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Car dependence is baked into an American society. We’re in love with our cars. They represent freedom, independence and the American spirit.
Cars are supposed to make life easier and better, but some say that dream is running on empty.
Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon are authors of “Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile,” which examines the historical context for car dependence and solutions to the problem.
Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon wrote the book "Life After Cars" because they say "cars ruin everything." They are seen in a provided photo.
Ari Scott Photography / Ari Scott Photography
OPB’s “Weekend Edition” host Lillian Karabaic spoke with them.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Lillian Karabaic: Your book begins with the bold statement that cars ruin everything. You’ve been covering this topic for years as journalists and podcasters, but I feel like many of us only know about the environmental impact of cars. What was the single most surprising impact of car dependence that emerged when you started actually working on the book?
Sarah Goodyear: I think for me, the thing that was really the most shocking and disturbing was to reckon with just how much cars separate us from our fellow human beings psychologically, physically and societally, and how much cars contribute to the division and atomization of our society.
There have been plenty of studies done that show that people who live on heavily trafficked streets, not even people who are necessarily driving all the time, but people who live in places that cars are going through all the time, don’t know their neighbors the way that other people do.
They don’t feel comfortable being outside of their homes, and they tend to spend more time inside their homes and retreat from the world.
We are always looking for causes of the loneliness crisis and causes of our political division. “Oh, it’s the internet that did this.’”
But I don’t think that we have even begun to wrap our minds around the way that automobiles and automobile infrastructure have separated us from our fellow residents and human beings in a way that’s really detrimental to our social fabric.
Doug Gordon: For me, cars have really robbed kids of childhood. They do not get to explore where they live because it’s too dangerous.
Especially in a suburban context, a lot of people leave cities for affordability reasons, and one of those reasons is that it’s cheaper to get more space the farther out you go from a big city, but what kids need is not actually a whole lot of space – what they need are other kids!
They need the freedom to just kind of pick up, go outside and play. Sarah recently interviewed a researcher named Tim Gill, who talks about the concept of ‘doorstep play.’ Not having play dates, but just being able to walk outside, look around, knock on your neighbor’s door and say, “Can Tim come out and play? Can Johnny come out and play?”
That’s really a kind of rite of childhood that has been robbed of children based on the way that we develop our suburbs and cities.
Karabaic: Speaking of kids, one of the Oregon examples in your book was the Alameda bike bus in Portland as an example of reducing car trips to schools. There’s now more than 21 different Portland schools that have bike buses. Do you think that bike buses can be a model in a place that isn’t as bike friendly as Portland and Eugene, Oregon?
Goodyear: There are going to be limits on where bike buses can come into being, but I talked to a bike bus activist from Glasgow, Scotland, and she was talking about how she sees the kids when they’re out on the bike bus as being kind of little revolutionaries out there, because they’re modeling a kind of behavior and a way of getting around that is really radical.
Just by being in that space as children, getting to where they’re going on bicycles en masse, that is a revolutionary act. She thinks it really opens drivers’ eyes, and she’s heard that from people. So I think that’s a really interesting aspect of the bike bus.
Gordon: I would also argue, and I’m a huge fan of the bike bus and Sam Balto, who we interview in the book, who’s from Portland.
But Sam even argues the fact that even in a place like Portland, where you need so much organizing and so many volunteers, it shows the failure of our streets, because those children on the bike bus, some are kindergartners and first graders, who are more than capable of biking a mile or two on their own power.
If the streets were safer, maybe they wouldn’t need quite as much adult supervision. The goal of the bike bus is to make the bike bus obsolete.
Karabaic: The subtitle of your book mentioned “freeing ourselves,” but so much of the book is about how systemic car dependence is and how it’s not really about your individual bike or transit commute.
What would you recommend as practical steps for individuals who want to move towards a life after cars, especially in Oregon, where we have a lot of folks who live in rural places where cars are absolutely a necessary tool for accessing medical care, groceries and basic necessities.
How do you free yourself in a society that is not free from cars?
Gordon: I think the biggest thing is, first, as we’re trying to do with the book, just become aware of the problem. Cars are this huge force that shape our lives, and yet, we give them almost no thought until the point at which something goes wrong. You get into a crash, you get a flat tire, and that car is not available to you to do the things that you need it to do, which are to get the groceries, to get to a medical appointment and to get to work.
Why are we trapped in this situation where my only way to be a fully enfranchised member of society, to eat, to gain employment and to see friends and family requires this depreciating asset that is just subject to all of these different traffic and crashes and things like that?
Number two, I would say a big thing that you can do is not necessarily replace your car with a bike and start biking every day, wherever you need to go.
That’s not what we’re really arguing in the book. What we’re asking people to do is know your elected officials, for example, so if they want to put a new bus lane in your community, even a small community where things are far apart, you understand the benefits that will come if that’s installed.
And you call your elected official and you say, “Hey, I support this, will you support it too?” Find other people.
Even in those rural communities, I bet there’s a walkable downtown that could benefit from a few small improvements that would make it even more accessible to people, so they could maybe leave the car at home once or twice a week for certain activities.
This system that we have was built over the last century, and it’s going to take a long time to unbuild, but we have to start that process now.
Karabaic: I think sometimes things can feel really overwhelming, especially in the face of something that requires a massive societal change like this. Was there anything that brought you hope in writing the book?
Gordon: We went to Ghent, Belgium, and they instituted a traffic circulation plan that eliminated the ability of drivers to use the city as a cut-through. That had tremendous benefits.
Cycling shot up by huge amounts — they met their 2030 goals by 2018, after just a year of this plan being implemented. Nitrous oxide levels fell by 40%.
And all of this came not from millions and millions and millions of dollars in infrastructure improvements, but just reversing the direction of some streets and changing some traffic signs. I think they spent about 5 million euros total. You couldn’t repair a highway on-ramp for that amount of money in the United States, and so that was like, “Wow, look how easy it could be if we choose to do it.”
That gave me a lot of hope.
Lillian Karabaic will interview Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon at Powell’s Books on Thursday, Nov. 13.
Tags: Culture, Cars, American Dream, Authors, Books, Novel, Bicycling, Bikes, Arts And Culture, Arts, Culture
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