This episode originally aired on April 28, 2026.
While they weren’t designed with automobiles in mind, cities have been overtaken by cars.
The dominance of cars on our streets and highways changed America. But can we get along without cars?
We’ll speak with Life After Cars co-authors and “The War on Cars" podcast co-hosts Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon.
They look at the damage cars have had on our society and better modes of transportation. But is a life without cars possible in Columbus?
Guests:
- Sarah Goodyear, co-host, "War on Cars" podcast/co-author, Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile
- Doug Gordon, co-host, "War on Cars" podcast/co-author, Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile
Transcript
This transcript is generated with AI. To ensure its accuracy, review the audio file.
Amy Juravich: Welcome to All Sides with Amy Juravich. America's love affair with the car has been celebrated in song, in television, and in movies. Throughout the 20th century, cars overtook the roadways and became a necessity for many.
But in recent years, alternative transportation methods to reduce our dependence on cars has been gaining traction. In our car-dependent culture, is it possible to build a future centered on people and not vehicles? And what about Columbus? Could we ever be a city without cars?
Those are the questions we are asking our guests today during this edition of All Sides. Joining us this hour, we have Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, hosts of the "War on Cars" podcast and co-authors of the book "Life After Cars, freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the automobile." Welcome back to All Side, Sarah.
Sarah Goodyear: Yeah, great to see you. And Doug, hi. Thank you.
Juravich: Hello. So you've been doing interviews all around the country. You've been traveling with your book. You also have a podcast. What's your reaction? What's the reaction been from listeners and from people you've met on the road talking about your book in different cities about your position on cars?
Doug Gordon: There's been great enthusiasm everywhere we've gone. We've done really large shows in cities from Phoenix to Seattle to now Columbus and have had hundreds of people, a thousand people in Seattle and there's a great hunger for reimagining our cities so that they're more efficient for people. So it's been really encouraging to see.
Juravich: Now, the people who bring you here like the group Transit Columbus brought you here, right? And they are also have a have a war on cars, so to speak, right. So I mean, they're promoting more public transportation. And so the most places that you go, Sarah, are they, you know, car alternative people bringing you in? Yeah, we-
Goodyear: Yeah, we've been partnering with transit advocacy and pedestrian advocacy organizations, bike advocacy organizations around the country, and they help us set up the shows and find the venues and find the guests that we bring on.
What's really interesting is at pretty much every stop we've had on stage with us elected officials who are interested in these issues. And so. What we've seen is that these advocacy groups that used to be considered kind of marginal, and a lot of politicians might have thought, oh, these are the annoying bike people or the annoying transit people. Now increasingly, I think politicians are being elected who care about these issues and who see active transportation users as a constituency rather than as sort of a thorn in their side.
Juravich: Well, Doug, do you have people stand up in some of these meetings, though, who maybe challenge you a bit and say, we really are a car culture, like we've gone over the hump and we're beyond it and we can't undo it.
Gordon: We have a little bit of a self-selecting group, probably, that comes to our shows and our events. But we do get some pushback here and there. This will never change. It's been like this for so long. It seems insurmountable. But we've seen example after example of places that are putting in light rail and street cars, that are put in bike lanes, like I was mentioning, Phoenix. They're putting in bike lines in Phoenix, one of the hottest, most sprawly places you can imagine.
Juravich: Are they adding shade above the bike? You would hope so. Right. That's a little bit different. Yes.
Gordon: But we're not getting so much pushback. I think people, even people who think this is just the way it is, at least recognize that it stinks. No driver likes sitting in traffic, and so I think they at least wish other people could have alternatives to driving.
Goodyear: And I do want to say that we've appeared, while our shows don't draw that kind of crowd usually, but we've appear on morning television shows, mass market television shows in Seattle and other places. There we really did expect, like what do you expect people to do? We need cars.
And even in that setting, sort of mainstream TV, morning TV, is a very receptive audience. I think. People are sick of this system. It's not working for people. And so there's an openness that there hasn't been before. I would say it's relatively new in the last 10 years.
Juravich: Okay. Well, do you think that right now, what we're in with the rising gas prices, the recent long lines at the airport due to the lack of TSA workers, has this helped or hurt the case for a life without cars? You know, like especially Doug, talk about the rising price.
Gordon: Yeah, I think it's a little bit of both. I think is going to help in that people are saying, why are we constantly going through this? The three of us are probably old enough to remember multiple versions of like, oh, sudden gas crisis of some sort, whether it's an exogenous event that happens or it's war like the one we're experiencing now.
And I think a lot of people are saying I just don't wanna go through this. So you're saying e-bike sales go up, for example. On the other hand, you're seeing a lot of. Politicians saying let's suspend the gas tax or let's gut climate laws because it's all gonna hurt people's you know pocketbooks so we have a lot of choices we can make right now and I'm hoping that we'll make choices so that when this happens again because we know it will happen again it happens every generation we are better prepared to absorb the shock so we have more railways more bike lanes better bus service things like that So people. Don't find themselves suddenly faced with gas costing a dollar a gallon more than it did a week or two ago.
