Episode 163: Dispatches from Book Tour, Part 2 

 

Doug Gordon: So we’re recording right now, and it is pouring outside in Brooklyn.

Sarah Goodyear: Yeah, it’s one of those rains where they actually send you an alert on your phone about it.

Doug: Yeah. I would like an alert on my phone that tells me to wear a Cleverhood. That would be a really good way of making these kind of dire announcements a little more cheery.

Sarah: That’s right. Because if you do put on your Cleverhood, then you could just go outside. You’re not made of sugar, you won’t melt, you will be able to enjoy the day. I rode a bike over here. I’m wearing my Cleverhood.

Doug: I walked over here wearing my Cleverhood. We both ignored the emergency warnings. Maybe we’re gonna get hit by flying debris, but we will be stylish and we will be dry in our Cleverhoods.

Sarah: And you too could feel this sense of confidence in the face of even rather alarming weather alerts.

Doug: Listeners of The War on Cars can save 15 percent on the best rain gear for walking and cycling now through the end of December with code BEAGIVER. Just go to Cleverhood.com/waroncars.

Sarah: Cleverhood: Don’t be alarmed by the weather.

Doug: Just check your phone.

Sarah: This is The War on Cars. I’m Sarah Goodyear, here with my co-host, Doug Gordon. Hello, Doug.

Doug: Hello.

Sarah: How you doing?

Doug: Good. Tired, but getting some rest from our book tour. I’ve been sleeping in a lot of days, but getting a lot done. And it’s great to be back home in Brooklyn.

Sarah: Yeah, it feels really good to be back in Brooklyn. Brooklyn, we love you.

Doug: We do.

Sarah: We’re in our home studio here with our home engineer, Josh Wilcox. God bless.

Doug: I feel like Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz. There’s no place like home.

Sarah: That’s so true.

Doug: And you were there. And you were there.

Sarah: [laughs] Yeah, right, right, right, right. We got back a few days ago, and here we are sitting down to record this. We took a slightly circuitous route home from the mountain west. We’ll get into that later.

Doug: We’ll talk about that later.

Sarah: Yeah. But this is gonna be a full rundown of the second leg of our book tour.

Doug: But first we have a little business. We are on Patreon at Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod. And of course, our book, which is the whole reason we are out on tour, Life After Cars is out now. You can go to LifeAfterCars.com, get it at any bookstore, preferably an independent, local bookstore. We loved working with them around the country.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: And also, we got the third leg of our book tour, which is basically many legs that we’re gonna talk about really quickly.

Sarah: It’s toes—it’s—I don’t know what it is.

Doug: Yeah. Heads, shoulders, knees and toes and legs. We are gonna be in Miami.

Sarah: Miami in January. I’m into that.

Doug: Thank goodness. With Chris and Melissa Bruntlett, who we love, who have been on the show before. They have a new book, Women Changing Cities, and we are teaming up with them with Transit Alliance Miami, for an amazing event in Coral Gables.

Sarah: Yeah, I’m really excited about that. That’s gonna be fun and sparkly.

Doug: That’s like Superman meets up with the Avengers. I don’t know what, exactly.

Sarah: I don’t know.

Doug: It’s a crossover event.

Sarah: Yes.

Doug: Then we’re gonna be in Jersey City. Columbus, Ohio, with The Ohio State University. Go Buckeyes. We’re gonna be in Pittsburgh or BikePGH. And then big news, we’re gonna be in Toronto with Cycle Toronto.

Sarah: Yeah. I’m really looking forward to Toronto. We’re gonna try to spend a few days there because, of course, that is in some ways the home origin place of The War on Cars podcast. And we’ll get into explaining that when we go to Toronto. But …

Doug: I realize we’re saying Toronto.

Sarah: I’m saying Toronno.

Doug: Yeah, I just heard a little T in there. I definitely said it. We gotta work on it.

Sarah: I’m trying to split the difference. You know, I’ve had many debates with people from that fine city about this. So I’m waiting …

Doug: Well, we’ll get to Canada and we’ll say sorry a lot, because that’s what they do up there.

Sarah: Sorry.

Doug: Yeah.

Sarah: Yes. And then we’re gonna be going back to DC.

Doug: For the National Bike Summit.

Sarah: Yeah. Which is gonna be really exciting. And we’re gonna have some great news about how that’s gonna work and what it’s gonna look like that we’ll be announcing soon.

Doug: All right, so let’s get into all the cities we visited on this most recent round.

Sarah: And as we said last time, there’s a sort of speed dating element to this where, you know, like, you have to get to know each city really quickly, and you get feelings for that city, you know?

Doug: I think we said fuck, marry, kill.

Sarah: Well, that’s what you said.

Doug: Yeah. We. I’m taking—it’s called The War on Cars. It’s not called the Doug Gordon Show, by the way. So first we were in Providence right after Thanksgiving. And Sarah, I want you to go first, because I grew up in the Boston area. I have spent a lot of time in Providence, and you have not spent quite as much time up there. What were your thoughts?

Sarah: Well, Providence, I will say, was not in its best light when we were there, because it was really cold and pouring rain. So that considered, it looked great. I really like the bones of downtown Providence. You’ve got a lot of beautiful architecture. You’ve got a lot of very human-scale streets. And they’ve been doing a lot of work to reclaim the riverside over the years. They’ve got a great new pedestrian bridge in. And, you know, it had a feeling of a place …

Doug: A pedestrian bridge, by the way, built on an old highway. The pylons that they use for that bridge are from the old highway. So great reuse of old car infrastructure.

Sarah: Yeah. And the whole place just kind of had a feeling of, you know, like, that there was a lot of potential that could be activated there. And it was a little hard to judge because of the weather and the time of year. Like, what would that look like in the summertime? Having lived in Maine myself for eight years, I know that New England cities look very different in the fall and winter than they do in the spring and summer. So that said—and the theater that we were in in Providence was also really beautiful. And of course, the advocates were amazing. So I had a pretty good feeling about Providence, but it felt like it needed more activation.

Doug: Yeah. That was the Uptown Theater, by the way. Beautifully renovated. I will say that on our West Coast leg of the tour, we were haunted by I5 almost the entire time, from Seattle all the way down to San Diego. This time around Providence, we were only in the Northeast for just a little bit. I95 really splits that city in just terrible ways. And you would walk from one side to the other. The theater was on the other side of I95 from downtown. And you can hear it. You know, that’s one of the big themes of these highways is that no matter where you are, you can hear the raging river of traffic that is just out of sight. So yeah, I like Providence. Maybe I’ll be insulting people from Providence if I call it mini-Boston, but it has—you know, it kind of built up at the same time, and it has similar history in our revolutionary period. And it does have yeah, great bones. Also, I’ll just say home of Cleverhood. So it was appropriate that it was raining.

Sarah: Yeah. And then we did get to go have weenies at the New York System hot dog place.

Doug: Well, you had a hot dog. I had grilled cheese.

Sarah: Yes, that’s right. And I will say that that was—that kind of encapsulated Providence’s charm to me. There’s, you know, bright orange and yellow booths in this very old-timey place. These old-timey counter guys.

Doug: Old-timey being what, like, the 1950s or ’60s? I mean, like …

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Doug: It was a great little place. It’s the kind of place I feel like in college I would have gone to at two in the morning to stave off a hangover, you know?

