I chat with Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, the hosts behind the unapologetic podcast “The War on Cars,” about their new book and the fight to reveal our car-dominated world as a political choice, not an inevitability. We explore the many ways automobiles suck, from the “motonormativity” that makes us angrier and more isolated behind the wheel to the devastating impact on children’s freedom and development. We also get into the positive, radical vision that animates their work: a future with fewer cars, where our streets are reclaimed for human connection and community.
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Text transcript:
David Roberts
Hey, hey, everybody. This is Volts for October 20, 2025, “Yes, you weenies: a war on cars.” I’m your host, David Roberts. Car culture has dominated US daily life for so long, with so few exceptions, that most Americans are like the proverbial fish in water: they can scarcely imagine anything else. Unless you have the means to visit somewhere overseas like Tokyo or Barcelona, it is extremely difficult to develop any sense of what it might feel like to be free of cars. You can point to statistics, but you can’t talk someone into a feeling they’ve never had.
That is why land use and transportation reform in the US is particularly difficult. But it is not impossible, and reforms have gained considerable momentum in recent years as at least some Americans begin to squint at a future world beyond the automobile. I am a bit of a newcomer to this area — gentrifying it, some might say — but one outlet that has doggedly documented every bit of progress is a podcast called The War on Cars, co-hosted by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek.
I’ve enjoyed The War on Cars for a while now, in no small part because it is as unapologetic in content as it is in its provocative title. It does not soft-pedal the damage cars do or the many advantages of living without them.
Now the podcasters have written a book — Life After Cars — so it seemed like a good time to revisit all the various ways that automobiles suck. Naparstek has moved on to greener pastures, but I’ve got Goodyear and Gordon with me to discuss the harmful effects cars have on our minds, our homes, and our families, as well as the many obvious and hidden advantages of living with fewer of them.
With no further ado, Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Sarah Goodyear
Thank you for having us.
Doug Gordon
Yeah, this is a real privilege. Thanks.
David Roberts
You guys have been at this for a while now, beating your heads on perhaps the biggest, most immovable wall in all of American life. I want to start with something — maybe I should have done this off-mic before we started, but I’m professionally curious — why write a book, you guys? Every author of a nonfiction book that I’ve ever spoken with reports the same thing, which is that it’s a misery to produce and then no one buys it. That’s basically the story I hear from everybody who’s ever written a book. And I’m constantly wondering, “Why do people keep doing this to themselves?”
What is it? So why write a book?
Doug Gordon
Guys, this was not a misery to produce. I mean, first of all, Sarah was an amazing collaborator on this and a project manager. It’s just a different medium than podcasting. And podcasting is a different medium than social media. So it allowed us to tackle the subject just in a different and, I guess, deeper way. And also, I think podcasting, you tend to listen to the stuff that interests you, and books are out there in the world, and we’re hoping to reach your sort of normie audience with this book. That might not have, like you said, sort of squinted at a future with fewer cars.
Sarah Goodyear
I would have to echo that. It was not that excruciating to write, partly because we wrote it very quickly, and so that helped to limit the pain. But I do think that books still have a kind of cultural currency that podcasts do not, and that they are sort of normie. And our hope is to continue getting this message out to everyone because we really feel like it needs to be heard by everyone. And I will shout about cars in whatever medium is available to me. Also, I’m just a writer, and as anyone who is a writer knows, that’s a fate you just can’t avoid.
David Roberts
Well, it could be some projection here. It’s just me knowing how miserable I would make myself if I tried to write a book.
Doug Gordon
It’s not easy, but it wasn’t agonizing, yeah.
David Roberts
When you look back at the politics of the last five years, the battle to create IRA and then the backlash, the reversal, the one thing that the sort of consultant class will tell you is, for the most part, IRA kind of came and went, and people really didn’t notice it. There are only a few sort of messages or fights that escaped that little bubble into the wider world. But one of the things the consultants will all tell you is the public hated the car parts. They hated the electric car parts. They hate when you go after their gas cars, basically, the general public.
So this is calling your pod a “war on cars” is basically tilting at the biggest windmill. So I wonder, have you ever had occasion to revisit the sort of belligerence of your title and the kind of confrontational nature of this? Or do you think that that’s just what’s required to bust through? Are you worried about putting off normies, I guess, is the way to put that?
Doug Gordon
Well, you should notice that the title of the book, obviously, is different than the title of the podcast. And it was Sarah who actually came up with the title of the podcast when we were brainstorming what it should be called back in 2018. Sarah, do you want to sort of revisit that conversation?
Sarah Goodyear
Yeah, we were coming up with a bunch of really lame names.
David Roberts
It’s not easy naming a pod.
Sarah Goodyear
It’s not easy, you know, “streets pod,” you know, things like that. Just didn’t really have any, any vibe to them. And then I think I said something like, you know, we should say “It’s whatever the name is going to be: The podcast of the war on cars.” And then it was just like, oh, it should just be “The War on Cars.” And I revisit the belligerence of that name probably every day.