Juravich: What about, Sarah, the idea that with summer travel season, are you guys advocates for more people flying to places or driving to places? I mean, sorry. The idea that being on a plane is becoming more and more annoying. It's more expensive. You have to wait in line at the airport. There's lots of problems. There's constantly delays. So therefore If you're taking a vacation, maybe in the United States, in less than 12 hours, maybe you'll drive. Is that okay for you? I don't know.
Goodyear: Well, I mean, look, we do not shame people who drive for any reason, really, because we do live inside of a system that doesn't leave a lot of options. Coming here to Columbus, for instance, I would have loved to have taken a train to Columbus. Oh, yeah. I guess you could.
Juravich: I guess you couldn't do that. Couldn't do. Wonder why. Yeah.
Goodyear: Yeah, so, you know, and because it's a very good distance from New York, it would be a great train ride. And instead we had to fly. I don't love flying at the best of times and certainly not in these times. So I see why people turn to driving.
Juravich: But you were in Pittsburgh a little while back. I bet you took a train. Did you take a train to Pittsburgh?
Goodyear: We didn't because it takes so long.
Juravich: It took too long. Okay. Yeah.
Goodyear: Yeah. So we have taken trains. I took a train to Toronto, actually, because I had the time as a 12-hour ride. But this is the thing. Cars are sold to us as vehicles of freedom and self-determination. And once you have a car, the world is yours and you can do whatever you want.
But the reality is what we all experience. It's tiring, it's dangerous, It's expensive. To run a car, and what we need are options. And the real freedom that we could be offering people in our society would be choices between rail. Excellent long distance bus service is another thing that is being gutted in this country. And I know that you lost your downtown Greyhound station here in Columbus recently.
Juravich: We did, well, there's like a modified one, yeah. Right, but I'm.
Goodyear: Right. But I mean, these are not a big.
Juravich: Nice bus station. Yeah.
Goodyear: Yeah, and Chicago's dealing with that right now, too. So I think that what we're advocating for are choices. And the fact that we're all locked into this system, cars have a monopoly on our travel in a lot of ways. Ways, and that's not good for anybody.
You're listening to All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about the possibility of a life without cars with Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, hosts of the "War on Cars" podcast and co-authors of the book, "Life After Cars, freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the automobile."
So you wished you could have taken a train to Columbus. There's a lot of people listening right now who probably wish there were trains in Columbus. We used to have a lovely train station, we don't anymore. There's whole group working on that. So you had to fly. So when you landed at the airport, did you have to take a car to get to your hotel?
Gordon: Yeah, I mean, and that's the thing, right? Like, it would be great if there was an express bus or light rail or a train that takes you from, let's say, the airport to the convention center or some other spot downtown.
There's been talk of that. Right, yeah. And look, like Sarah was saying, we're advocating for choices. And again, we don't shame people. If you're taking the summer road trip and going to national parks and going to Disney World or going to see the grandparents, great, get in a car, put the sleeping bags in the back and you know, have fun.
But what we're more advocating for is like, do you need the SUV to go pick up a gallon of milk to take your kid a mile and a half to school? Those are trips that could be done walking, cycling, transit, with many other means that wouldn't require you to have to finance a car to pay four or $5 a gallon of gas wherever it's headed at this point. So that's really what we are at. I love a good road trip. I love camping. I love that kind of stuff. What I don't want is to build my life around having to get in a car every single day of my life for every trip.
Juravich: Yeah, I understand that about getting the gallon of milk. But what if I have to drive four soccer players around, right? At least I'm I have them all in one car, right. I need a bigger car. Right, yeah. But I need a bigger car.
Gordon: Cars are a tool, right? And in that case, a car is a really great tool for the job. But if I'm just traveling to work and the only thing I carry is an iPhone, maybe a car is not. A 6,000 pound SUV, for me, 185 pounds, is probably not the best tool for that job.
Juravich: Sitting alone by yourself.
Gordon: Yeah, go ahead, Sarah.
Goodyear: Well, you know, I mean, you bring up the soccer example, and that's one that we hear a lot. And women, in particular, often have to manage a lot of different types of trips. You don't. Yeah, kids around doing errands, taking care of elders as well, and so, you know, wouldn't it be great if those kids could ride a bike to soccer practice, or if there was a bus that went to their ballet lesson?
Or whatever it is. Imagine how much freedom that would mean, not just for the children who would be able to learn how to navigate their communities and feel independent and gain agency in their lives, but also for the parents. It would represent such freedom and liberation where then if you needed to stay and do some work or if you had your own stuff to take care of, then you would know your child was safe going off to soccer practice without you and indeed that is the way that for a long time things did function and it's not some brand new idea that kids should be able to get around their communities by themselves. There used to be a lot more of that and Doug you have the numbers on that getting to school, right? Yeah.