Sarah: Yeah. And, you know, it’s got a kind of mid-century, mid-20th century charm. And I think that a lot of Providence has that kind of retro charm of different eras. Some of it’s gorgeous 19th-century architecture, some of it is kind of cool mid-century modern stuff. And there’s too many cars, but I did sense a lot of great potential. And the thing that is one of the big fights that’s going on there right now has to do with transit. And we’re gonna be talking about transit more in this episode, but RIPTA, which is the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority, is under real threat with funding cuts. And so that was a big theme for the advocates the evening we were there was save RIPTA. I got a Save RIPTA t-shirt, one of the great t-shirts that I got along the way. And, you know, I just think that they’re also talking about—they have a transit center downtown, the Kennedy Transit, which has not yet been renamed the Kennedy-Trump-Trump-Kennedy Transit Plaza.

Doug: [laughs] Yeah.

Sarah: Thank God. But they are talking about moving it, and I think that would be a real shame because it has this beautiful central location that kind of says transit is important to this region. And putting it on the edges of the downtown, I think, would really take away from that message. And I think there are obviously improvements that need to happen to this transit center, but I think it’s been there for generations, it’s really important to keep transit central. Rhode Island is such a small state. Transit can do so much there to bring people together that we just really support RIPTA and the efforts to save RIPTA and the advocacy that’s going on around that.

Doug: Yeah. And the neighborhood that the theater was in is Federal Hill, with some beautiful historic mansions and homes. And there is a campaign to put bike lanes, protected bike lanes on Broadway, which is the main boulevard that connects downtown with that neighborhood. And I’m really excited to go back when that project goes in. So hats off to the advocates there, the Providence Streets Coalition, for all they’re doing to save transit to make the streets better. This will also be a theme of every city. Every city had just incredible advocates. That was the best part of this tour is meeting all these people.

Sarah: Yeah. And thanks so much to Riffraff Bookstore and bar that provided the books for the event—another really cool Providence institution, really. And also our hearts go out to the city in the wake of this terrible shooting at Brown. You know, it felt different to me having just been there, knowing what it must be like, knowing how tight knit that community is, and how people really care about each other and show up for each other. And yeah, we send our thoughts to Providence on that.

Doug: Okay. Austin, Texas. So we should say we took Amtrak from Providence to Boston to South Station. Beautiful renovation. I mean, we haven’t been there, either of us in a long time, but it looks gorgeous, South Station, at least the outer part of it now. There’s a whole building over the station that didn’t exist when I was a kid. And then we took the Silver Line to the airport. So, like, Boston, pretty good airport connection. I know people there don’t love it. The Silver Line has its issues. It’s in mixed traffic at some point, and that is a real crapshoot depending on the time of day when you’re getting to the airport. But that was a big theme. We really would try to take transit to and from airports where we could.

Sarah: And we both took Amtrak to Providence. And then yeah, it was really cool that we could make that connection and make a flight, and really do it reliably by doing Amtrak plus the Silver Line. And yeah, we got on a flight to Austin and we went to Texas, which is obviously, you know, a completely different universe than Providence in so many ways. I think in Austin we had to take a car service to get from the airport to the …

Doug: We did.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: I really liked Austin. I had never been before. I will say from the get-go, the vibes in Austin? Off the charts. Like, incredible vibes.

Sarah: Impeccable.

Doug: Yeah. Great food. We should probably get into that a little bit.

Sarah: Yes.

Doug: I joked that I was gonna eat my weight in tacos and I pretty much did.

Sarah: Yeah. Doug and I are both on sort of an austerity program in the wake of having gone on this tour. [laughs]

Doug: Yeah. Well, I can’t even look at a taco now because they’re just not gonna be as good as they were in Texas. Yeah, so I really liked Austin. I will say the downtown kind of stinks. Like, it’s really dead. There isn’t a lot of life there. What it has going for it is the access to the trails by the river, Lady Bird Lake and the pool that is, you know, just up the creek. I ran those. And Sarah, you did, too. You walked a little bit.

Sarah: Yeah. No, I ran and biked and walked all the way.

Doug: And they were—yeah, they’re an incredible asset for the city. And having a body of water, I’ve always said, like, it’s really important for me to live in a place where I know where the water is. So New York, of course, we’ve got water all around us. When I go to Chicago, I sort of always know where the lake is so I can always orient myself. Obviously, in LA, you know, where the ocean is. Austin, having the river was great, because I sort of, like, walked out of the hotel, pointed myself downhill, and boom, I’m at the trails. So that was what I thought was great about the downtown, actually. We did notice that Austin has to be the parking podium capital of North America.

Sarah: Yeah. Sorry, Austin. What is going on with that? I mean, we saw right from the first night we were there, I was just kind of like, “Wait, what is that?” And it was an apartment building perched atop a pile of parking that was so tall that, like, it looks—it seemed like the apartment building was, like, way, way, way up in the sky. So, you know, you regularly see 10-, 15-storey parking podiums. I guess there’s one that’s 27 stories?

Doug: Yeah, something like that. 26, 27.

Sarah: And my question was okay, so you get home. I was like, is there an elevator or something to take your car up? No, you have to drive around and around and around and around, I guess, depending on where your parking space is.

Doug: Yeah, so you get home and you still might have 10 minutes before you’re home.

Sarah: Yeah, that was really disturbing. And there were some buildings that actually looked like the parking was so disproportionate that it took over most of the building. Like, it seemed like the apartments were sort of an afterthought.

Doug: Yeah, there’s that old Canadian National Film Board film from the 1960s. It’s called What on Earth!. I believe it was nominated for or even won an Academy Award for short animated film. And the premise of that film is that aliens come to Earth, and they’re observing all the cars everywhere, and they assume that cars are the dominant species on planet Earth. And to go to downtown Austin—and this is also not to knock on Austin, this is true of a lot of US cities—you would assume that that’s true, because like you said, it was sort of like the cars get all this luxury housing and people get a place to sleep as a treat.

Sarah: Right.

Doug: Yeah. So that was tough.

Sarah: Yeah. And also, like, I understand a lot of these buildings with these parking podiums are new. And they’re baked into the city. This is not gonna change anytime soon. These are brand new buildings. The architects really tried hard. They have, like, little vines growing out of some of them or different kind of cladding on them, trying to make them look stylish. That’s gonna be there for a while. But what Austin also has is just an insane amount of surface parking lots in the downtown, in the Sixth Street area, which is sort of the entertainment district, and also just freestanding parking structures pretty much everywhere you go. I have never seen so much parking in my life as I saw in Austin. That can be changed.

Doug: Yeah.

Sarah: That can be infilled. That can—you know, a freestanding parking structure is not something that has to be there forever. So I think that there’s a lot of potential for infill. They have gotten rid of parking minimums. The problem is …

Doug: The funny thing about them getting rid of parking minimums—and it’s great—is that now they need parking maximums, because, you know, so what you get then is instead of an 800-space parking podium, you get, like, a 612-space parking podium. So technically, it’s gone down by, you know, 15 percent or whatever, but you still have hundreds of spots. I think part of the problem with downtown Austin—and we should get to the neighborhoods a little bit.

Sarah: Oh, yeah.

Doug: There’s so many good things to say about Austin.

Sarah: So much to say about Austin.

Doug: But it’s a state capital. And state capitals, with some exceptions like Boston, are often a lot of municipal buildings and parking lots that aren’t in use for a good portion of the year. And especially with the Texas state legislature, which is not in session all the time, like, there’s just so many dead spaces around the Capitol. And that takes up so much of the downtown. I did run around the Capitol building. It’s beautiful. Ten Commandments and a Confederate memorial there, so make of that what you will. But yeah, so we should get into the neighborhoods because like we said, I mean, Austin vibes.