David Roberts
I know people ask you about it all the time because this is like all of — I will just say that everybody on the left, something about everybody being on the Internet together, everybody on the left wants everybody else on the left to speak at all times as though they are addressing a 50-year-old mechanic in, like, rural Pennsylvania. You know, like everybody’s trying to seduce the swing voter, but surely there’s a role for other forms and tones, do you know what I mean? Surely there’s a place for the belligerent.
Doug Gordon
Well, we were trying to do a couple of things with the title of the podcast. One is the phrase itself “war on cars.” David, you know, anytime you try to change so much as a single parking space and turn it into anything other than car storage, people will accuse you of waging a war on cars.
David Roberts
Well, not just cars, Doug. We’re waging war on Christmas.
Doug Gordon
Freedom... That’s exactly right. You say Happy Holidays at Starbucks and suddenly it’s a war.
David Roberts
It’s a war on everything if you want to change anything.
Doug Gordon
And so we were trying to do that of appropriating a term that the other side uses — in the history there’s lots of social movements that have done that. And then the other thing was, we really felt that once Sarah said, “Oh, this is the podcast about the war on cars.” We sort of snapped our fingers and said, “Oh, that’s it!” Because that’s the tone we want to take in the show. We don’t want it to be the Wonky Wonk podcast with three wonks and their guests — another wonk. We wanted to cover cars as —
David Roberts
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Doug Gordon
No, not, you know, and I listen, I listen to those podcasts. They’re important. But all movements need, you know, you need the people inside glad-handing the politicians and you need the people outside with the pitchforks. And that’s really the only way change gets made. And so we have, with the podcast, been able to say, look, sort of like you hinted at in your intro, “Nobody alive today knows a world without cars.” And we see them as just a force of nature: “Of course you’re going to build a giant parking lot when you build housing, and when you build a retail complex or something like that, of course you’re going to drive your kids to school. There’s no better way. It’s America. It’s freedom.”
And we wanted the podcast to say, not only are we going to look at policy and land use and parking reform — which are all important topics — but we’re gonna look at stuff like the propaganda that’s fed to you during the Super Bowl. You know, when you watch car ads and they promise you pedestrian-free, traffic-free, slicked-down streets where you can just be free. Or, you know, it’s more Sarah’s beat of, like, you can just rampage through nature in your 2024 child-crusher.
David Roberts
Never with another car in sight, though you’re always the only driver.
Sarah Goodyear
But I do think that the title, the title was a deliberate provocation and it worked because we are still here seven years later. And if you look at the figures of how many podcasts are around for that long, it’s pretty grim if you want to start a podcast. So people responded to the tone, which was defiant in the face of, as you said, the most sort of pervasive cultural influence in North America is the automobile. I mean, I had somebody ask me at a cocktail party once, “You know, well, you know, do you have people come on your show and say the good things about cars?”
David Roberts
What about the other side, Sarah?
Sarah Goodyear
You know, I think they got that covered. So, you know, that was our feeling now when we looked at titling the book and talked with our editor and the people at the publishing house, you know, we all agreed that that title on a book might be hard to parse for people, for someone in a bookstore.
David Roberts
They might think it’s like Sean Hannity.
Sarah Goodyear
Exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly. And so we started talking about what is it that we are trying to do? What is it that we’re trying to get to? And again, very quickly, this title came — it was a people at Penguin Random House actually floated it first. And it was like, of course, “Life After Cars,” that’s what we want. And it just helped us to shape the message that we’re trying to get out there, which, David, you were talking about the left and what is the message the left is trying to get out? And who is the left trying to talk to and tying ourselves into knots to try to say the thing that might appeal to a mechanic in Philadelphia or in Pennsylvania, but the thing is that I think that a guy in Pennsylvania who’s wrenching his car would probably be more responsive to the honesty and frankness and humor.
David Roberts
I wish other Democrats understood this, Sarah, that even if he disagrees with you, he might respect you not being a weenie about what you really think.
Sarah Goodyear
And then, and then if we say to him, “Hey, we want to show you what life after cars could be like,” and we present a positive radical vision of what that could be, that’s a lot better than saying, “Don’t worry, all we’re going to do is put a sharrow in paint on that street.” And you know, so I really believe that to get the Overton window to move, you need to push hard, in my case, from the left. And we’re willing to be those people.
David Roberts
And I also think about the beginnings of feminism. And one of the things that the early feminists always said that they were doing is taking things that people had just thought of as daily life and politicizing them, sort of revealing them to be political. These things that you think of as normal background in your life are political. They are political choices. And I think it’s kind of the same with cars. They’re so ubiquitous for so long in the US that a lot of people, I think, it doesn’t occur to them that it is even a choice, that there is politics.
You know, so in a sense it’s just like the confrontationalness of it just, I think, is a good way of breaking through that, these are choices. This is politics. This is not just the way life is.