Gordon: Yeah, it was over 40% of kids walked or bike to school in 1969, and now it's about, it hovers around 11, 12, 13% of kid, so it's really gone down, but the percentage of kids who live within a mile of their school has not gone down by all that much. What's changed is the size of the cars, where we build the schools, so they're in areas that are not in a walkable downtown, but they're on the edge of town, for example, across a busy strode that's impossible to walk long or across.
So that's really what's change. You know, my daughter and I joke all the time. We never fight over her plans because she can just go walk. We live in the city. She can just walk to the movies or walk to a park. But her friends who live in suburbs are always fighting with their parents. Mom, can you drive? No, I can't drive. I have a meeting. Dad, can I drive? No, I have to take your brother across the other direction in town. So, you know, that's what we're talking about. Like, my kids get up, they go to school, and I can just sit there and have coffee and be a lazy parent. It's kind of great, actually.
Juravich: So, okay, so do we need to go back in time and redesign to have every soccer field and every school on a bike path somewhere? Is that, like, is that where we messed up?
Gordon: A little bit. I mean, I don't think we have to go back in time. I think we have to look at the streets around those places and say, you know, I think parks and schools are great little nodes where we could say, okay, like where could we build protected bike lanes to get people there? Where could we built sidewalks to get People there. And if you did that in a lot of towns, you might have a pretty passable network that would get kids to some percentage of the places that they needed to go, you No. We're not saying there should be zero cars, we're saying we should de-center cars in our lives, and that would be a great way to do it.
Goodyear: Well, really, it's back to the future in a way. I mean, I know that Columbus is anticipating tremendous growth in the next decade. And so it seems to me to be a really wonderful opportunity to make these kinds of choices and to say, as we grow, are we creating a network inside this city that will allow people more freedom of mobility, people of all ages? You know, 30% of people in the United States of America don't have driver's licenses. That includes children.
Juravich: Okay.
Goodyear: All right, well, if you had the children, okay, I'm with you. But there's also a lot of people with disabilities that prevent them from driving. There's a lot people who don't want to drive, who don't t have the capacity to drive for whatever reason. And then there are people who have driver's licenses, older people who maybe shouldn't have those driver's license anymore and for whom a more mobile society that offered them more options would mean that they wouldn't be isolated as they age.
So, I think as we grow... We need to recognize that the car itself and these roads that we've built, in some ways those are the antiquated technology, right? And that in the future, we can be doing the work of repair and rebuilding our communities in ways that are more connected and more human.
Juravich: Doug, you mentioned you live in a city, so you live New York City, much more walkable than a lot of other places, especially when you think about Ohio, even beyond Columbus. I mean, what are some practical steps that people can take to move toward a life without cars when we have such rural places? You know, because we're not, we, Columbus is not New York city, A, but then B, do you drive 15 minutes away from Columbus and you're in a more rural area than you would find in New York?
Gordon: Yeah. I mean, I think in places that are more rural, obviously a car is going to be a very important tool for a lot of people. But e-bikes can really shorten distances in rural areas. And it is possible that you have that rural road with a wide shoulder. So you could lower the speed limit on that road and maybe install some sort of infrastructure that allows cyclists to have a little more space, a little bit more protection.
Sidewalks in such areas would be Great. Changing zoning so that we don't have to drive all the way out to the Walmart or the big box store on the edge of town, but instead allows for smaller markets that people could, if not walk or cycle to, at least not have to ride as far to. And to cut down on the vehicle miles traveled per person, you know, you don't want to have to spend all that money on gas to go get your groceries. You could spend less if you're driving half as much, half as far.
Juravich: But Sarah what you would concede that a life without cars is easier in a city than it is in a rural area
Goodyear: Yeah. Yeah, of course. And I've lived in a rural area. I lived on a dirt road in Maine with wood heat only, and I know what it's like, and I had a job that I had to get to. Unfortunately, when my husband got into a car crash and our car was in the shop for several weeks, I was pretty stranded, and had to walk down to the road to get a ride from one of my coworkers.
You know, if they're ... Were ways to have rural transit, which you do see, like in Europe, for instance, you will see functional bus systems. And then it's a question of you get to the bus stop and then that will take you to your job center or whatever. You know, I think that there's a lot of options, but people in rural areas, yeah, you need cars, but what if when you were coming into Columbus, you didn't have to, or into the more densely populated part of Columbus.
You didn't have to bring your car all the way in if there were transit that made it easy to get in. I think every community has to have solutions that are tailored to that community and that's why local advocacy is so important. But it's also important to have a vision that the way that things are built right now is not because of the laws of physics. It's not some you know, handed down from on high kind of thing. This is a human construct that we live inside and we made the decisions to get us here and we can make decisions that move us forward in a different way that's more sustainable.