Sarah: Austin vibes …

Doug: It’s a real thing.

Sarah: … are so good. So I-35, another one of the freeways that haunts us.

Doug: And that is being widened.

Sarah: And that is being widened, inexplicably.

Doug: Oh, I can explain it. There’s a lot of—there’s a lot of money.

Sarah: One more lane will fix it.

Doug: There’s a lot of money to be made by highway contractors and concrete and cement factory owners. And that is why this industrial complex continues.

Sarah: Yeah. And so you see the blight around I-35 where the widening is gonna happen, businesses that are gonna be displaced or businesses that were two or three blocks away from the freeway are now gonna be right up on it. And I-35 divides East Austin from West Austin. And on the east side of the freeway there’s some great neighborhoods and some really great stuff happening. And my first day there, I just got on a bike share and followed a bike lane out of downtown, a really excellent protected bike lane that took me underneath the freeway to the east. And I found just like a really cool neighborhood that is a new, transit-oriented development that’s done really well at scale with a ton of ground floor retail that is a really exciting place to go out at night, that has a lot of fun businesses, and at night has a really fun vibe. And it’s got light rail running out there, and it’s got a terrific world-class bike lane that is protected, and that brings you into an urban environment in a really great way.

Sarah: That said, I then tried to follow what the bike share app told me to do and go—I was like, “Oh, I’ll go back a different way.” And it took me up to a street that had a line of paint on it that was barely far away enough from the curb for me to ride in between that line and the curb, and, you know, pickup trucks doing 80 miles an hour alongside. I was like, no, I will not be riding that alleged bike lane. So they do have some poor bike infrastructure as well, but they have a lot of really, really great infrastructure. And that network is being built out.

Doug: And we’re knocking the downtown, but the downtown bike network—where they have it—that’s some good stuff. They are building some really nice stuff. I went to the Hyde Park neighborhood on the suggestion of one of our friends down there—Cutter Gonzalez, thank you for everything you did for us—and went to the First Light Bookstore and Café. And that was great. Beautiful homes, lovely neighborhoods. Wouldn’t take much actually to turn places like that into kind of low-traffic neighborhoods by changing the direction of some streets. I went to Tyson’s Tacos, not too far from that neighborhood. And that was really good. Speaking of tacos, I want to shout out Mayor Pro Tem Vanessa Fuentes, who was one of our guests at our show. Just an incredible elected official. Not only was she down with coming on a show, you know, from The War on Cars and talking about life after cars, she gave us a good recommendation for tacos: Veracruz, which some locals told me was not their favorite. My experience with tacos—and I’m sorry to the audience, because this is gonna be a taco-themed episode—is an average taco in Texas is sort of like an average pizza slice in New York City. If you’re from somewhere else, it’s incredible.

Sarah: Yeah, I loved all the tacos we had there, although I am more of a California-style taco person myself. But nonetheless, I …

Doug: You like a corn tortilla.

Sarah: I do like a nice, soft …

Doug: I like a flour tortilla.

Sarah: A handmade corn tortilla. But, you know, there’s so many things to call out about Austin that are great. And one of the things that I want to say is that Austin is a classic blue dot city in the middle of a red state. And the countercultural feeling is really strong, and the queer community in particular is just so vibrant and so really holding their own. And, you know, a few years ago, people were lamenting the fact that a lot of cities don’t have queer neighborhoods the way that they used to, because queerness has become—or at least 10 years ago people were saying this, they had become sort of normalized to the extent that …

Doug: Well, queer neighborhoods get gentrified quickly in a lot of places.

Sarah: Well—and also, you don’t need to live in a queer neighborhood to live a queer life safely anymore—or at least that has been true in many parts of the United States. Austin really still has that feeling, not just with the queer neighborhood, but with countercultural people in general that, like, we have to hold this place, we have to defend our right, as they say, keep Austin weird. But it’s more than that. It’s like we have to defend our right to freedom inside a state that is extremely against a lot of the freedoms that we’re talking about here. And in a way, it reminded me of being in West Berlin during the Soviet period. To a much lesser degree, but it had that same sort of defiant air to it. And we were in …

Doug: West Berlin if the Berlin Wall was a 12-lane highway that they’re gonna—and you can freely go underneath it if you choose.

Sarah: [laughs] If you choose. Exactly. So that was really interesting. And we were in this dive bar the last night we were there. We had been doing a little book talk at this wonderful place called The Little Gay Shop where Urban Austin Reads has been having some of its events. And there was a bar next door, and they had a big rainbow flag that said on it, “Y’all Means All.” And it was just so beautiful. Like, it’s just such a great way of reminding ourselves that a state like Texas is filled with people who are fighting the good fight, who believe in all the same things that “coastal elites” are fighting for: the freedom for self determination, the freedom to be ourselves without fear, and the freedom to live fulfilled lives. And so, like, I just was really, really moved by that. The Little Gay Shop had a holiday market, and I went to that holiday market and there was a drag queen story hour. And, you know—and it’s like you hear about these when you’re in New York and you’re like, “Oh, that’s nice that they’re doing that,” but being there and seeing a wonderful drag queen doing a story hour at this event, it just—you really felt why that’s important and why it’s something that we need to fight for.

Doug: I will say about the highway widening is that yeah, I loved Austin. Like I said, the Hyde Park neighborhood was beautiful and the people there are just awesome, the food and all the rest. I’ve never been to a city where I actually have seen a highway widening in progress through a city. I’ve seen highway widenings in the countryside or in less-populated cities. It was like being transported back to the 1950s and the 1960s, and seeing, like, neighborhoods being demolished. And it is pretty striking to see lots with signs, you know, of property that has been eminent domained by the state where you’re not allowed to go. And there clearly was a business there, and there are abandoned buildings or just lots that have already been wiped out by the incoming highway. And that was pretty scary and weird to see. I’ve never experienced—it was like watching a bad slice of history happen right in front of your eyes.

Sarah: Yeah. The other thing that I want to shout out is the transit in Austin is actually really good. We’ll say what we each did on our weekend off in a second, but I stayed in the farther eastern part of Austin and used a bus to get back and forth to that spot. And it was great. Like, it really worked, it really came when it said it was going to. So nice bus service in Austin, really appreciated that. And also, we can’t stop talking about Austin before we mention Book People Bookstore, who is the bookseller that was our partner there, which apparently is the third-largest bookstore in the United States.

Doug: Yeah. It’s Powell’s in Portland, the Strand Bookstore here in New York, and Book People in Austin. It was awesome.

Sarah: Yeah, and it’s a really great store. Really tremendous. And so yeah, so there were so many good things about Austin. I honestly—if we are doing “fuck, marry, kill,” definitely fuck Austin.

Doug: [laughs]

Sarah: It’s a sexy town.

Doug: Sorry, kids.

Sarah: Sorry.

Doug: It is a sexy town. Yeah. Despite starting off on a negative point about Austin, I will say I just loved it. It was great.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Okay. So we did have this weird little period between Austin and Houston. You stayed in Austin. I went to San Antonio to meet up with friends and run the San Antonio marathon. And speaking of “fuck, marry, kill,” I don’t know where I stand, but somewhere between fuck and marry.

Sarah: [laughs] Okay.

Doug: The downtown of San Antonio is just awesome. It’s got so many great historical bones. Now I will say I took the bus from Austin to San Antonio. The bus showed up 36 minutes late. It’s 81 miles. It should take an hour and a half to get there, tops. It took almost three hours from arriving at the station to arriving in San Antonio. So give me a train, please. I just want trains.

