Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile - Hardcover

Goodyear, Sarah; Gordon, Doug; Naparstek, Aaron

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593850726 ISBN 13: 9780593850725

Verlag: Thesis, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

From the hosts of The War on Cars podcast, a searing indictment of how cars ruin everything—and what we can do to fight back

When the very first cars rolled off production lines, they were a technological marvel, predicted to make life easier and better for all Americans; yet a hundred years later, that dream is running on empty.

Instead of unbounded freedom, the never-ending proliferation of automobiles has delivered a host of costs, among them the demolition of our neighborhoods, towns, and cities to make way for car infrastructure; an epidemic of violent death; countless hours lost in traffic; isolation from our fellow human beings; and the ongoing destruction of the natural world. Globally, SUVs alone now emit more carbon than the nations of Germany, South Korea, or Japan.

That’s why we need Life After Cars. Through historical records, revealing interviews, and unflinching statistics, Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, hosts of the podcast The War on Cars, and former host Aaron Naparstek unpack the scale of damage that cars cause, the forces that have created our current crisis and are invested in perpetuating it, and the way that the fight for better transportation is deeply linked to the fight for a more equitable and just society.

Cars as we know them today are unsustainable—but there is hope. Life After Cars will arm readers with the tools they need to implement real, transformative change, from simply raising awareness to taking a stand at public forums. It’s past time to radically rethink—and shrink—society’s collective relationship with the automobile. Together, let’s create a better Life After Cars.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sarah Goodyear is a journalist and author who has covered cities and transportation for publications such as Grist, CityLab, and Streetsblog. Doug Gordon is a TV producer and writer who is also a neighborhood safe streets advocate better known online as Brooklyn Spoke. Aaron Naparstek is the founding editor of Streetsblog, a news site that launched in 2006 and is dedicated to what was then called New York’s “livable streets” renaissance. They live with their families in Brooklyn, and they came together to create The War on Cars podcast in 2018 out of a sense that no one was covering the subject of cars and what they do to culture, society, and the planet in the way they felt it deserved. Doug and Sarah continue to host the podcast.

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1

A Brief History of the War on Cars

In the first panel of Action Comics number 12, published in May 1939, mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent is outside the offices of the Daily Star, a precursor to the more famous Daily Planet. A small crowd has gathered, and when Kent asks someone what has happened, he is shocked to learn that a friend of his has been hit and killed by a reckless driver.

Enraged, Kent calls the city's mayor and asks why Metropolis has "one of the worst traffic situations in the country." The mayor's response will likely be familiar to anyone who has tried to get an elected official to take traffic violence seriously. "It's really too bad," the mayor says. "But-what can anyone do about it?"

Kent vows to do something about it himself. He changes into Superman's iconic blue-and-red uniform and, in a single bound, takes to the skies, smashing through the window of a radio station and commandeering the live broadcast. "The auto accident death rate of this community is one that should shame us all," he tells listeners. "More people have been killed needlessly by autos than died during the world war!" Then, in a panel that shows the superhero in close-up for emphasis, Superman proclaims into the microphone, "From this moment on, I declare war on reckless drivers-henceforth, homicidal drivers answer to me!"

The subsequent pages and panels flow by in a cinematic montage of vengeance against automotive carnage. Superman descends upon a county tow pound where the cars of traffic violators are stored and proceeds to "smash and tear them to a pulp," gleefully stating, "I think I'm going to enjoy this private little war!" He confronts a used car dealer who knowingly sells dangerous lemons and destroys his inventory. He picks up a car with a drunk driver and admonishes him to "leave the liquor alone." At one point, Superman himself is mowed down by a "hit-skip" (or hit-and-run) driver. Pretending to be a ghost, he then jumps in the motorist's back seat and threatens to haunt him if he continues to drive recklessly. He targets traffic enforcement, stopping a police officer from taking a ten-dollar bribe from a driver who wants to get out of a speeding ticket. He redesigns roads, using his incredible strength to eliminate a dangerous curve through a mountain pass. Superman even confronts a motor company executive about prioritizing "profits at the cost of human lives," before laying waste to the entire automobile factory.