Juravich: Our guests, Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon are staying with us. They are the hosts of the "War on Cars" podcast and co-authors of the book "Life After Cars, freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the automobile." Coming up, we are talking about Ohio's connection to cars and we'll touch on some traffic fatalities and car safety technology. That's when All Sides continues on 89.7 NPR news.
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Juravich: You're listening to All Sides. I'm your host, Amy Juravich. The affordable car is dead, according to a recent "New York Times" opinion piece. But what are the transportation options for our car-dependent culture? We're talking about whether America can free ourselves from the grip of the automobile.
And Columbus is a very car-centric city. Ohio is a car-focused state. Ohio has quite the legacy with car manufacturing. Could Columbus ever truly be a city without cars? Still with us, we have Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, hosts of the "War on Cars" podcast and co-authors of the book, "Life After Cars, freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the automobile."
Thanks again for being with us. Thank you. My pleasure. So I mentioned Ohio has quite the car legacy. We manufacture Hondas and Acuras just a little north of Columbus. The Jeep Gladiator is made in Toledo. I mean, there's a bunch of others. How can Ohio get away from being car focused with that kind of legacy behind it.
Gordon: Well, what if we switch to building trains and building e-bikes and things like that? These are good union jobs and good, typical middle class, support your family, go on vacations and send your kids to college kind of jobs. And you could be building Jeep Gladiators or you could building the next generation of transit, you know, vehicles, busses, all kinds of stuff.
So that's one thing is that we believe in a just transition. It's not just. Cut everything, cold turkey and, you know, move on and everyone ride a bike and be happy. That's not how we see it. We want to make sure that as we move forward, that's why in the climate movement and other movements they talk about a just transition. We want make sure people are brought along economically. And so regions like the Midwest, states like Ohio, where it is a huge part of the economy and it's a huge of the United States.
Like we're going to have to retool a lot of our stuff. We've talked a lot, Sarah and I about. We did this during World War II, you know, we had factories that were building certain things and then we switched them to build stuff for the war effort and then after the war we switched them to building largely cars and other things for the growing middle class. We could do that again if we took on a sort of war footing approach to. Climate and the economy and all the rest.
Juravich: Well, and Sarah, I have to ask you about your last name. I was waiting. Because your last time is Goodyear, and Goodyear happens to be a well-known name in Ohio. And you're here having a war with cars. And a lot of cars, including mine, have Goodyea tires on them, so do tell. Well, first of all,
Goodyear: My bike has Goodyear tires on it at the moment. Yeah, so the connection is that one of my distant ancestors, Charles Goodyear, in 1839 figured out the process to vulcanize rubber. And vulcanization is the process by which rubber has chemicals added to it so that it doesn't melt in the summertime in the heat and it doesn t freeze and crack in the winter.
That was something that in the beginning of the 19th century, people were really struggling to figure out. They knew rubber could be really useful, but they couldn't figure out how to make it work. So Mr. Goodyear figured it out. Mr. Good, you figured it out kind of by chance. And then he was, I believe, brain damaged from so much contact with toxic chemicals. And he died in poverty because he was not able to secure all the patents that he needed for his invention and died in agony and poverty.
And then when the tire company was founded It had nothing to do with my family. It was named after him because he had invented this thing. It was just a tribute. The Goodyears never owned Goodyear Tire.
Gordon: We're not we're not rolling entire money
Juravich: rolling in tire money that's funny all right I'm with you okay okay so and so I didn't know the Goodyear made bike tires so that's an oh yeah
Goodyear: Oh, yeah, they make they make pretty much any kind of tie.
Juravich: Jenny got a tire that you need. They will give it to you. OK. Well, let's talk about Columbus becoming less car-focused. Because we don't have passenger rail. We don't a subway system or a trolley. We just started this past year building a bus rapid transit system. So we're working on that. But how do we do this? Because I feel like we are 100 years behind, basically, in building a public transit system. How do we fix it?
Gordon: It all comes down to political will. You have the space. I mean, that's the thing. We rode around Columbus yesterday with folks from Transit Columbus and folks from the Ohio State University. And I look around and I just see, wow, you've got like three, four, six lane roads. You could easily take one of those lanes and turn it into a bus lane, a bike lane, a two-way protected bike lane wider sidewalks.
We're talking about this massive number of people who are gonna be coming here. Columbus could easily absorb one and a half million more people and you'd barely notice it. What you would notice is a million and a 1.5 more cars. And so.
Speaker 6: Oh, okay.
Gordon: You really want to make sure that when people come here, you know, they look around and say, wow, there's my bus lane and there's the bike share station and there is the light rail that could take me to the airport. I don't really need a car. I think you could get it done. You just need to have the right people in place who make it a priority. And we've seen lots of cities that started behind New York or London or Paris, let's say, and are catching up very, very quickly because they've got the right politics in place.