Sarah: Come on, man.

Doug: I know you all do, too. But got dropped off right in the middle of San Antonio. And it’s a great city. Of course, the Riverwalk is a really good attraction that is like a magnet that brings people downtown. And not every city is lucky enough to have that. But the bones of that city—and there are plenty of parking garages and surface parking lots, but the bones of the city are so great. The marathon was actually a great way to see so much of the city, and they did such a good job, the organizers of this race, of showing off the best of that city. We ran through the downtown, of course, but the King William neighborhood, which is a historic, beautiful neighborhood. They took us through—this will tell you how hilly the marathon was. I think it was, like, Alamo Heights, Olmos Hills and, like, all—every neighborhood had something like “Heights” or “Hills” in the name. But it was incredible. And the marathon had mariachi singers and dancers, and just all of this great cross-cultural stuff that makes San Antonio—and I would argue the country—great. I really loved it. Tiny little bike lane network from what I could see. Not a whole lot of great protected infrastructure. Very good bicycle share system from what I saw. That was great. And in the downtown and to get to King William and some other places? Very walkable. Not a very big city, but it was great. I really liked it a lot. Really great trail system as well, because you could take these trails up to and past a lot of historic missions. So that was cool. I went by one. Of course, I walked by the Alamo and went on a tour there. They’re pedestrianizing the whole Alamo Plaza. Like, they’re doing a better job pedestrianizing the area around their biggest historic landmark and tourist attraction than New York City does in Times Square and Broadway. It’s really impressive to see. So I really liked San Antonio, and also the people were really friendly, so it was great.

Sarah: Yeah, I’m sorry I missed that. I’ve been to San Antonio in the past, and it’s a great, great town and a lot of really cool things happening there. And they have a lot of good stuff going on.

Doug: And I saw Pee Wee’s bike at the Alamo, so War on Cars related and just fandom-related.

Sarah: Okay, that’s perfect.

Doug: Yes.

Sarah: While you were doing that, I had a little glamping experience, where I stayed in East Austin and these folks had a little camper in their backyard that I rented. And what was great about that was it really got me out into a far neighborhood that I never would have seen otherwise. Very quiet, beautiful trail network along a creek there, and went for a great run. And it just kind of exemplified the DIY spirit of Austin, which is something very strong. We also went to a DIY gallery in the garage of some folks, friends of the show.

Doug: Yeah, we saw a bike-themed exhibit there, too. That was called the Good Luck, Have Fun Gallery. And it’s operated out of this couple’s garage.

Sarah: Yeah, they just set up a gallery in their garage and do events there. And, you know, I think that really exemplifies this wonderful DIY spirit of Austin. And then I got on a bus and went to Houston from Austin. And that actually was a completely seamless, on time bus ride that, you know, you go through the sort of the outskirts of Austin. You can see where there’s a lot of ranch land that’s being bought up and that’s gonna be subdivided and suburban sprawl as you go out. Then you go kind of through this big state park area that’s really beautiful and hilly. And then you kind of start approaching Houston. And really you feel Houston from 40 miles away. You know, it’s coming, and the freeway just starts getting wider and wider and wider and wider. And then you reach the Katy Interchange on I10, which is this famous highway interchange. And it’s literally—I have to admit, it’s kind of majestic. It sort of is like a cathedral of freeways, and it’s beyond anything that I’ve seen anywhere else, including Los Angeles. It’s just this huge web of freeways at, like, all different levels that’s kind of like sucking you into Houston.

Doug: The Egyptians had the pyramids and we have the freeway interchanges.

Sarah: Exactly. Like, that was what it felt like. And so—yeah, and that was my entry to Houston. And I feel like it was actually a really, really appropriate way to enter Houston. And now we’re gonna start talking about Houston.

Doug: So I flew from San Antonio to Houston, and I’m ashamed to admit it, but it was just the easiest, cheapest way, because I just didn’t wanna deal with the bus again, because I didn’t have a great experience on the bus. And you get into the Houston airport, and you get in a car and you go down the highway as you’re approaching the city. I have never seen more ads for personal injury attorneys, more billboards for “Injured in a car wreck?”, and almost nothing else. Like, barely any fast food billboards or other things. It was almost all, like, pictures of trucks ramming into a car, lawyers, like, you know, in their suits saying, like, “Injured? Call us! We’ll get you a million dollars.” So, you know, as we said in our show there, that’s a sign you might have a traffic violence problem in your city.

Sarah: Yeah, for sure. And …

Doug: A literal sign.

Sarah: Yes, a literal sign. Yeah. So Houston is tough. I mean, I think that we need to just be very real about the fact that Houston is dealing with probably the toughest challenges that you could face in the United States of America, which is probably the toughest country for this kind of advocacy work that there is. So hats off to the advocacy community in Houston. And we’re gonna get into that in a second, but I just want to say what I did the night before Doug got there was I had known that Houston—I had never been to Houston before, but I had heard that there’s a huge Vietnamese community there and that there’s great Vietnamese food. I love Vietnamese food, so I looked up what’s, you know, some Vietnamese food near my hotel downtown. And most of the Vietnamese community is now in a farther-flung place that’s impossible to reach by transit, but there was this one famous restaurant, Huynh’s, that is downtown. Guess what is happening to Huynh’s?

Doug: They’re putting in high speed rail and transit and a bike share station out front?

Sarah: No, it’s been eminent domained for widening the freeway, of course. So the whole former “Chinatown,” quote-unquote area of Houston is part of this massive eminent domain freeway-widening scheme that TxDOT, the Texas Department of Transportation, has got on the table for Houston. And so I went to this incredibly nice Vietnamese restaurant, had an incredible meal, fantastic people working there, owning it, and tons of people eating there, including several members of the Houston Police Department. And it just was—it was really kind of gutting to hear one of the young women who’s a member of the family that owns the place talking about, like, “Oh, we think we’re gonna be able to stay through the World Cup next year because they’re not gonna be tearing it down before then.” And just as you said before, like, making these mistakes that we made in the ’60s and ’70s, just doing it all over again. Eleven hundred homes, three hundred businesses, and guess what? Almost all in minority neighborhoods. Have you heard this story before? I mean, come on, man! How can we be doing this again?

Doug: Well, like I said, the highway industrial complex knows no bounds. We should say some good things about Houston.

Sarah: Plenty.

Doug: Yeah. And there’s a lot of good things to say. First of all, of course, the advocacy community there is just incredible, and especially because they’re working under such tremendous odds. And the people could not have been nicer.

Sarah: Oh my God.