Finally, Superman goes after the man he believes is most responsible for the crisis: the mayor of Metropolis. Superman carjacks the politician and terrorizes him by driving so fast that the mayor, a bit of a lead foot himself, fears that Superman is going to kill them both. Then our hero flies the hapless elected official to the city morgue, where he forces the mayor to look at the maimed bodies of "auto victims," people he says the mayor killed with his lackadaisical approach to enforcing traffic laws. Scared straight, the mayor swears he will do everything in his power to make sure all traffic rules are "rigidly enforced." (In the story's humorous coda, Clark Kent is about to get in his car to drive to city hall to cover an announcement about the mayor's traffic safety initiative only to discover that, thanks to the city's new zero-tolerance policy for traffic violations, he's received a parking ticket.)

To modern readers, Superman's violent "war" on cars might be a bit surprising, and not just because the image of the Man of Steel as a menacing vigilante stands in stark contrast with the heroic "Truth, Justice, and the American Way" version popularized by the 1950s TV series or the classic 1978 movie starring Christopher Reeve. (At one point in the 1939 comic, the mayor calls him a "hoodlum" and laments that not even hundreds of police officers can stop him.) It's probably not even that this Depression-era Superman is shown using his powers to right social wrongs instead of stopping some megalomaniacal villain from destroying the city. No. What is most shocking is that the biggest threat to the citizens of Metropolis in 1939 was not a monster or alien invader nor even Superman's famous archenemy Lex Luthor, who wouldn't appear in print until a year later. It was the car.

Almost eighty years before we started The War on Cars podcast, why did Superman announce via a radio broadcast (the podcasting of its day) that it was time to start a "war on reckless drivers"?

In 1914-the year Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, were both born-approximately 4,700 people in the United States were killed in motor vehicle crashes, a rate of 4.8 per 100,000 population. In 1939, the year Action Comics number 12 was published, 32,386 people in the United States were killed in motor vehicle crashes, a rate of 24.7 per 100,000 population. (For comparison, as bad as traffic fatalities are today, they occurred at a rate of "only" 13.8 per 100,000 population in 2022, the most recent year for which comparable figures are available.)

Siegel and Shuster, like a lot of people living in the United States in 1939, would have known their share of people who had lost their lives or suffered life-altering injuries because of reckless driving. Only a few decades into the mass automobilization of North American cities, the duo also would have had recent experience living in cities before cars really took over. The problems caused by automobiles would have only grown over the course of their lifetimes, as would a culture of complacency as the death toll continued to rise. To Siegel and Shuster, it must have seemed like only a superhero could stop the carnage.

Cars and the War on People

The only reason anyone knows the name Henry Bliss today is that he holds the macabre distinction of being the first person in the United States killed by a car. According to a report in The New York Times, on the evening of September 13, 1899, Bliss stepped off a downtown streetcar on Central Park West and Seventy-Fourth Street, when he was suddenly struck by a taxi (an electric taxi, interestingly enough). Eyewitnesses said that Bliss was flung to the pavement, his head and chest crushed by the impact. He was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, but his injuries were too severe to treat, and he died the next morning. Henry Bliss was sixty-nine years old.

The taxi driver, Arthur Smith, was arrested, charged with manslaughter, and held on $1,000 bail-the equivalent of about $37,000 today. As the Times reported, Smith claimed "a large truck occupied the right side of the avenue," leaving him no choice but to drive extremely close to the streetcar and making it impossible for him to avoid striking Bliss. Smith was later acquitted, achieving another kind of distinction as the first in a long line of drivers to face zero criminal consequences for killing a pedestrian.

Most histories of automobiles in the United States begin in 1896 with Henry Ford and his Quadricycle, a two-cylinder, gas-powered vehicle made from bicycle wheels, a seat from a horse-drawn buggy, and other miscellaneous parts. Or they begin on October 1, 1908, with Ford's Model T "rolling off" (in every telling, it's always "rolling off") the assembly line at the Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit. The seeds for the United States' status as the dominant economic superpower of the twentieth century were planted by Ford, the invention of cars, and the efficiencies he pioneered at his factories. The automobile industry built the American middle class, which in turn bought the cars and houses that created the postwar suburbs, entrenching what we now know as "car culture." The history of the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is, in a very real way, the history of cars-and vice versa.

As the saying goes, history is written by the victors. In many ways there's no bigger victor in American...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Thesis
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593850726
• ISBN 13: 9780593850725
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland