EXTRA: Cars as a Virus with Hermann Knoflacher

Doug Gordon: Hey everyone, it’s Doug. So it’s a really busy time for The War on Cars. We are deep into the final edits of our book and we’re really excited with how it’s shaping up. We can’t wait to tell you all more information about it really soon. We promise we’ll have cover artwork, a title, everything, and you will all be the first to know.

Doug: In the meantime, we are dropping this old bonus into the feed. It’s an interview with Professor Hermann Knoflacher of the Vienna University of Technology. Professor Knoflacher is a really cool guy. He is perhaps best known for creating something called the Gehzeug or the Walkmobile, which—well, you’ll hear about it in the episode. Trust me, it’s pretty awesome.

Doug: This is the kind of bonus content you get when you become a Patreon supporter of The War on Cars. Your contributions allow us to keep the podcast going and growing, and we are truly humbled by everyone’s support. If you are not already signed up on Patreon, you can go to TheWaronCars.org, click “Support Us” and you can become a member for just $3 per month. Not only will you get access to exclusive bonus episodes like this one, but you’ll also get free stickers, a handwritten note, merch discounts, and a whole lot more. We actually have a live show coming up, and Patreon supporters will get early access to tickets, so stay tuned. We’re also working on a bunch of brand new episodes that we know you’re going to enjoy. The first of those is coming shortly. Thanks again for your support.

Doug: This is The War on Cars. I’m Doug Gordon, and welcome to a special bonus episode just for Patreon supporters. Some of you might remember this old Uber ad. It’s from 2017, and it shows people moving around the streets of Bangkok wearing giant cardboard boxes. In the ad, we see people in the cardboard boxes getting angry, bumping into each other, unable to pass each other on narrow streets, clogging highways, and getting frustrated as they search for a place to put their big boxes when they’re done with them until the entire city is overrun by giant cardboard boxes.

Doug: Plus, there’s the music choice, “The Bare Necessities,” which is the song from the Disney movie The Jungle Book, which is a really nice added touch because really, when you strip a car down to its bare necessities, its single purpose, nobody’s really happy in one. And by representing automobiles not as stylish objects of design or cutting edge technology, but as simple geometric shapes that are far bigger than the person they’re transporting, the ad does a fantastic job of demonstrating why private cars don’t work in urban settings—at least not when everyone has one.

Doug: Now obviously, Uber’s role in many cities’ congestion woes is a topic for another episode, but the idea of representing a car as a giant box that’s literally worn by a person comes from an Austrian professor named Hermann Knoflacher. Professor Knoflacher, who has a background in civil engineering and mathematics, is the head of the Institute of Transportation at the Vienna University of Technology, where he’s worked since 1975. That same year, he invented something called the Gehzeug, which translates from German to English as “Walkmobile.” It’s a wearable wooden frame meant to demonstrate the spatial inefficiency of cars. In the nearly 50 years since the Gehzeug was invented, it’s evolved into a powerful protest tool for people advocating for livable streets and sustainable cities.

Doug: Now as you can imagine, Professor Knoflacher is a very strong critic of the automobile, making him not just an engineer or a planner, but one of the world’s preeminent philosophers about the effects of cars on people and the environment. And long before COVID, he even compared the automobile to a virus—more on that coming up. At 81 years old, Professor Knoflacher is still very active in the planning world, and his observations on what cars have done to society are more relevant than ever. I was so grateful that he agreed to join The War on Cars for an interview. One note about this episode: stick with it, I promise. The first bit gets into the origins of the Gehzeug, and some of the professor’s work in Vienna early in his career. But the later parts are where we really dig into some of his more philosophical musings on the problems with cars. Trust me, you’re gonna love it. Please enjoy my conversation with Herman Knoflacher.

Doug: Professor Knoflacher, welcome to The War on Cars.

Hermann Knoflacher: Oh, thank you very much for inviting me.

Doug: So I wanted to start by talking about the Gehzeug, the Walkmobile, which you created in 1975. I think some of our listeners will be familiar with it or have seen pictures of it, but others will not be familiar with it. Could you describe it? I’d love to talk about your motivation for creating it.