Doug: The most enthusiastic advocates, I think, of any city—at least outwardly enthusiastic. You know, I don’t want to, like, separate out all these different communities, but they all have their special flavor, I should say. Hats off to Joe Cutrufo, old friend who was here in New York working for Transportation Alternatives, who now runs Bike Houston. He’s just leading an incredible group of people down there. We were treated so nicely by the board, by the volunteers. We went on a really great about 15-mile bike ride using the Bayou Trail network, which is really impressive. I mean, it goes under some buildings. They’ve carved out some space along the water that gets you pretty deep into Houston. And we did see some really nice neighborhoods. The Rothko Museum back there was really beautiful. That whole area, lovely old oak trees, like some really beautiful historic neighborhoods. It was really nice to see more than just the downtown.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Which, you know, downtown Houston is tough. Like, they’ve got these tunnels in the same way that Minneapolis has the Skyway system to deal with the cold, they have it in Houston to deal with the heat. And they’re cool, but they suck the life out of the street. And we went for lunch in one of these tunnel areas that’s connected to different buildings. And it was nice. We had a really lovely lunch. But you look around and you think, okay, all of these people look the same because they’re all working for the same types of companies, if not the same company occupying one building. And what happens, of course, in Houston, is people drive, they park their car in their office building garage, they go up to their office, they sit at their desk or in their conference rooms. Lunchtime, they go down to the basement, to the tunnel system. They eat there with people who are like them. Then they go back up and work, and then they go back down to the garage, and then they go home. And so there isn’t a whole lot of street life outside, even though the weather while we were there was perfect. I realize it’s not year round. So that was something I would—you know, they need to fix the street life however they can. They are working on it. Main Street, where the light rail runs, or part of the light rail, they are pedestrianizing it.

Sarah: Yeah. And that project was ongoing. We actually saw workers putting down the paving stones and making this beautifully designed pedestrian area that will be opening up very soon. And that’s really radical in a town like Houston, to be going all in on pedestrianizing this Main Street area. That gave me a lot of hope.

Doug: Yeah. What I was told by Joe and other advocates was that the mayor, John Whitmire, who sucks, let’s be frank.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: He sucks. He’s ripping—we saw where he was ripping out a bike lane on Austin Street, and spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to do so. What I was told about the Main Street project is that the mayor can kind of see that a downtown should be a destination. So you’ll drive your car, park in a nearby garage, and then you’ll walk on this pedestrianized Main Street, go to dinner, go to a bar, whatever. Then you’ll get back in your car and you’ll go home. He doesn’t really see active transportation and pedestrian-friendly spaces as just good for neighborhoods. He sees it as a sort of business and tourist thing, which is a mindset that is not unique to the mayor of Houston, but is certainly a problem specifically there, because it means they’re not getting good stuff elsewhere under him.

Sarah: Yeah. And I will say that that fits in with a little bit of a theme of Houston, which was that we saw—there was destruction happening without necessarily positive repair happening. Like, we saw this bike lane that’s being ripped out. It’s sort of half ripped out now. There’s no conviction about it. It’s not like they’re putting something better in that, you know, that’s gonna be different and add something to that neighborhood. They’re just putting back a traffic lane, but they can’t even seem to get it together to do that efficiently. We saw also some rainbow crosswalks in the Montrose neighborhood that had been destroyed because of federal policy.

Doug: Because Sean Duffy. He can go fuck himself.

Sarah: Yeah. And that was really kind of heartbreaking to see a little strip of rainbow, where it used to be. That’s a neighborhood that has a lot of queer people in it. And yeah, this eminent domain, the blight that’s caused by these constant highway widenings. It’s like people told us that one of the jokes about Houston is it’s gonna be a great city once you finish building it. I guess that’s sort of a common thing to say about Houston, but okay, that’s true of all cities. I mean, New York is always being renewed and recreated every second, but this seems like there’s just a lot of blight and destruction that happens, and then it’s just replaced by freeways and car infrastructure, and nothing additive happens. I mean, aside from this great trail network, and again, the advocates that we met, Molly Cook, the state senator who appeared with us.

Doug: Awesome. I want to say about Molly Cook, by the way, she might be the only elected official to get on stage with The War on Cars and say, “Fuck cars.”

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: At one point she did. And she is just of that generation of elected official that, like, really just wants to lay it out there of, like, what the stakes are, what the problems are and what the solutions are. She was really impressive.

Sarah: She got into being concerned about street advocacy because she’s an ER nurse, so she has seen …

Doug: Some shit. Yeah.

Sarah: … what cars do to people’s bodies. And she was really passionate about the idea that when she was in the ER, or when she is in the ER and seeing not just the injuries that cars cause, but the populations of people who live in our cities who are marginalized and live in terrible conditions because our downtowns are such a mess. And she just felt like for her, she was putting a Band-Aid on things as a nurse every day that she wanted to change systemically. And so kudos to her. Keep your eye on Molly Cook down in Texas, because she’s somebody who’s going places.

Doug: Yeah, we need more nurses running for elected office and fewer car dealers and attorneys.

Sarah: Yeah. So I would say, like, I overall found Houston incredibly energizing and exciting, because they do have a lot of good stuff going on. They’ve got a lot of good bike trails, they’ve got some really good transit options as well.

Doug: The downtown bike network, I will say, where they had protected bike infrastructure, it was really good. Another theme of this part of the tour was that—and this was true in Seattle and other places as well, was, you know, as New Yorkers, we’re just still dealing with so much paint and plastic for our protected bike lanes, but other cities are actually building concrete separation, which I know, we have some folks from New York City DOT who listen, and there are exceptions in the city to this, but we don’t have a whole lot of concrete-separated bike lanes. It’s like a technology that seems to be beyond the reach of our city. I don’t know why. Houston had some really impressive protected, wide protected bicycle lanes. Also, I will say give me an urban, walkable downtown ballpark any day of the week. You know, going over to where the Astros play and just being able to walk there from downtown was great. It’s really cool.

Sarah: They had bollards that were baseballs.

Doug: Yes.

Sarah: I really liked that.

Doug: Yes.

Sarah: And again, the light rail, I really appreciate it. We used it quite a lot, and it was very practical. And unlike light rail systems in a few other cities, like, you can actually just show up on the platform.

Doug: Yeah, the headways were really decent.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Yeah. Pretty good. Even late at night.

Sarah: So Houston, keep up the good fight. You’re doing great, and we love you.

Doug: Yeah. Okay, so then we made our return visit to Denver. We had not been to Denver since February of 2020.

Sarah: Remember that time?

Doug: I don’t. I don’t remember anything from before March 17 or so of 2020. Denver? Man, talk about “fuck, marry, kill,” I would—I would anything but kill. I would be in all kinds of relationships with Denver.

Sarah: Somebody said to me, she’s like, “You better say you’re gonna marry Denver.” [laughs]

Doug: Yeah. So Denver, look, I’ll say about Denver, let’s get the bad stuff out of the way, because I think that’s important. Like, the downtown, it has its challenges. Like, especially the sort of more financial oriented part of downtown, it’s pretty dead. That’s a problem. But the LoDo, Lower Downtown district closer to Union Station, incredible bones. Maybe the best bones of any city Denver size. You know, old warehouses that are condos. They fixed up the 16th Street Mall. We were told they no longer call it the mall, they just call it 16th Street, because it used to be a symbol of a failure of pedestrianization because nobody was using it. It was really dead. And they have made it so beautiful. Some of the best placemaking we experienced in any city. Larimer Street, which was pedestrianized. The light game there, you know, they have all these beautiful lights. You know, it’s getting dark early because it’s winter, and you just felt like everywhere you looked, there was something beckoning you to, like, walk down a street, because there were lights in the trees are strung across the street to give it a sense of place. Almost like a roof to the outdoor living room some of these places were. So that was really great.

Doug: And then the cool thing about Denver that I really appreciated is they have this kind of offset diamond grid in the downtown that doesn’t match up with the surrounding neighborhoods. And that can be confusing for some people, but what I liked about it is, were the terminating vistas. So you would look down one street, and there’s a mountain. Beautiful. You’d look down another street, and there’s a bridge, a pedestrian bridge. You’d look down another street, and there was, like, a church. And it just created a really beautiful walking environment. As a Disney fan, I would compare it to Main Street, USA with Cinderella’s castle at the end, because you could see something worth walking to at the end of your view. And I loved walking around downtown Denver. It was really easy to walk around.