Doug Gordon
And also the “Life After Cars” messaging, nobody hates cars more than other drivers, right? As much as we dislike them as pedestrians, as cyclists, as people who take the bus and are stuck in traffic behind people in single-occupancy vehicles, drivers hate traffic the most. And a life after cars can mean, “Hey, you, who has a mobility issue or needs to lug something heavy on a camping trip or something like that. I like to drive now and then. It’s an important tool in my mobility toolkit. I just don’t want to do it to take my kids to school or get a gallon of milk.”
And so we’re trying to bring drivers along to this. A life after cars where your neighbor rides a bicycle to work and isn’t taking parking, “your” parking in front of your house is better for you too.
David Roberts
Yeah, it’s better for drivers. This is, you know, this is just like the feminists trying to tell men, “No, toxic masculinity is bad for you too.” Although it never sinks in. So I don’t know how hopeful I am.
Doug Gordon
There’s a great Onion headline that’s like “99% of drivers approve of public transportation for others.” And I feel like, hopefully we can get some of those drivers onto bicycles or walking to their corner store.
David Roberts
Well, let me ask this before I get into some specifics about crappy things about cars. Sort of like a wonk’s objection to this project, which is to say, what if I were to just argue that more or less 100% of transportation choices that individuals make are downstream of infrastructure, basically. Once you’ve built the infrastructure, people are going to use it the way people use it. And the range of choice within that is fairly narrow. So if you want to change these things, you have to do it upstream at the level of policy and infrastructure. And basically like trying to change individuals’ minds is pointless.
They will change their behavior if infrastructure changes. Do you know what I mean? Why not just go straight after the policy angle on this?
Doug Gordon
We do a little bit of both in the book. And look, I think you need both. You know, I’m a bike advocate, a safe streets advocate, and there are very few elected officials who are just going to say, “Hey, let’s install a lot of bike lanes so people who aren’t cyclists can become cyclists” or just use the bike, you know, once or twice a week to get to work or whatever, without the individuals lobbying for it at the grassroots level. So, you know, individual action for institutional change. I think that’s right. You know, we can’t, with climate change and other things, like we’re not going to save the environment by people just deciding to switch to electric vehicles or foregoing cars altogether.
There have to be policy incentives and, as you said, infrastructure. But you don’t get there without the political masses sort of demanding it from their elected officials. You talked about the backlash earlier that we’re experiencing right now. I think that the population and the people are ahead of the politicians. We saw that in the reaction to congestion pricing, Kathy Hochul’s pause a year ago, and how just suddenly all of these people came out of the woodwork to say, “Hey, wait a minute, Manhattan would be better with fewer cars. What the hell are you doing?”
David Roberts
You notice she’s kind of changed her tune lately. She’s out. “I love the MTA.”
Positioning herself as a champion now.
Doug Gordon
Especially as the polling has changed around congestion pricing.
David Roberts
She saw what happened.
Doug Gordon
I think it goes in both directions. You’re 100% right. If you took the two of us, car-free urbanites in Brooklyn, and plopped us into jobs and homes in, you know, a suburb of Dallas, we would buy cars.
Sarah Goodyear
Yeah. No, I mean, I’ve been there. I’ve been a car owner and I’ve been car dependent to get to my job and all of that. I’ve lived that life and that’s why I know about this. But I would say also, David, that what we’ve seen is that policy has been changed by, in some cases, activists who have gotten into government. And there has been a really strong advocacy movement that I was lucky enough to find out about way back in 2006 when Aaron Naparstek hired me to do some writing for Streetsblog. Michael Bloomberg was mayor of New York at the time and was starting to make changes.
But the Transportation Department that evolved out of those changes in the city of New York ended up including many advocates and activists that I had met on the streets as a reporter or in meetings or whatever. And then you see some of that percolating into the US DOT under Biden. I do think that the conversation is totally different from what it was 20 years ago. For instance, transportation issues and land use issues are now debate questions in most mayoral debates or congressional debates even. Even Donald Trump had to talk about land use. He was very protective of single-family zoning in the 2020 election, as I recall.
David Roberts
Who was it, Cory Booker was going to — who is it that was going to destroy the suburbs? Or was it Biden? Who’s going to destroy the suburbs? What happened to that agenda item?
Sarah Goodyear
Somehow they never got around to destroying the suburbs. But I guess what I’m saying is I do think that really organized, intelligent, principled activism that is based on reality. Which is the reality is that cars suck and they’re really expensive and they hurt a lot of people. That advocacy has led to a change in the conversation that has also led to a change on the streets that you can see in many American cities, not just New York.
David Roberts
Yeah. And I also think, and this is so hard to measure, and you hear contradictory things about this. I sort of also think that the younger generation, kids these days, you can only sell them the illusion of car culture on TV for so long, when they look around them and they’re just like, “Oh, this is gross.” Being in a car is gross. You know, everything’s congested. I can’t walk anywhere. You know what I mean? It is what it is and it’s gross. So, the illusion can only last so long.