Juravich: You're listening to All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about the possibility of life without cars with Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, hosts of the "War on Cars" podcast and co-authors of the book, "Life After Cars, freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the automobile." Listeners, I'd love for you to join us. Do you think Columbus can ever be a city without cars? What would need to happen to convince you it's possible? Give us a call, 614-292-8513. That's 614, 292-8513. Or send us an email at allsidesatosu.org.
Goodyear: I just wanted to add to what Doug said. One of the things that we've heard about Columbus is that it's a very easy city to commute in. It's easy to drive and easy to park here. It doesn't suffer the kind of congestion that some other cities do.
But yeah, if there's a million more people here and they're all driving, there will be that kind of digestion. And if you don't prepare for that by creating transit systems that are useful for people and that are frequent enough to really be useful for people. Then you will get everybody in their cars, and then it won't be easy to drive here anymore, and it won't be easy park here anymore.
And so I think that if people like the things about Columbus today, they have to recognize that unless the city makes some kind of provision for this population growth, that it's not gonna be like that forever, and then you're gonna be stuck in the same loop that places like Houston and Atlanta are stuck in where they're... Constantly spending billions of dollars on widening roads when they know that adding lanes, one more lane, doesn't fix the problem. There's something called induced demand that when you widen the road, it just brings more people onto the road and you get the same congestion again very, very rapidly. This is a lesson that we learned in the 20th century. We need to apply it today.
Juravich: I, people who live here complain about the traffic, because I think people complain about traffic. Everywhere. Everywhere, no matter what traffic you're sitting in. Weather and traffic. Or how long, yeah. But I grew up in Pittsburgh where there's a lot more traffic and there's mountains in the way, so they can't widen the roads and mountains, rivers, bridges, all kinds of problems. No widening the roads in Pittsburgh. So whenever people, when I moved here, I was like, this is not traffic. This is a, you have six lanes. This is amazing. Yeah. So, so the idea of. But so Columbus still has room. We can keep widening the lanes. But you're saying that we need to reconsider that. So how do we do that?
Gordon: But why would you want to keep widening the lanes? Because eventually you'll run out of city that's worth going to, you know? Like, that's the thing is like nobody goes to a city and says, you know, what's great about it here? I can drive and park wherever I want. In fact, the best cities to visit are usually the worst ones to drive in. You know, New York is horrible to drive in, but people love visiting New York, Paris, terrible to drive.
But, you know, I think there other things that this city could do, something as simple as zoning rules that could change so that you could build a big apartment building with a grocery store on the ground floor. So the few hundred people who live in that building and the many thousands who live around it can just walk a block or take an elevator down and get their groceries. So they don't have to pile into the SUV and just get that gallon of milk or their weeks worth of groceries.
There's so much that could be done. Columbus has the luxury of space and they should really capitalize on that and use it because what makes a city great. Is people, that's what makes a city great, is when you walk around and you think, wow, that restaurant is full, people are coming out of that concert or that theater, the museum is busy, or there's a big sporting event, that's makes a great, and Columbus has those assets, it should lean into it.
Goodyear: Yeah, and you talked, Amy, about how Columbus is 100 years behind in some ways, but what we've seen is that sometimes the places that make changes later can have the experience of looking at Houston or Atlanta and seeing, wow, they tried to do it by widening, widening widening widening. That just wiped out neighborhoods, gutted whole parts of the city. And didn't solve the problem. Not only that, it cost tens of billions of dollars.
And so as much of a burden as cars are on individual car owners, so too is car infrastructure a burden on municipalities and states. I think it's really important to recognize that if you double down on car infrastructure, it's gonna be hideously costly for generations to come. Whereas if you learn the lessons of the last 100 years and leapfrog over to where cities like Paris are or cities like Atlanta are today, where they're really trying to do things differently. You can learn those lessons. You don't have to make all the mistakes all over again. You can take less.
Juravich: From other people's mistakes. Listeners, if you'd like to join us, do you think Columbus can ever be a city without cars? 614-292-8513 or email us at allsidesatwosu.org We have John calling from Columbus. John, what's your question?
Speaker 7: Yes, it's more of an opinion. We could really reduce traffic if, instead of having big busses that went on extremely set routes, we had small vans that might have routes but could always divert to get into someone's driveway. They could help a lot with getting around the city. And if we encourage using them, it would take a lot of cars off the road.
Juravich: All right. Thank you for that, John. So what about the idea of vans more like public transit that's smaller than a bus?
Gordon: Yeah, I think you need all of that. I think the busses with the fixed routes that are predictable. But, you know, a person with, let's say, a disability who maybe can't get down to the bus stop. You know, we have access to ride in New York and lots of cities have on demand transportation services. So, yeah, I Think that's a great addition into the transportation mix.