Sarah: Yeah. The first night we were there, I set out and just started following what seemed to be a path that the city was showing me in various ways. There’s great wayfinding signage.

Doug: Yeah, I want to get to that in a moment. We’ll talk about that.

Sarah: Yeah. But then there was a pedestrian—you know, I could see that next to Union Station, there was a pedestrian bridge. And it sort of naturally called me to go up those stairs. And then oh, here’s a vista of a park, and there’s another path that goes down these stairs, and there’s another bridge beyond that. And I found myself in the middle of a park on the banks of the South Platte River that was just so beautiful. And it was sunset, and there were people gathering on the hilltop to watch the sunset. And the city was telling me how to use it. And this is something that we were thinking a lot about as we were on the road is that people in North America, a lot of them, sadly, have never had the experience of being in a city and really using a city, and so they don’t know how to do that. They just haven’t had that experience using public transit, walking around. They don’t know how to do it. And I feel like Denver was a city that was telling you every step of the way, here’s how to use this space. Here’s what you can do here. Here’s the possibilities. Don’t you want to come over here? And kind of inviting you into a relationship with the city? It was very romantic, and it’s great.

Doug: The seesaws in front of Union Station?

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: That was really cool. Like I said, the placemaking was really great. Yeah, on the theme of using the city, I think one of the things that we really noticed—and Denver also has a problem with parking podiums and too many surface lots. I think there was one picture in our slideshow that I called the turducken of parking. It was like street parking, surface lot and parking garage and podium in the background. Cities are building a lot of housing—not as much as we need, but you did see new condos and new apartment buildings everywhere. But I would walk around a bunch of cities, including Denver to an extent, and say, where are all the people? You have thousands upon thousands of apartments within view and very few people out on the street. And I think part of the problem is that we’re building so much parking in so many of these cities, and we can sort of get into why that—especially in Denver, why, you know, there’s so much parking. But what happens is you go home from your job, sort of like we were talking about with Houston, and you have the car easily available to you. And there isn’t ground floor retail in a lot of these developments. So what do you do? You get in the car and you go to the big Whole Foods or the Target or whatever, and then you drive back. And there isn’t a culture of just going to buy one bag of groceries and walking home and just oh, what do we want for dinner tonight? I don’t know, walk down to the corner market and get lettuce and stuff to make salad and pasta or whatever.

Doug: So the street life really needs to be improved. And I think so many of these new developments that we’re seeing around the country are not cultivating city life, they’re approximating suburban life in a city space. And so I think that’s something I would want city planners to change. Like, first of all, of course, parking maximums but, like, how does the building meet the ground? What is there on the ground? Small shops, markets, a place to get a pair of keys copied, a place to get shoes repaired. Like, none of that seemed to exist in a lot of the newer developments. So that’s something I would have changed. Denver has a unique issue in that half of the reason to live in Denver is so you can access nature and the outdoors. So, you know, people leave on the weekends and they get in their cars and they go skiing and hiking and whatever. So I don’t know how you crack that problem, because people want parking spaces with their developments, but there’s gotta be some way to increase the street life for when people are at home.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, I would just point to Vancouver, because Vancouver …

Doug: They’re doing it right.

Sarah: Same thing. A lot of the reason to be there is those mountains and the skiing and the blah, blah, blah. Right? Very similar in some ways, but look at the way the buildings meet the street. We got that great tour from Brent Toderian, who really explained how that was done. And, you know, they do have food stores and pharmacies. And that’s planned, that’s not coincidence. And so I think that stuff really brings the street life to Vancouver in a way that the United States of America, we’re still seeming to struggle with that. I will say that in Austin, some of the newer developments, it had a lot of entertainment stuff and restaurants and that kind of thing. It didn’t have as much of that really practical if you need to do your errands in a 15-minute walk. Not quite sure why that’s so hard for us to understand.

Doug: Yeah. Yeah. Also Denver, another walkable, downtown urban ballpark.

Sarah: Yes.

Doug: The Rockies suck, but the ballpark is beautiful.

Sarah: Yeah. Ball Arena is also within walking distance.

Doug: Yeah. Let’s talk about the wayfinding. I made a goal of doing a 10k run in every city we went to. And there were two cities on both legs of the tour where I did not run, and those were Houston on this leg and Los Angeles on the last leg. What do those cities have in common? They are so overdeveloped for cars. We were staying in LA, in the downtown, and I thought about going for a run and I looked around. I’m like, “Ugh, I gotta go under a freeway. There isn’t really like a big uninterrupted stretch of running available to me from where we’re staying.” So I didn’t run there. Houston, I didn’t run there despite the good trail system, because I couldn’t intuitively figure out from where we were staying—and Sarah, you said you had this problem, too, how to access the trails. There were no signs from where we were that I could see. Denver, however—and this is a really good example of how building a city for cyclists is good for everybody—walked out of the hotel, went a block or two and saw this adorable sign with a bear on a bicycle that said, like, Denver Bikeway, that showed me different destinations to both the Cherry Creek Trail and then other destinations around the city and the mileage.

Doug: And while that was designed for cyclists, I was like, okay, I now know that the Cherry Creek Trail is a quarter mile away from where I’m standing. And I go that way, I follow the bike lane. And I got to the trail, and the trail was great. And so I ran there. So little lesson learned. You know, I was joking earlier about what urbanists call the popsicle test, which is like, the mark of a good city is can a kid walk somewhere, get a popsicle and walk home before it melts? That’s a sign you have a safe, good, well-designed city. I would do the podcast host marathon training test, which is can a podcast host from New York drop himself in the middle of your city and get a good 10k run in? And if he can’t, let’s talk.

Sarah: Yeah, I think that’s a great metric. So then we took a little side trip from Denver out to the small, but definitely punching above its weight in the bike department, city of Boulder, Colorado.

Doug: Beautiful.

Sarah: So beautiful. And we were able to reach it on an excellent, excellent bus service called the Flatiron Flyer. And that bus runs very regularly and reliably out of Union Station.

Doug: I think it was every half hour.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Yeah, not bad.

Sarah: Yeah. And takes about an hour to get out there, and I think there’s an express that goes even more quickly. And yeah, then we went out to Boulder and were hosted by the people of Community Cycles. And that was a really fun experience.

Doug: And shout out to Martha Roskowski, longtime advocate in this space and just an incredible human being who helped us, picked us up. I got a nice ride on the back of her Tern because we had to go get our bicycles from Community Cycles. So that was a really fun way to be picked up. Yeah, we got to explore the trail system, which again, was very intuitive. The wayfinding there was really great. It just felt like no matter where you were, you saw a sign for access to the trail, which was really great. Even along some very stroad-y highway-like infrastructure, there was space for bikes. By the university campus, for example, there’s a big road, big basically highway dividing one part of the campus from the other, and we were able to get across via trails. We did learn about the $18-million bike underpass in that place. You know, if you got $18 million to spend on bike infrastructure, spread it around maybe? But it was beautiful. It was really nice.

Sarah: And they have their issues there. They’ve been trying to do some four-to-three lane conversions to get better bike access on some of the routes that are necessary to actually get around the city for transportation that are not addressed by the trail system, because the trail system really follows the drainage system of the creeks there and sometimes you want to go in the other direction. And there has been some backlash and fighting about those narrowings of traffic lanes, because in part, there’s some serious concerns about evacuation from wildfires, because this is a community that’s under threat from climate change in a number of ways: flooding and wildfire.