So you’ve, over the years, have documented many, many negative aspects of car culture. And as I was thinking about what I wanted to talk about, it’s funny, the ones I want to talk about are not necessarily the ones that are what this pod is about. The environmental effects on cars, for instance. I feel like, I get it, you get it, everybody listening to this pod gets it. They’re the biggest source of greenhouse gas pollution in the US, they’re the biggest source of particulate pollution. Kills tons of kids, gives kids asthma, tire particles, whatever. We all know the environmental aspects are terrible, but what interests me almost the most is some of these other sort of intangible effects.
So talk, for instance, about the research about how it makes people feel and behave when they are behind the wheel of a car. This is fascinating to me. This is something I feel people intuitively understand, but they don’t necessarily know that other people feel the same way. But they’ve done studies and you literally become a worse person.
Doug Gordon
Yeah.
David Roberts
When you do sit behind the wheel of a car, quite literally.
Doug Gordon
So Sarah wrote this part of the book, so maybe she’d be better to talk about it. I’ll set her up on the podcast. We spoke to Professor Ian Walker, who’s done a lot of research into a phenomenon, what he calls “motonormativity” — sort of a play on heteronormativity or other forms of normativity where, because we don’t really see cars as this force in our lives, or just as you said, “the water we’re swimming in,” they do change our behavior in ways we would never accept in other contexts. And I think this, to me, is really the most fascinating study, because we do, again, we know these studies of people who walk and bike to work are happier than people who spend, you know, 40 minutes behind the wheel of a car.
David Roberts
Losing an hour-long commute is like the equivalent of winning the frigging lottery or something like that in terms of its effect on your happiness. It’s like one of the biggest, most clear boosts to happiness that you can get is not commuting by car.
Doug Gordon
100%. I think every cyclist I know who lost a commute because they started working from home was really upset, whereas every driver I know was very happy. But, Sarah, maybe you want to talk about the motonormativity stuff. I feel that, to me, is absolutely the most fascinating stuff.
Sarah Goodyear
Yeah. Dr. Ian Walker, who’s a British researcher who looks at all of this stuff in great detail, did a really interesting study on motonormativity that looked at, if you ask somebody a question about a social ill and you replaced a car with something else, how would that change the answer? So the example that was most striking was that they asked a question about air pollution, and respondents were asked if they agreed with one of these two statements. The first statement was, “People shouldn’t drive in highly populated areas where other people have to breathe in car fumes.”
The next question was, “People shouldn’t smoke in highly populated areas where other people have to breathe in cigarette fumes.” They went from only 17% agreeing with that statement when it had to do with cars to 75% of people agreeing with it when it had to do with cigarettes. Now, of course, you can say cigarettes aren’t necessary. As Doug often says, “You can’t ride a cigarette to work.” But the idea of the car as antisocial, as something that is disturbing other people, hurting them, causing them anxiety, causing them very direct health harms — the idea that you should be able to put your car in the street and leave it there on public property and that that’s just okay and that, you know, parking or car storage is just a completely acceptable thing when you wouldn’t think of leaving any other possessions out like that in the middle of the street.
David Roberts
I feel like it was some mayor in the course of some reform battles said something to that effect, like, “You don’t have a right to store your refrigerator right out on the street.” It’s not my job to find you a storage spot for your appliances. That’s not my job as mayor.
Doug Gordon
And so, you know, then you sort of start asking yourself, why is it that we accept this? Why is it that we accept this from the automobile or, you know, I always think of the engine noise from muscle cars, for instance. You know, they’re just roaring by and they’re blatting their blats all over the place. And it’s like, can you imagine if that guy just sort of walked into a coffee shop and started yelling at people or something? Or just going “aaaaaaahh”, you know, like, why do we accept all of this from cars? And I think it is something that we had to be trained to.
Sarah Goodyear
And that’s something that, you know, we get into the history of when there were people who did have a living memory of life before cars.
David Roberts
Yeah. This is so wild. The early parts of the book are wild because when cars first came around, people were shocked that they were killing people all the time and that they made streets unsafe. It was not just background. It was not just the water they were swimming in. They’re like, “This is horrible and gross and it sucks.” And that was in, like, the 1930s.
Doug Gordon
Yeah. Yeah. We opened the book with — since Superman has been in the news over the summer with the big movie and all of the right-wing freakout over, “Has Superman gone woke?” because, you know, he’s an immigrant or whatever, Superman was always woke. So, 1939, one of the earliest editions of Superman. We open with a description of this Action Comics story where Clark Kent walks outside of the Daily Planet’s office and sees a friend of his who’s been hit by a hit-and-run driver and killed. And this throws him into a rage. He dons the tights and the cape, and he commandeers the airwaves of the local Metropolis radio station and declares, literally declares war on cars.
And there is a cinematic montage in comic form, obviously, of him destroying an automobile factory, scaring the living daylights out of a drunk driver.