Juravich: We also have an email from Isaac who says, Columbus is a fantastic biking city if you live close to a trail and if your destination is along the same trail. We need better connections between existing infrastructure. So talk to me about connecting bike lanes.
Goodyear: Yeah, I mean, too often in cities around the world, bike lanes are, you know, they'll have a showpiece bike lane that is in downtown, and it starts in one place, and then it ends, and you're just kind of left off in the middle of a sea of cars, which is not comfortable for anyone. It doesn't encourage people to use this as a genuine transportation solution.
And so— It is really important to look at connections. We rode a couple of bike lanes yesterday and saw a couple bike lanes. I'm thinking of the 4th Street bike lane, where it goes through an on-ramp for a highway. And the bike lane is just this painted green strip that cars are going at high speed through that strip to get onto the on-ram for the highway. That's not a meaningful connection. That's a terrifying experience that's gonna put people off.
So connections are really important in New York City right now. That's actually, we have some city council members who are saying, that's what we need to do to bring New York city's bike network up to where it could be is connections. But yeah, you have to look at it as a transportation system, just like any other. You wouldn't build a highway that just went for three miles and then. Just there was nothing else after that. Like, you know, you need to think of it as an integrated system.
Gordon: It's a mindset shift, because I think the trail system is easy for elected officials to say, oh, biking isn't that wonderful. People can go biking on the weekends or in the morning before work, but they need to actually see it, as Sarah said, as a transportation system. So you get that trail, and then when it ends at the street, the street network continues to get that person to their office, to school, to shopping, or whatever it is.
Juravich: Yeah, because Isaac mentioned going on a trail, but he didn't mention an actual bike lane, right? Because he's wanting the trail to take him to where he needs to be.
Gordon: Yeah, some people drive to go ride a bike, and what if they could bike to go ride a bicycle?
Juravich: We also have an email from Ellen, how do we deal with the very strong road building lobby? She feels like they've been winning for decades.
Gordon: Oh, yeah. I mean, it's all the people who pour concrete. It's all of the engineers and designers who build highways. You know, I think we have to convince them that we could take the money that we're spending on highways and spend at least a portion of it on building high quality bike infrastructure that also requires engineering and concrete to be poured and sewer grates to be relocated and things like that.
So, yeah, it is a very powerful lobby. And they're not going to sit there and say, OK, we have enough highways. We're all done here. So let's just. Repair what's there. We need to be active and organized, and we need to elect people who listen to the transportation and active transportation activists and lobbyists of their own sort. We don't have as much money to throw around as they do, but I think we can change the political calculation a little bit.
Juravich: We are talking with Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, hosts of the "War on Cars" podcast and co-authors of the book "Life After Cars." Listeners, you can join us. Do you think Columbus can be a city without cars? And what would need to happen to convince you it's possible? 614-292-8513 or email us at allsides at osu.org.
You're listening to All Sides. I'm your host, Amy Juravich. According to AAA, the typical driver spends about an hour a day in the car. This, along with the expense of purchasing, maintaining, and insuring a car, have contributed to America's changing attitude toward cars.
But there are many cities in the United States where a car is still the easiest way to get from point A to point B. Columbus is working to improve public transportation. The recent Link Us initiative will make it easier to walk, bike, and scoot to school. Plus it will add bus rapid transit lines with the first one currently under construction now.
We are talking about whether America can free itself from the grip of the automobile and still with us We have Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon hosts of the "War on Cars" podcast and co-authors of the book "Life After Cars." Thanks for being here a pleasure and we did have an email come in and the question was can you give me an example? Of a city that Columbus can look to as a way to catch up on all this transportation thing. Tell me a city that Columbus can be like that is not New York City or Paris.
Gordon: The city that really surprised both of us the most was Atlanta. Atlanta is the poster child of car dependence and sprawl. But they we were talking about trails earlier. They are building the Beltline, which is a 22 mile loop around the city. Old Rail Trail, and it's being connected. It'll be completed within the next two years.
And what's been really cool about that is that it has spurred all of these other bike lanes that have grown off of it because people want to get to it. The other really cool thing about Atlanta is because it's so hilly and so hot and so sprawled out is that people are really adopting e-bikes at a rate we hadn't seen in any other city. And because its evolution as a cycling city is so new, really just in the last five to seven years, let's say, that has coincided with e-Bikes and the just explosion of them all over this country.
So, you know, if it's possible in Atlanta. Huge sprawled out single family homes next to big apartments. Lots of neighborhoods that have a built form that's similar to Columbus. Everything from your denser streetcar era suburbs to newer 90s era developments and things like that. Strip malls. If it can happen there, it can really happen anywhere. It was incredible. Families on cargo bikes, kids on the back of their parents' bikes, kids riding their own bikes. It was largely because of the Beltline and the trails that have and the bike lanes that have come off of it. And of course, the advocates and the elected officials who are making this all happen.