Doug: I think actually as we record this episode, they’re facing something like 80-mile an hour winds and the risk of fire because it has been pretty dry there.

Sarah: Yeah, and it was similar when we were there, there were very high winds. So they’ve got some really special challenges, but there’s a very high level of infrastructure there to build on, and so I feel like Boulder is a place where the conversation is happening at a higher level.

Doug: The really interesting thing about Boulder is they have this green belt around it, and they have a real problem there. They have height limits, they have all kinds of stuff blocking their ability to build more housing. The housing is incredibly expensive there, the most expensive of any city that we visited on this tour. And Boulder is a city of not more than 110,000 people, but they have 65,000 in-commuters, 65,000 people driving cars into the city. And they can’t really build enough to accommodate the people who want to live there, and so it’s sort of an unintended consequence where they’ve preserved this beautiful city, this beautiful downtown, and they have this green belt around it to preserve the nature and the beauty, but beyond that is just Colorado sprawl as far as the eye can see. And that’s a real problem.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, I sort of said that it’s almost like if Greenwich Village were a city. I mean, a lot of people look at the preservation efforts that have happened in Greenwich Village, which was, of course, Jane Jacobs’s home neighborhood, and said, like, this is bad because we’re preserving these—we’re preserving it as if it were a museum of a city. And it’s not a museum. And then stuff around it gets messed up, because you can’t do anything there. Boulder is kind of that on a city-level scale in a way. And the sprawl development that we drove through—which, you know, it seems pretty clear that that’s gonna become a continuous megalopolis at one point—it’s tough to see because there’s a lot of bad development out there, there’s a lot of really sterile development out there. And we didn’t get out into those communities. I understand that some of them are trying to create, like, actual walkable …

Doug: Yeah, there are trails along the highway.

Sarah: And walkable downtown.

Doug: Yes.

Sarah: People are trying to build, and all of that. But it really kind of calls into question this balance between preservation of both urban fabric and nature and the need for more housing. What type of housing is gonna be built? And these are all obviously really complex questions that I think that whole Denver-Boulder corridor really kind of throws that all into relief.

Doug: We’re asked at a couple of cities about our thoughts on the abundance movement. And I don’t want to get too into it here. Maybe we’ll do an episode. But I looked around at some of the places where we were. I’m like, you know, we are building a lot of housing in some places. It’s just crap.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: You know, it’s sprawl. It’s not sustainable. It’s not good for our souls. So, like, we can build stuff, just not in the right places and the right kind of things.

Sarah: Yeah. But just saying, like, take away regulation and throw a lot of money at building stuff, no, that’s not …

Doug: It’s not gonna be the solution. I will say Boulder was—yeah, it was just beautiful. It was really nice. Probably a good segue into things that people gave us.

Sarah: Oh, yeah.

Doug: So shout out to Chuck. I just want to name drop Chuck for a second—you know who you are. We showed up in Boulder, and Chuck hands us both Burt’s Bees lip balm.

Sarah: [laughs] Yes.

Doug: And at first I was confused, because I was like, isn’t that from, like, Maine or something? Maybe I’m wrong. He’s giving us a local gift. And then I realized it’s so dry there that he was like, “You’re gonna want this.” And it was so thoughtful of him. So thank you, Chuck.

Sarah: Yeah, it was just really lovely. I felt really …

Doug: People are great.

Sarah: … cared for, you know? I felt, like, really supported and, like, people wanted us to know how much they cared about us coming and they wanted us to be comfortable. Okay, so …

Doug: Other cool things that people gave us?

Sarah: Other cool things that people gave us. I just have to shout out, Bonnie.

Doug: Bonnie in Houston.

Sarah: Bonnie in Houston.

Doug: One of the coolest people I’ve ever met.

Sarah: First of all, it’s just like, boy, what energy Bonnie brings to everything. She is just a ray of sunshine in the world.

Doug: Also a nurse. So maybe these things are related.

Sarah: Also a nurse. Bonnie just was a fun person to be around. But she had bought out the entire stock of a local art supply store. Very—she was very firm that she had not got …

Doug: Very civic minded.

Sarah: Very civic minded. She went to her local art supply store, bought their entire stock of beads, and made dozens of friendship bracelets that had messages that were taken from Life after Cars.

Doug: I have my “Cars Ruin Childhood” friendship bracelet at home. I should put it on for the next show.

Sarah: Yeah, I have two. I have “Cars Killed the Coho Salmon,” which …

Doug: That’s a deep cut.

Sarah: That’s a fact. And “Cars Cause ED.” That’s erectile dysfunction, for those of you who don’t know what that means. Also makes an appearance in the book. Thank you, Bonnie, for reading carefully.

Doug: You’re not gonna see those at a Taylor Swift concert, but thank you, Bonnie.

Sarah: [laughs]

Doug: Those were amazing. Anything else?

Sarah: Oh, yeah. So we got—in Portland, we got some really cool zipper pulls that were made of used bicycle tires.

Doug: Yes.

Sarah: And also bookmarks that had little bicycles dangling off the end of them, also made out of used bicycle tires.

Doug: And then a big shout out to Becky Hawkins, who is on Instagram as @Becky_and_shoulder_angel—underscore between those words. A cartoonist, an artist who made a comic for us based on an idea of, like, a highway wreck and what that means that, like, someone has died. And, you know, not your normal subject necessarily for, like, a ha ha comic, but just a beautifully drawn piece of art. We’re gonna have to fight over who gets to keep it.

Sarah: Well, we’ll just have to have, you know …

Doug: Up your Patreon contribution so we can afford an office.

Sarah: Yes, we need an office. But then in Providence, we had a gentleman who gave us some beautiful postcards of walking maps of Providence and the area that he’s done that show how you can access nature and quiet space in Providence without a car. And they’re beautifully hand drawn, hand colored.

Doug: I mailed two to my kids.

Sarah: Yeah. That was really moving. We got a lot of t-shirts. We got a lot of trucker hats and …

Doug: Stickers. Many stickers traded hands.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: In both directions.

Sarah: Yeah. So, you know, it’s just been really moving.

Doug: People are awesome.

Sarah: Oh, yeah. I know a guy—I can’t—I think it was on the first leg of the trip, gave us those feather-shaped reflecting things that you can put on your backpack or whatever to make you more visible. Yeah, it’s just sort of really moving seeing what people have brought to us. And then also just huge thanks to everybody who’s just brought their story to the book signing line, and taken the couple minutes to tell us something, to talk to us about what your concerns are, what your excitement is. These things mean just a tremendous amount to us personally. And, you know, I can’t say enough about how humbled I am by the experience of meeting somebody like Bonnie, who has read the words that we’ve written so carefully, and then made something of her own from that. Like, that, to me, is exactly what we hoped would happen with this book. And it just has moved me profoundly.

Doug: Yeah, it was very humbling to be out there in front of all these crowds and to get to talk to everybody. And I am, at heart, an advocate. That is who I am. That’s how I got started in all of this. And to meet people working under tremendous odds who care about their city, who love their city, but who recognize the ways in which it can be better—whether that’s Providence or Austin or Denver or Houston or any place we’ve been to—is just remarkable. It’s also—it’s so great in a weird way, to see that everybody’s struggles are the same. I was saying to people in a few cities, we’ve all been doing this a long time. You know, you and I have been doing this for a long time, and a lot of the people we know have been doing this for a long time. I’ve never heard a new argument against bike lanes. It’s all the same stuff. “Oh, what about emergency response? What about old people? What about traffic?” Et cetera. “Nobody’s gonna use the bike lane,” for example.