David Roberts
Now that’s woke, guys.
Doug Gordon
Oh, it’s totally woke.
David Roberts
This is woke. This is the kind of woke I can get behind.
Doug Gordon
But if you think about it, Jerry Siegel and Joel Shuster, who created Superman, they were born in a life before cars. And as cars became more prevalent over the course of their lifetime, the 1910s, 1920s, and by the time they created Superman, the 1930s, you know, you had something like 1,000 people a year in New York City being killed by automobiles. A number that’s even unfathomable today when we have only 200, 300 pedestrians being killed every year. And so it absolutely would have been seen as this menace on par with losing people to the Great War.
And we’ve lost that shock because we are sort of like — I know this is not always the perfect example — but the frog in the boiling pot of water.
David Roberts
We’re throwing analogies around all over the place.
Doug Gordon
Yeah, exactly. About it, Sarah, in the book about traffication, we don’t really have a word for the increase of automobiles over the course of even our lifetimes because we just don’t notice it.
David Roberts
Also interesting to me is just on a very concrete level, when you’re in a car — this is a point I think I heard on your podcast originally that always sort of stuck with me — you’re always looking at someone else’s ass, basically. Everyone you’re dealing with has their back turned to you. And on a very deep lizard brain, evolutionary level, people turning their back on you is a sign of disrespect. It’s a sign of hostility. So everyone’s showing you their ass. You’re incapable of communicating with other people, so you’re incapable of interpreting other people’s behavior.
So you just interpret it in the worst way. Do you know what I mean? Just the physics of the situation are set up to make it so that you become kind of a psycho, so that you become kind of a — like a — there’s nothing in the experience that triggers empathy or kindness or patience. Do you know what I mean? Everything about it.
Doug Gordon
Nobody ever becomes a better person behind the wheel of a car.
David Roberts
Yeah, no, it’s funny. Everybody will tell you that. I’m horrible behind the wheel.
Doug Gordon
Same, same.
Sarah Goodyear
And again, this is something that we’ve known for a long time. You know, there’s an old Disney movie called Motormania that came out in the 1950s.
David Roberts
Which you could release tomorrow.
Sarah Goodyear
You could release it tomorrow. And we write about it in a book. And it’s, you know, Goofy comes out of his house as Mr. Walker, and he’s just a lovely guy smelling the flowers. And then he gets into his car and becomes Mr. Wheeler and he’s a psychopath. And we’ve all had it happen. I’ve had it happen to me. Everybody has had this experience. And the thing that I ask myself constantly is, again, why are we willing to accept this? We know this is true. We see our loved ones suffering from road rage, and we feel it in ourselves.
We feel our blood pressure going up. We can feel even the health effects that it’s having on us to have that kind of rage. Why do we accept this? We accept it because we have to. Because we have created infrastructure that makes it so that in order to be an enfranchised citizen in this nation and to fully participate in the economy and the health care system and the education system of our nation, such as it still is, you have to have a car. Otherwise, you’re second class. And guess what? One third of Americans, roughly, can’t drive.
David Roberts
That’s wild.
Sarah Goodyear
Children, old people.
David Roberts
I bet nobody, no one knows that, no one knows that.
Sarah Goodyear
People with disabilities, people who don’t have driver’s licenses for various reasons. So actually, there’s this enormous population of people who just are literally sucking it up because we won’t admit that there need to be alternatives to motor vehicles.
David Roberts
Well, you saw this in the fight about the congestion pricing in New York, it is simply an empirical fact that more people come into New York on the subway than driving. So this is going to help more people. But if you followed the public discourse about it, it was as though the people who aren’t driving are simply invisible. Simply don’t exist. Literally some politicians, you get the vibe that they literally don’t know about those people, like they’re mole people or something, that they literally only see drivers or only can only imagine drivers. And these are politicians in New York.
Doug Gordon
I mean, it’s maddening that that’s the case in New York, where it’s like, not even close. But that’s part of the motonormativity as well, I believe, it’s that “who do politicians see?” And also, cars take up a lot of space. And so they give the illusion of primacy. If you were to walk out on my street, you would assume everybody here has a car, because save for the one fire hydrant that may or may not be parked up right now, every space on the block is occupied by a car.
But two thirds of the people in my neighborhood don’t own a car. And so it gives this illusion of primacy. And there’s also the other thing. When we’re talking about sort of activism and social movements, who speaks up the most? We’re seeing this in our politics right now. It’s the people who have something to lose.
Who doesn’t know that they have to speak up? You know, I often say it’s impossible to organize the tenants of an affordable housing development that hasn’t been built yet. And that’s the same for bike lanes or transit use. You can get the drivers on the street to show up to a meeting because they’re going to lose three parking spaces. But you can’t get the 300 people an hour who might bike down that street if it were safe to show up to the meeting.