Juravich: All right, so Atlanta, right, because we're not basically that e-mailer said we're not going to be in New York City. So no, yeah, you don't have.
Gordon: So no, yeah, you don't have to be. That's the thing you have to be Columbus, you know, it's going to have its own Columbus flavor. It's not copy and paste. It is a little bit of like, let's learn the lessons, just like the hospital down the road has a really good treatment for this disease. Let's learn. But our patients are a little different. So we have to adjust the dosage. That's how I see it. Like we have a lot to learn from other cities.
Juravich: Well, we have a call from Rachel, who wants to talk about the difference between Columbus and Boston. So if we're not gonna be New York, Rachel, we're gonna be Boston either. Go ahead, Rachel.
Speaker 8: Well, so I was born and raised in Columbus and left after college and now I live in Boston and I'm now back in Columbus. And it's just kind of striking the juxtaposition and listening to you guys talk about this because it's sort of that last mile problem.
One of the things I've really noticed in Boston that's really helped is with the e-bikes that you just talked about, there's a lot of roads or I should say bike lanes and they're putting more and more bike lanes in all the time all over. But they have the sort of blue bike, or we call them blue bikes, that you know, the system of bikes that you can just easily. Swipe your phone and rent a bike and they have e-bikes now and so many more people and they're all over the place in these sort of like micro hubs where you know you have areas around you know universities or shopping areas where people want to sort of run to the store or do something and they've strategically placed those e-bike hubs where it's really easy to just grab one and go and I it's just
Juravich: Columbus has scooters and bikes that you can get. Are you saying they're just not as plentiful for you?
Speaker 8: They're not. I have to be honest. I've not seen, I mean, I've been here for, you know, four days now and driving around. I'd not really seen many of these. You should come to Ohio State's.
Juravich: You should come to Ohio State's campus. You'll see a bunch of them. But yeah, I got your point, Rachel. Thank you. All right, so yeah, talk to me about this bike renting system in Boston that she's talking about. I mean, Columbus is trying that. We have them. There's scooters littered all over Ohio State campus, but maybe they're not everywhere.
Goodyear: Well, I mean, we actually rode some spin bikes yesterday on our tour. And there is a bike share system here. I think it's evolving. And the issue of where scooters get left, where dockless bike share gets left. Boston has a docked bike system, right? Yes, yes. Yeah, so the same as New York, where there are actual docks that you have to put the bike back. So it's not. Thank you.
Juravich: You can't just leave it anywhere, you have to take it to a place. Okay.
Goodyear: But I think that the issue in a city like Columbus is that it's not quite dense enough to maybe support that as easily. But we are seeing bike share be a transformative, certainly in Boston, in New York. These are transformative technologies and they do solve that last mile issue a lot of the time or like short trips within neighborhoods that are maybe too long to but that, you know, you hop on an e-bike.
And anyone who hasn't ridden an e-bike here, who's listening, I would really urge you to go to a local bike shop and try one, or try one of the spin bikes. They're easy to figure out. And it's like flying. I mean, honestly, the- So you-
Juravich: So you won't get all sweaty on your way to work. You won't all get sweaty. That's the best part. Exactly.
Goodyear: Exactly. And it's just a really, it's a really fun thing to do. And I met somebody in Atlanta who, she had driven a car to work her whole life, and then she tried an e-bike, and she has not looked back for months. She only commutes by e- bike now, even when it's raining. And so that person is not a person who went from a bike to an e bike. That is a person who went from a car to an e-bike. And I think that's a really, really interesting transition that you're gonna see more people making.
Juravich: We have Todd from Columbus, and Todd does not own a car and lives here in Columbus. Todd, how do you do it?
Speaker 9: Hi, yeah it's been 12 years, it's great. I ride my bike, I take the bus, it fine. But one thing I wanted to bring up is I feel like a lot of people's largest obstacle against getting away from their car is winter. And I wondered if the panel had any ideas about how they motivate people to choose other alternatives in the winter and what kinds of things the city can do to make winter commuting. Uh or transportation more uh non-car friendly I guess
Juravich: Okay, all right. Thanks Todd. Yeah, riding a bike in the winter is hard, right? I mean, maybe even dangerous and then waiting for a bus in the Winter is hard It's in cold and you told us to be more like Atlanta. Well, Atlanta is a whole lot warmer than here So tell me tell me how to do it in the
Gordon: One of the greatest cities for cycling in the United States is Minneapolis. And Minneapolis has some of the worst weather in the winter. Of any big city, of course, but they have invested in protected bicycle lanes. And when you clear and plow those protected bicycle lanes, then the cycling doesn't become quite as dangerous.