Doug: But every year that I do this, every week that I do this, I hear new arguments for it. It keeps expanding. The tent keeps getting bigger, and the people trying to solve these problems are just more diverse, more interesting than they’ve ever been. And it’s so cool and heartening, especially now when things are so tough, to meet people who are saying, “I can’t fix every problem in the world, but I can fix this.” And that’s really inspiring. So thank you to everybody who hosted us, every advocacy organization, every person who came to a show, every person who—we would just show up in a town and, like, 10 or 15 people would show us around—Rob Toftness in Denver, for example—and a whole crew of people who just would show up. I mean, we had, like, how many people on that bike ride in Houston?

Sarah: Like, 12 or 15? Yeah.

Doug: And they just were like, “Hey, look at this. Look how cool this is.” Or, “Look how shitty this is.” And they would just give us the honest truth about their cities. And that is a gift. It was amazing. We felt so taken care of. So thank you.

Sarah: Shout out to Euphree Bikes also. Really liked …

Doug: Oh, in Houston.

Sarah: In Houston, we rode great bicycles. The company is based in Houston. So I gotta talk about two things that are negative, and then we’re gonna end with something that’s kind of funny. So stick with us through the negative. We can’t not say—and I know we talked about it the last time, too—the crisis of people who are living unhoused in this country.

Doug: Shameful.

Sarah: It’s shameful. And this is what you see in the downtowns of so many of America’s great cities. Instead of seeing vibrant street life and businesses that are thriving, you see a lot of people who are in distress, who are suffering from a combination of being unhoused, of mental health issues, of addiction issues, all of the above. And that is a real thing that I think in New York, because we do have such a vibrant street life, because we do have so many people who are not suffering from those issues who are on the street all the time, that even though we do have those problems here in New York, they’re not nearly as visible. In Denver for instance, I walked home from our event on 17th Street instead of 16th Street. I did not follow the beckoning lights, which I should have. I was like, “Oh, the hotel’s on 17th Street. I’ll just walk down 17th Street.” And it was really disturbing. And I wasn’t scared because the people who were there were not doing anything except for trying to mind their own business and survive. But I saw a guy huddled over an open fire with a windscreen around him at, you know, ten o’clock at night in downtown Denver. It looked like something Walker Evans would have photographed. I mean, this is just unacceptable, especially because these cities that we went to—and I’m especially thinking of Houston in this regard—are just dripping with money.

Doug: Well, that’s something we talked about last time. You know, I think about Houston with all of this oil money and fossil fuel money, Austin, huge tech town now. You know, there’s no excuse for this level of despair and distress among our fellow human beings when there’s so much money to take care of them if only we would tax the right people and deploy services in an efficient way. And Denver, with some really high real estate prices and a generally good quality of life for most of its residents, there’s no excuse in this country for why this is happening other than a lack of caring from the people who have the power to do something about it. And yeah, like you said, these people who are living on the streets, they don’t want any trouble. Most of them are not gonna harm you, even if they are suffering from some serious mental health issues. But it creates this death spiral in your downtown where people do feel uncomfortable.

Doug: And man, it would just be so easy to solve. Like, we can do it. And I’m not like a housing conspiracist of, like, there’s all these empty homes and just put them there. I’m talking about, like, we could build real supportive housing to get these people the services and the help that they need. Because the number one thing most of these people need first is a roof over their heads where they know they can just be safe, and then get the support that they need, hopefully at that place or nearby facilities. So I just keep coming back to this idea. Everywhere I looked I was like, this is fucking unacceptable in a country as wealthy as ours.

Sarah: Yeah, we get that it’s not easy to solve in the sense that each human being is a very complex set of challenges, and yet if we put half of the resources that we put into widening a highway or into building an app.

Doug: Or ripping out a bike lane in Houston.

Sarah: Right. Or building apps that just are rent-seeking mechanisms to monetize stuff that everybody has always done forever and just give somebody else a cut of it. If we spend half of the time and resources that we spend on those things instead on showing dignity and care for our fellow residents, then I think we would be able to solve the problem. It may not be easy, but we’ve got a lot of resources. It’s a very wealthy country with a lot of brain power. And also, I just want to say, related, the transit funding crisis is also something that’s unacceptable. We saw that in every city that we went to. There are a lot of great advocates out there fighting for transit. We’re gonna keep covering transit, because you cannot have the kinds of cities that we aspire to on this show without robust transit systems. And that, I think, is going to be—saving transit in the United States of America is gonna be a theme that we’re really gonna be looking at over the next several months. And we saw it everywhere we were. Save RIPTA, Save SEPTA.

Doug: Save them all.

Sarah: Save them all. Okay, so quickly …

Doug: [laughs] There was a poetic end to this leg of the tour. So we finished up in Boulder on Saturday, and we had a luxurious departure time from Denver of around 11:00 am, so we didn’t have to wake up so early and rush out. And we took off, and things were looking great. We were all set to go home. I was excited to come home for the first night of Hanukkah with my children.

Sarah: I was supposed to be trimming the Christmas tree that my family had gone out and bought that afternoon.

Doug: The season was merry and bright. We were all set.

Sarah: We were all set. And then somewhere over the great state of Indiana, I believe, I looked at the flight tracker. I felt the plane sort of do a slight downward motion as it does when it’s beginning its descent. And I thought, “Hmm, Indiana is awfully early to be beginning our descent into JFK.” And then I noticed that the little plane on the monitor was making the slightest of left turns and I was like, “Okay, what’s going on?” And then right at that moment, the destination flashed and it had changed. It said, “Destination Detroit.”

Doug: Yeah, so we were diverted to Detroit due to a ground stop related to wind and other weather-related issues at JFK. And so, you know, I’m sure many of you have been through the drill. We were diverted, we landed, we got hotel credits, and we stayed at the Skyline Hotel, which did not have a view of a skyline. It had a view of highways.

Sarah: And also, technically, it was not in Detroit. It was in Romulus, Michigan.

Doug: That’s where the airport is. Yeah.

Sarah: We’ve now spent the night in Romulus, Michigan. But there was a certain poetic feeling to The War on Cars‘s hosts getting sucked into the vortex of the automobile industry right at the last minute, right when we were about to get home.

Doug: Yeah. This was probably punishment for whoever hacked those VMS signs to put up “Cars Ruined Cities.” We have no idea how that happened.

Sarah: We have no idea how that happened. We were willing to pay the price, though.

Doug: Okay, that is it for this episode of The War on Cars. Thanks for everyone’s patience with our production schedule as well, because we are maybe an episode short, but we will be back on track, and we really appreciate everyone’s support.

Sarah: Yeah, we’re gonna be coming back strong in the month of January. Remember, you can support us by signing up on Patreon at Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod. 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: Thanks also to our friends at Cleverhood. You can receive 15 percent off the best rain gear for walking and cycling now through the end of December with the code BEAGIVER at Cleverhood.com/thewaroncars.

Sarah: The War on Cars is produced with support from the Helen and William Mazer Foundation.

Doug: This episode was edited by Samantha Gattsek. It was recorded by Josh Wilcox at the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio.

Sarah: Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear. Transcripts are by Russell Gragg. Our logo is by Dani Finkel. I’m Sarah Goodyear.

Doug: I’m Doug Gordon. And this is The War on Cars.