Hermann Knoflacher: Well, I will start with the motivation and the idea when it comes to me. Normally I am commuting with public transport, but once in the ’70s, I had a car, and I stuck into congestion and started thinking how stupid I am here to be stuck in the congestion and breathe the terrible air around me and in my car. And then this reminds me of the first paragraph of the Austrian traffic code. And the Austrian traffic code says the street or the road—the street is a public space which can be used by everybody under the same conditions. And I thought this time, well, I’m in my vehicle, in my car, why shouldn’t I make a Gehzeug? Then I will occupy the same kind of space like the car user is doing this.”

Hermann Knoflacher: And then I went back to the Institute and made the first drawings. And these drawings I presented on slides at this time in different universities. And this slide encouraged a lot of students to build Gehzeugs, right? And then they sent me pictures from their activities. And this started, I would see the global occupation of this Gehzeug because it shows exactly what is happening, how much space we occupy. But what is interesting, if you’re going around with the Gehzeug, everybody thinks you are totally crazy. But if you use a car, everybody respects you. And the politician said, “Okay, there—we must provide more space for the automobile.” The Gehzeug goes directly into your brain. Then you recognize okay, something is wrong. And this is very interesting. So since this time the Gehzeug is in use, and it started with activities from my students from other universities, and it’s today very common, I think, globally.

Doug: And in fact, you have a great quote where I read an interview where you talk about that if you walked around with a wooden frame with four armchairs in it and just left it somewhere and expected to be given that space, people, as you said, would think you were crazy or entitled or antisocial. And yet that is exactly what we expect with a car.

Hermann Knoflacher: Yeah, this is exactly what is happening. If I leave my Gehzeug, for example, in the public space on the street, and I put four chairs into it, then no shop owner will think that some money will come out of this situation. But if the car is parking in front of his shop, he thinks, “Oh, there are rich people that are coming.”

Doug: So I want to talk about your work in the planning world. You were involved in various efforts, very early efforts to reduce the amount of private cars in Vienna. And this was long before such efforts were very common, as we see in Paris, London and other cities. What was the reaction like when you began your work?

Hermann Knoflacher: Well, I was a very young planner when the city of Vienna was building the U-Bahn, the subway. And they invited me because at this time no other planner wanted to do this, I would say it’s a killing job to pedestrianize the city center at this time. So I think politicians thought, “Okay, this is a young planner, we can use him up to make this—at this time very, very difficult and dangerous work.” And so I had the opportunity to pedestrianize the city center, and make all the traffic arrangements, traffic organization and so on, which were implemented at this time. Because the city had already planned to pedestrianize it, but nobody had the courage to do it. But finally it was a success.

Hermann Knoflacher: But this was just something which started in 1969, and the pedestrian areas were opened in ’74. But in ’72 we had a big movement against the plans to build motorways in the second ring and along the first district. At this time there was a public uprise, and I supported this uprise also, because at this time I know that the motorway in the city is crazy and it will destroy the city. So I supported it, but at this time I hadn’t the whole knowledge and the whole consequence is known as I have it today or some years later after. And the city of Vienna, this was a part of the master plan of the city of Vienna for some years. In the 1969 master plan it was still included. And since the opposition was very strong, the mayor decided in 1972 to skip this motorway. We have still some fragments of this motorway which was already built at this time. But the rest of the city is still a motorway free in this area.

Hermann Knoflacher: And so the city of Vienna had no master plan anymore at this time. And they invited—I became professor in 1975, and they invited four professors to develop the new master plan. They gave us four year’s time and money to work on the new background of the new master plan. Now one of the colleagues was working on main streets, motorways and something like that. The other one was working on heavy rail, public transport. The third one was working on economy. And all the other stuff the others didn’t want: pedestrians, cycling. Well, cycling, they didn’t want at all to have it in the program. It was—had no future at this time.

Doug: Why didn’t they want cycling in the plan at the time?

Hermann Knoflacher: Not at all. Not at all.

Doug: Why not?

Hermann Knoflacher: Because Vienna has no cycling, and the politicians at this time and the administration said it will have never cycling. They said, “Well, we are not Copenhagen, we are not Amsterdam, because we are Vienna.”

Doug: I find it so fascinating that in the 1970s, people in Vienna were saying, “We are not Amsterdam, we are not Copenhagen, we are Vienna.” Today, in New York City, in cities around North America, all over the world, you still hear that. What’s your reaction to the fact that that argument endures?