David Roberts
Yeah, that’s all of progressive politics. The trick of progressive politics in a nutshell, right there. Well, I want to talk about one more concrete harm of cars that is fascinating to me personally. I interviewed the Bruntletts about this. You know, the couple, they’re living over in Delft now.
Doug Gordon
Chris and Melissa, we interview them in the book too. Yep.
David Roberts
They’re, you know, sending out envy-worthy Instagram posts constantly about their, you know, they’re like, “Oh, our 13-year-old daughter left and took a train across the country to visit a friend today. She’ll be back in two days. It’s fine.”
Doug Gordon
Yeah, I would call them the diplomats in the war on cars.
David Roberts
It’s alternatively sort of dreamy and maddening. But one of the things that they talked about in their book that really struck me as just intuitively struck me as true. And of course it’s backed up by studies too, is the effect on children. If you think about the standard suburban child’s life now, they’re sort of in a space, then they’re in a car, they’re in a sort of tended, you know, surveilled space, then they’re in a car, then they’re in another tended surveilled space, then they’re in another car, et cetera, et cetera. At no point are they doing basic wayfinding.
Yes, basic, like autonomy. Finding my own way around the world. They just don’t do that on the most elementary level, and they don’t develop those skills. So talk a little bit, Sarah. I know you’ve read a bunch of stuff about this. Just about what car life does to kids and the advantages of the alternative for kids.
Sarah Goodyear
Yeah, I mean, there’s tons of really interesting research about this. One study I wrote about was by a guy named Bruce Appleyard. It solicited maps from children. It said, “Draw a map of your route to school.” And the kids who were driven to school would draw a dot with their house and a dot with their school and maybe a couple of turns in a road and a couple of landmarks. But it was pretty basic and not really having much to do with the actual topography of the trip. Kids who walked or biked to school had much more detailed maps that included many more turns and details like trees and “here’s my friend’s house.”
And this research has been replicated in a few different places since then. It’s pretty robust. And I think that you really can make the case that kids are kind of lost in space, if you will, because they just aren’t oriented. And also they’re just missing — it’s more than the orientation, although that’s obviously extremely important. They’re missing the texture of the place where they live, the sort of the fabric that, the details that they see that they learn so much from. “Oh, here’s a butterfly or here’s a bird that is in one kind of tree. And then there’s a different kind of bird that sits on the ground.”
I mean, really basic stuff like that.
David Roberts
Yeah, and seasons, weather.
Sarah Goodyear
You know, the way that one side of the street is sunny in the morning and the other side is sunny in the afternoon. And depending on what the weather is, you move to the other side of the street. Remember that song, “The Sunny Side of the Street?” I don’t think that kids these days necessarily think about the benefits of what being on the sunny side of the street might be. So, you know, that is one, just one of many ways that it hurts kids. And then another really, really robust set of research has done that shows that kids who take active transportation to school are much, much more prepared and energized to start their day.
And they come to school and they’re ready to learn, and they’re already activated. And if they are driven to school, that’s not happening.
David Roberts
The other aspect I would throw in there on the kids front is that one of the broader discussions happening around childhood and kids generally in America is this notion of helicopter parenting. Kids are being tended and watched and curated, and they have less and less time to go out and explore on their own. And if you’re a parent and you let your kid go out and walk to the store, you risk getting arrested for doing so. And so everybody’s pointing to the negative effects on children of this. But when they talk about the causes, they’re like, “Why are parents hovering more?”
And “Why, why, why?” And to me, the answer is just like, “It’s cars, y’all. It’s cars.” That’s all about cars. You can’t let your kids go anywhere without you, because cars.
Doug Gordon
Yeah. You know, there’s that couple in North Carolina who let their kids walk, I think, to the grocery store. And sadly, the two boys, I think one of them was killed by a driver as they crossed a really busy street. And the parents were arrested. They’re, like, facing a criminal conviction.
David Roberts
Yes. This is the lesson we take. Let’s arrest the parents.
Doug Gordon
You know, just doing a normal thing that any child should be able to do. And it was just so harmful for them. You know, there’s so much talk right now about the anxious generation and smartphones and things like that. And I don’t want to downplay the real negative effects of social media on children, but, you know, I’ve talked about this constantly. I have a teenage daughter who’s 15. I have a son who is about to turn 13, and they’re on their screens and their phones as much as any other kid. And we have all the battles of, “Okay, you know, it’s dinner time. Put the phones away.”
But I also live in a place where if my daughter wants to just pick up and go to the movies with friends, because five minutes ago, she got a text like, “Hey, what are you doing?” She can go do it. And there’s a park a block from my street, and my son can just go there. We don’t usually do play dates because we just sort of say, “Let’s go see who’s at the park.” And he can go pick up eggs for us at the grocery store without.