You know, if you're if you are worried about slipping or falling on ice, that's not going to be a big issue if the bike lane is plowed. And if you do fall, you're not going to fall into traffic. So, you know, a lot of the bike infrastructure, if you can call it that, you know, sharrows, just markings on the street, that's not going encourage people to ride, especially in bad weather.
You know heated bus stops more frequent service. So people aren't waiting 15 20 minutes, you know, everyone can wait outside for two minutes for five minutes Look some of it just comes down to personal preference You know if it's too cold for you to ride like I think sometimes we also need to just have a better rhythm of the Seasons like if you have a couple of days where like your trips are a little closer than they were and you're not getting In the car, that's okay.
But there are lots of cities around the world that have horrible weather Seattle rains all the time and they have some of the best protected bicycle infrastructure we saw in any city outside of Minneapolis. I think every city, every excuse that cities give for not investing in cycling. It's too hilly, it's too hot, it things are too far, it is too rainy, it is to cold. We can point to examples where that just has been defeated basically.
Juravich: I did want to talk about one thing that was related to safety. When it comes to traffic fatalities, you say, you've talked about it, you've written it in your book, but you say that the US has a rather blase attitude toward deaths caused by car accidents. How so? Tell me more about that.
Goodyear: Well, 40,000 Americans on average die every year on the roads of this country. And we just accept that as the cost of doing business. And to give you some idea of how extreme and extraordinary that number is, our traffic fatality rate per 100,000 people is 14.2. Canada, which is, as I recall, a cold country, just to our north it has a lot cultural similarity stars is 4.7.
4.7 per 100,000 versus 14.2. Well, first of all, I think we are bad drivers. I think were distracted drivers. I think, we drive too fast. But more fundamentally, unfortunately, I think that we live in a culture of violence in the United States of America. And that violent death, whether it be by gun or car, is something that's just in the air. It's just ambient here. And when you go to other countries... That is not true, and we argue in the book, and I do believe that our devil-may-care attitude toward people dying on the roads is part of why we can accept other kinds of violence as easily as we do in this country.
Gordon: I also think there's just a sense of rugged individualism that if you get sick, if you get hit by a car, you were doing something, or the person who hit you was doing something as opposed to seeing our problems as a systemic situation, as a systematic problem in need of systemic solutions.
So it's safer cars, better technology in those cars, safer roads, so it's not possible. To speed or you have to put the phone down, there's technology that would force drivers to do that. There's so much we can do, but we just leave it to look both ways before you cross the street or please don't drive distracted, don't dry drunk, but there's a lot we can to make the roads safer, even for people who are being careless.
Juravich: What about people who feel like riding a bike on a road is scary? That's dangerous to them.
Gordon: They're not wrong in a lot of places, you know, that's the thing. And that's what we have to overcome. But that's, what we're talking about, about systemic solutions. So, you, that four lane strode with drivers going 55 miles an hour. I don't expect like a mom or kids or an elderly person to feel comfortable riding on that all anybody. But like the most daring person in the world is, you know, nobody's going to feel comfortable there.
That's why we need the safe bike infrastructure. We need someone to look at that road and say, why does it have three lanes in each direction? And maybe you can have. Two in each direction, and we could provide safe space so that people feel comfortable riding. You know, if it isn't safe for that eight year old or the 80 year old, then it's probably not safe for anybody else.
Goodyear: Yeah, and I just want to ask people to realize that there is no other wealthy developed nation in the world that has anything close to our traffic fatality rate. We are a wild outlier in this and we're more like, you know, African countries that don't even have proper roads. So I really, I want people to know that because I think that we just, we think it's just normal. It is not.
Juravich: We only have two minutes left. How do we convince lawmakers at the state level, at the city level, the people with the money and the power to invest differently?
Goodyear: Organize, organize, organize. And that's what I'm gonna say. There's some great organizations, Transit Columbus, you know, Yay Bikes. There's these great organizations here. You are not alone. Find your people, find the people who believe in this and organize. Nothing happens without organizing.
Gordon: And I think also we can, if we can't make the safety argument, we can make the economic argument. These are good things for cities. As Sarah was saying, car infrastructure is incredibly expensive to maintain, to build in the first place, let alone maintain for 50 years. Parking garages just suck the life out of cities, but you know what's great?
Lots of ground floor retail, bike lanes, sidewalks that are pleasant to walk on, lots of foot traffic that that generates for the coffee shops, for the bookstores, for whatever. And so these are good things. As I said, no one wants to visit a city where the biggest thing about it is that it's easy to drive. People want to visit cities where there are fun things to do and lots of other people to see. And so we could make that argument as well.
Juravich: Our guests have been Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, hosts of the "War on Cars" podcast, co-authors of the book, "Life After Cars, freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the automobile." Thanks so much for joining us today. This was great. Thank you for having us. You're listening to All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. I'm Amy Juravich.