Hermann Knoflacher: Well, this I think is a preoccupation of some, I would say fundamentalistic behavior, because they are captured in this car-oriented thinking. This is not the question if this is a city like Copenhagen or somewhere else. The question is how can we help people to get in a better future? So I came into this field, and I was very much interested in how people behave.

Doug: I was struck by something I read in another interview where you said that the biggest obstacle to fixing traffic congestion and the problems created by cars is stupidity. And I wanted to dive in there a little bit and ask what you mean by that.

Hermann Knoflacher: Well, if it wouldn’t be so stupid, we wouldn’t have so much problems with the transport.

Doug: That is true.

Hermann Knoflacher: Yeah. We wouldn’t have the climate problems, we wouldn’t have the killing on the roads, and we wouldn’t have so many people in the hospitals from accidents and so on and so on. And we wouldn’t destroy our cities, we wouldn’t destroy the local economy or something like that. Things are happening because we have exceeded our evolutionary borders about speed and perception of the environment. And if we go into a situation which is created by the car, that you have a huge amount of power, which is thousand times more than as a pedestrian, your brain don’t follow.

Doug: Along those lines about sort of power and superiority, nobody becomes a better person behind the wheel of a car. People get very angry, they are short tempered, they can behave in ways that we outside of the car experience as sociopathic. And yet we also hear that people love to drive. So setting aside car dependency as the thing that forces people to drive, how would you explain why people love to do something that is so harmful to them, to the built environment, to the natural world and to other people?

Hermann Knoflacher: The easiest way to explain it is that the feeling of power, the feeling of freedom and the environmental conditions we have provided for the car gave them very short benefits. But all the other things you mentioned before, which is damage of the city, damage of the local economy, damage of the noise, the noise environment, the air pollution and something like that, they don’t have direct feedbacks about this. Once things are happening too fast, we don’t have the senses and the receptors to understand what we are doing because the things are happening out of our evolutionary experience. Our evolutionary experience is a pedestrian experience. But we have prepared a world not for people, we have prepared a world for a new kind of beings. This is the car driver. We started the discussion about the Gehzeug.

Doug: I was about to bring back the idea that the Gehzeug lays that idea bare, right? You would not expect to—I think you’ve written that you wouldn’t expect to walk around your city spraying carcinogenic gasses in the faces of other people. And yet with a car, you do that and you’re on your way before you can even contemplate that there are any effects to that at all.

Hermann Knoflacher: But the problem is that the decision makers, the planners, have also the car in the brain. And if you have a car in your brain, you make a world for cars. And if you have a car in your brain, you spend a lot of money to have a car or use a car and something like that. Or you make an environment which is not safe for children, which is not healthy for children, which isolates you because this created a very different behavior of this car-oriented society than the whole history of mankind before, because the people now accept to live in cages. They live in a driving cage. They have their cage in the office. This is not the normal behavior of people as they lived for five or six million of years, or at least 10,000 years in normal cities.

Doug: So you mentioned the way that the car burrows itself into the brain and affects everybody from individual drivers to planners. And I think that’s probably a good segue to your idea that the car is a virus. You lay it out very nicely in a lot of your writings and your speeches, and you have a book that’s called Virus Auto: The Story of Destruction. How are cars like a virus?

Hermann Knoflacher: Well, I’ve written in the virus book because the normal behavior is that we have a cell. And the virus coupled with the cell, it entered the cell and then the cell is starting to replicate the virus. The virus controls the control center because a virus has no own energy. And the virus car, because the car changes our behavior like the virus is changing the behavior of the body cell. Because the body cell, when she has accepted the virus into the inner part of the body, then the virus controls its behavior.

Hermann Knoflacher: So the car has changed the whole value system of the society like the virus is changing the whole value system of a cell. Because the normal cell is supporting the functions of the body. And this is happening globally. This is one of the reasons why cars have spread out over all continents. And the difference to the normal virus is that we know the situation of a normal virus and we fight against killing people, but for cars we are doing quite the opposite. We support them with money, we support them with a lot of privilege. Nobody, if he’s a human, you cannot make noise like a car. Then you are charged, or the police take you away from public space when you are drunk or something like that. But if you are in a car, you pollute the air with all kinds of poison air and something like that. You occupy the space for children. You destroy the environment of cities. And people accept everything because they are behaving like the body cell.

Doug: Everything you’re saying, it all seems to come down to speed and obviously space.