David Roberts
Again, this is another thing: If all the infrastructure is about cars, you lose public places, so you lose spontaneous mixing, like you’re talking about, which is, again, that sounds like sort of a whatever, a casual thing. But you read the research, casual, spontaneous mixing is the foundation for human friendships and development. Like, it’s literally how we connect with other people. And you just can’t have that in a car. So anywhere, if you want to meet up with someone else in a car-focused area, you have to plan it. Spontaneity goes out the window. Even though people think of cars as freedom. And “If I want to be spontaneous, I can do it,” but it’s really the opposite to me.
Sarah Goodyear
And not for nothing, it’s freedom for kids and it’s freedom for parents, and parents can have their rich lives as well if their kids have this kind of freedom. You know, I mentioned Bruce Appleyard earlier. Donald Appleyard, his father, did research in the late sixties in San Francisco about different streets that had different levels of traffic and what the social life was like on those streets.
David Roberts
I remember that one, that chart. I remember the visual.
Sarah Goodyear
Yeah. And people on streets that were classified as light traffic had three times as many local friends and twice as many local acquaintances as those on heavy-speed.
David Roberts
It’s a direct relationship. It’s very striking. The more traffic there is, the less human-to-human contact there is. Almost like mechanically.
Sarah Goodyear
And we talk about the loneliness epidemic constantly. But I looked at Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General under Biden’s report on the loneliness epidemic, which is a lovely and very important piece of work. It doesn’t mention —
David Roberts
It’s maddening. It’s maddening. It’s cars, guys. It’s cars that’s doing that. Again with the fish and water thing. I’m like, “Jesus!” We’re all stranded in our suburban homes. We don’t see one another unless we call and make explicit plans to do so. There’s no spontaneous bumping into one another anymore. There’s no wayfinding for our kids. There’s no autonomy, there’s no spontaneity.
Sarah Goodyear
And there’s no mixing between. It adds to polarization, political polarization, and class divides, and racial divides, and all of it.
David Roberts
I think this was someone on your show also, again, who said something like — I have all these stray bits of your pod floating around in my head — but someone on your show was talking about, I think, biking through, I think, Amsterdam or something. And she was making the point that there are not a lot of lights. These are not light-governed intersections in Amsterdam. They’re mostly just like, “figure it out.” And she said, when you ride a bike through Amsterdam, you are a dozen times every minute making small adjustments to other people, and you are accommodating yourself and coordinating with other people in these micro ways over and over and over again as you ride through Amsterdam.
And it just has an effect. You realize you’re living among other people and you’re involved in a common project and you live in a common place and you’re together in the place. You know, it’s just very basic stuff.
Doug Gordon
And also, David, I mean, you were on our show and I really remember something. One of the things that stuck out to me about that interview was you said that when you live in a suburb where you just have to drive everywhere, you refer to the car as your “land yacht” and that you steer this land yacht around. Sometimes you have to spend a lot of time looking for a place to moor this thing, to dock this thing. That’s frustrating. And then nearly all of your interactions with other people who you don’t know are transactional. It’s the barista at Starbucks, it’s the Target clerk.
David Roberts
Those are the people you spontaneously meet — service employees.
Doug Gordon
And if you do bump into a friend, maybe it’s at the grocery store because they’re shopping, shopping at the same time. But when you live in walkable, dense places, and I should be clear, we’re not talking about every place needs to become Manhattan. We’re talking about your idyllic Mayberry small town where you can walk Main Street. Just Main Street USA. You bump into friends and you bump into someone you know from work or a college buddy you haven’t seen in years. Or you see the person who works at your dry cleaners walking home from work.
And they are more than just the person who takes your cash in exchange for clean clothes. They are a human being who is just like you living their life.
David Roberts
Well, the point I try to make in a community like that, when you are not dependent on cars, when a new person comes in, it’s additive. Oh, maybe they’ll like open a business or, you know, be a customer or be a friend or whatever. But if it’s car dependent, every new person that comes in is just mathematically a competitor for limited parking and street space. Every new person is a burden. Every new person is a bad thing. I mean, it’s very, very basic. If you live in a car-dependent area, every new person that comes in makes life incrementally worse for you. And that right there sets up the NIMBY dynamic.
Doug Gordon
It’s parking all the way down, I think, you know, every fight that you see about an affordable housing development, someone opening up a new daycare, you know, on what used to be a vacant lot, comes down to, “This is going to add more traffic to my neighborhood.” We are rezoning just as we speak the Gowanus neighborhood, which is literally a stone’s throw from where I live, they’re going to add 8,000 people to my neighborhood. I haven’t noticed it so far because, you know, there are people moving in and it’s just like, “Okay, I might have to wait 30 more seconds to grab a slice of pizza, you know, at my neighborhood joint.”
David Roberts
There’s just people around. It’s very difficult to. This is something I have trouble communicating with people. You know, my family went to visit Mexico City last year and I don’t know if you’ve been to Mexico City, but it’s just vibrant, just hopping. There’s just people on the street everywhere. And my son asked, he’s like, “Is this a holiday or is there a festival or something happening?” I was like, “No, this is just a city with people in it.” You know what I mean? It’s alien to American sensibilities. But it feels good to be out and among people.
