t know, if a driver says that going slow behind a cyclist or not being able to drive to every last square inch of pavement in the city is going to trigger them to murder someone else, that person shouldn’t drive. And we should be separating people from their vehicles and vehicles from people as much as we possibly can. There are other situations where I don’t know what we do. The airplane situation, I don’t know what we do to get people to treat other humans like humans. But when people have access to large machinery that can kill other people, there should be massive amounts of—like you were saying, with cigarettes—taxes, limitations on space and changes to the design themselves of the thing that is harmful.

Tara Goddard: Absolutely. I think we need to be talking a lot more about removing vehicle access from people who shouldn’t or shouldn’t at least for a while be driving. And as I mentioned in our study, people were the least likely to think, even if a driver was found guilty, that you shouldn’t impound their vehicle. And so there’s a real reluctance. And I am in no way an expert on kind of restorative justice approaches, but I think there’s ways to do it where again, rather than putting someone—just incarcerating someone, taking their vehicle. But also, because of the way we built our society, making sure that doesn’t then result in negative outcomes as far as job loss or things that are just gonna cascade and not help anyone, right?

Tara Goddard: So I think we could take vehicles, but then also find ways that people can still get around and get what they need, but they no longer have the ability to cause harm with their vehicles. And so that’s something where I would love to see kind of legal scholars and transportation safety folks come together more to figure out how do we do that, or the policy folks who work in that kind of issue. And I think, as you say, I also don’t know what to do about just getting people to treat each other like better humans or the flight attendants, which is why we all kind of have to just work in our little corner or our little piece. And for me, that’s really—even though we did all the media crash reporting, and I think I’m really proud of that work and it’s super important, I’m really interested in, okay, well, how are these issues at play among the people who actually have the power and the ability to design our environments differently or do auto regulation as well? But in particular because there’s only so much we can do on changing broader society if the planners and engineers are still hearing these messages in their training at school, if it’s still in the documents. Or maybe I radicalize a couple of my students, but then they go to work for someone who’s still got this old school approach to prioritizing vehicles or vehicular cycling approaches or whatever, they’re just gonna end up back in that. And so we never get out of that kind of doom loop or whatever. So I just appreciate this idea of we have to come at it from so many different angles.

Sarah: I think that’s a great place to end. Getting out of the doom loop. That’s my Project 2025.

Tara Goddard: [laughs]

Doug: There we go.

Sarah: Tara Goddard, thank you so much for joining us at The War on Cars. It’s really been a great pleasure, and obviously we could talk for hours.

Doug: It was long overdue, and you are welcome back at any time.

Tara Goddard: Well, thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of fun.

Doug: We’ll put links to all of Tara’s research in the show notes.

Sarah: Go pick up some excellent rain gear and the perfect bag for bike commuting for yourself, or perhaps for a holiday gift.

Doug: I do hear there are some holidays coming up.

Sarah: That’s what they say.

Doug: The War on Cars is supported in part by the Helen and William Mazer Foundation. We thank them for their generosity.

Sarah: Remember, you can sign up to support us on Patreon, and get all sorts of benefits by going to Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod and signing up today.

Doug: A big thanks to everyone who supports us on Patreon, including our top contributors: Charley Gee Of Human Powered Law in Portland, Oregon, Mark Hedlund and Virginia Baker.

Sarah: This episode was recorded at the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio by Josh Wilcox. It was edited by Ali Lemer.

Doug: Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear. Transcripts are by Russell Gragg. I am Doug Gordon.

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