Hermann Knoflacher: Yeah.

Doug: And you have a great quote that I read about comparing that the driver is much different from humans than any insect because no insect moves so quickly in its natural habitat that it kills itself or others.

Hermann Knoflacher: Yes.

Doug: And there’s no insect that sacrifices its own children’s habitat or its offspring as parents do.

Hermann Knoflacher: This can only happen if the car is deeper in your brain than children love. There’s no other, I would say addiction, which is so deep rooted in our brain like the car.

Doug: I’ve also read, speaking of children, that you have very strong opinions about playgrounds, and have written or spoken about sort of their place in society as opposed to the amount of space that we give cars.

Hermann Knoflacher: Yeah. Well, it is crazy that we cage children in their playground and let cars move around it and make their playgrounds everywhere. Normally—when I came to Vienna in 1959, there were not many cars in the streets. And I got some of my living out of teaching mathematics to students. And at this time the children had soccer, I would say games, or soccer games on the streets. This is not possible anymore today because everything is occupied by cars, and they are pushed back on the sidewalks, which is unbelievable. Ten thousand years of urban society, people used the public space, which means the street.

Doug: And you mentioned sidewalks and how children used to play in the street, and now they are relegated to the sides of streets. You even have very strong opinions about the word “sidewalk,” which is not necessarily translatable exactly one to one in every language, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.

Hermann Knoflacher: Yeah. Because in Germany it is called Gehsteig, which means in a small path, for example, on the mountains and something like that. It says everything. Because I think to grow up you must get in contact with the society. I grew up in a car free environment in the village in Carinthia in South Austria, and there were no cars there. Well, the first cars which came from very far were war vehicles from the occupying army. But I had a wonderful childhood all the time. And so I have still—I would say I have never lost the contact with the earth, contact of my feet with the earth. And this is not happening today anymore, because children normally, if they are using or they are moved to somewhere, they are moved with a car. They don’t walk very far. For us, it was totally normal to walk one, two or three kilometers, like for the Dutch, where they cycle for even 10, 15 kilometers in every kind of weather condition. This is the normal behavior.

Hermann Knoflacher: And we are totally away from this normal behavior. And this costs a lot of energy. This produced a lot of noise, produced a lot of air pollution and all these other things we have already mentioned before, but the people don’t recognize it because they are very comfortable in their car. Even in bad weather they have air conditioning in the car, but the pedestrian has no air conditioning. He’s exposed to all the weather situations, which is good that he knows a little bit about how nature is doing.

Doug: I always find that very funny that, you know, especially I sometimes joke that Americans like to fancy themselves very tough, very rugged individuals. But the minute you mention that you walk or bike everywhere, the first question you get from people who drive is, “Oh my gosh, well, what do you do when it rains? What do you do when it’s cold?” And my answer is always, “I get wet, I get a little cold, and I’m fine.”

Hermann Knoflacher: And you’re healthy. [laughs]

Doug: Yes, and I’m more in tune with my environment. Exactly. We’re talking so much about the negative externalities of automobiles, and how they impose all these costs on people who aren’t in cars, you know, foul air, noise, danger. You are a proponent of making motorists more directly responsible for the costs associated with driving. How does that translate into policy, in your view?

Hermann Knoflacher: So today we have a tremendous amount of subsidies to make this car society running. We subsidize the parking places, we subsidize the use of fuel, fossil energy, and something like that. We have a lot of priorities. So if you put money on all of this or take away the subsidies, which means bring cars back into the normal market economy, then, for example, in Vienna, the parking in the city would cost about €500 to €600, €700 per month. And if we put the right price, the people can behave in the right manner.

Doug: What do you say to people who believe that charging market rates for parking, for example, is a regressive tax that unfairly hurts poor people? Wealthy people can afford to pay it. Poor people who depend on cars, especially in places like America, where there are few options other than cars. What other policies are at politicians’ and elected officials’ disposal to counter that argument?

Hermann Knoflacher: Well, it’s very difficult to counter this argument. Well, the situation that the poor people have the biggest disadvantages is very easy. Because if you take the parking fees you have to support, put the money into public transport, put the money to make pedestrian areas, put the money into cycling lanes, then you have the money to change the environment for the people. And then they are able to read the other informations from the environment. And then they start walking, they start cycling and they start using public transport.

Doug: I want to talk a little bit about that relationship between time and distance and speed. You’ve written about prioritizing transportation modes, that walking should be prioritized first, cycling should follow, public transit should come after that. And that you say that we mostly don’t need high speeds, which I think to Americans sounds surprising, where speed is a premium, it’s a feature advertised in every car, zero to sixty in three seconds and all the rest. What do you mean that we don’t need high speeds in transportation?

Hermann Knoflacher: Well, you can have high speed if you like, but if you would like to have high speeds, then you have to carry all the costs and all the risks of having a high speed. But this was not my approach, because I grew up with all the knowledge—or I would say the ignorance—which was taught at the universities. And I believe that if I drive faster, I can save time.

Hermann Knoflacher: And it was very interesting for me when I make transport planning in one of many cities in the ’70s. In one of the cities I recognized it was the city of Wels, about 50,000 inhabitants. And I’m doing all my planning on the basis of service. So the people get questionnaires and I ask them to send them back. And so—and then we analyzed it. And it was very interesting at this time, it was about 1972 or 1974, then I could draw the distribution of travel times for each kind of modes. And what was interesting is that the travel time distribution of pedestrians, cyclists and cars was more or less identical. And then we could calculate the average speed of these three modes. And if you calculate the speed in the cities, we had a walking speed between origin and destination, which was average three kilometers an hour. And the driving, the speed of cars was about 17 kilometers an hour, which means about six times more. They had a much longer distance, but the same time. The time is always the same. What is happening if this system behaves in this way, are two things. First of all, each trip has the origin and destination. If the people rely on cars, the destination is much farther away compared to the pedestrian environment. And then you can explain why the old cities have everything around it. This is the density and Variety of the city. Everybody is dreaming and talking today about it, but everybody thinks he can do it with a car. This is not possible. So if you want to have a human-scale city, you must take out the car. This is the consequence which I have written in many textbooks and publications.

Doug: So final question, and I want to get back to the idea of the cars virus and tie it together with the Gehzeug, the Walkmobile.

Hermann Knoflacher: Yeah, yeah.

Doug: So that was designed to show the absurd amount of space that cars take up. And the idea now of everyone having their own private bubble, a sort of social distancing machine, reads very differently. Obviously, the need to stop the spread of COVID means that so many people have been forced to do what cars do, which is retreat into enclosed environments. They isolate themselves from the outside world. And in many cases they did it actually by turning to cars. We’ve seen congestion go way up in New York City where I live, and in cities around the world. Car sales have gone way up, have rebounded entirely in many places. How do we break this cycle of people trying to solve the problem of cars by turning to cars?

Hermann Knoflacher: I think the reason why the people are dependent on cars is that what we are doing, we try in the car traffic is exactly what we try to prevent in the virus COVID-19 or virus dangers. The normal treatment of all viruses is to prevent coupling with a cell. And if you have developed the vaccination today, which is going on globally, the main focus is to prevent coupling. And this is exactly what we have to do with the car, also. We have to prevent coupling of cars and human activities. Take out the cars of human environments, which means out of cities, out of villages. I’m not against the car, but we have to reorganize parking. Instead of using money to build motorways or to build parking in the city, we should take the money to park the cars outside of the city, where you have a good connection with bikes or with public transport to and in the city, and leave the car outside of the city. Then you get a human-scale city. So prevent coupling, which means change parking.

Doug: Professor Knoflacher, thank you so much for this conversation. It was fascinating. And thank you for not just joining the war on cars, but being an early fighter in the war on cars. I really appreciate it.

Hermann Knoflacher: Thank you very much.

Doug: That’s it for my interview with Hermann Knoflacher. If you use it as a jumping off point to read more of his writings and interviews, that’s perfect. There are links to some other interviews in the show notes. Unfortunately, his book Virus Auto is not available in English, but hopefully it will be someday. I want to thank Florian Kolber and Stefan Draschan in Berlin for first introducing me to Professor Knoflacher and suggesting I reach out to him. And of course, I want to thank all of you for your continued support of The War on Cars. Last year was just an awesome one for the podcast, and this year is shaping up to be even bigger and better. We mean it when we say we couldn’t do it without you. I’m Doug Gordon and on behalf of my co-hosts Aaron Naperstek and Sarah Goodyear, this is The War on Cars.