Doug Gordon
I agree.
Sarah Goodyear
Yeah, I think so too. And I’m frankly kind of terrified of what the developments of the last couple of years, couple five years mean for even the kind of transactional interactions that you’re talking about that you have at your Starbucks that you, you drive through. They’re trying to eliminate customer service positions so that you’re not even going to have a barista.
David Roberts
So your life is entirely behind a screen — becomes one. And think about the self-driving cars too. That’s taking what little bit of active agency you have left and making it you a passive consumer of screens in that too. So you’re just a passive consumer of screens at this point, literally everywhere, at every moment of every day. And other people become entirely theoretical to you.
Doug Gordon
It’s funny because, you know, you’re talking about self-driving cars. One of the things we talk about just briefly in the book, because we don’t really get into actually self-driving cars all that much until the very end, because our feeling is that, you know, the problem of cars is not going to be solved with other different cars.
David Roberts
This is a big question on people’s minds. I threw it out on social media. This is one of the questions I get back. There’s this dilemma among people who are sort of advocating for livability and urban livability. And you want to say simply switching out gas cars for electric cars is going to leave most of the problems untouched. Most of the problems have to do with geometry. It’s just cars are big, right? And if everybody has one, they’re going to be congested all over the place. But on the other hand, EVs are a big step up over gas cars.
And switching out the gas fleet for the EVs is something that’s very important and necessary. So you don’t want to stray over into hostility toward EVs, although I do see that in some quarters of the urbanist community are just outright hostile to EVs, so I just wonder, how do you navigate that? And this sort of the same question kind of applies to AVs, although AVs raise other questions.
Doug Gordon
I think it’s a pretty easy question to navigate. I think there is a sort of reflexive knee-jerk opposition to electric vehicles or autonomous vehicles among some in the sort of anti-car movement. But the party line for the podcast is, look, you live in a place like New York, Boston, San Francisco, Milwaukee, places that are or used to be vibrant downtown cores. Everything there should be based around walkability, bikeability, and transit. In the places where people are going to need cars for a long time — and that’s most places in the United States — we absolutely need to shift people to EVs as quickly as possible to stop burning fossil fuels and to really deal with the problem of climate change.
But you know, I think there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
David Roberts
But there are trade-offs, don’t you think? I mean, there are going to be cases where policy that encourages EVs either displaces or renders impossible — for instance, just to make a concrete example, you have a curb space, do you put an EV charger there? And if you have an EV charger there, does it become more difficult to put a bike lane there? In other words, there are sometimes trade-offs.
Doug Gordon
Yeah, I think sort of like you were saying earlier, it’s all downstream of the built environment and infrastructure. So yes, in a suburban place where there’s no alternative to driving, it might make sense right now to put that EV charger on the curbside or in the parking lot. In my neighborhood, they did want to put curbside EV charging stations in. And a lot of us said, “Hey, wait a minute, 2/3 of this neighborhood does not own a car. Why are we locking in that space? It could be bike parking, it could be a future bike lane.”
And so I think a lot of these things, what we’re trying to argue in the book is we don’t expect most people to read this book and slam it shut at the end and throw their car keys in the nearest river. We don’t think that’s realistic for most people. But we want them to ask that question that you’re asking when their town comes to them and says, “Hey, we want to put like 20 EV chargers on Main Street.” And they could say, “Hey, wait a minute, couldn’t we turn that into outdoor dining instead? Couldn’t we turn that into bike parking?”
We want them to start, if not being antagonistic to these questions, at least being open to letting them be discussed.
Sarah Goodyear
And also, I’d like to talk about the continuum of electric vehicles. That is, not every electric vehicle has to be a Ford F-150.
David Roberts
Some of them can be Hummers.
Sarah Goodyear
Exactly. But we haven’t talked about car bloat and the enormification of cars in the United States of America, which is happening a little bit in other places, too. But I was just in the UK and talking to a woman who researches SUV size, and an SUV drove past us, and she said, “Can you believe the size of that thing?” And I said, “That’s a small SUV in the United States.”
David Roberts
You could park that in the trunk of an F-150.
Sarah Goodyear
Exactly. But I think that in their eagerness to appeal to the amygdala of the American consumer, the American auto companies have been like “Look, EVs can be really fucking huge too.”
David Roberts
Yeah, you could be a tough guy in an EV.
Sarah Goodyear
You can have an oversized EV too. Well, okay, guess what? We could make electric vehicles that are sized completely differently and that serve a variety of functions along a continuum of need. This is transportation — vehicles should be thought of as tools.
David Roberts
Yeah. And I’m a little radicalized about this, Sarah, because nothing infuriates me more than when you bring this up and people respond, “Oh, well, that’s just what Americans want.” As though the car companies are just eager to be of service. They just want to know, “What do you want? We’ll make whatever you want.” That’s such a naive, ridiculous view. They are pushing these things on us because they make a lot of money. The idea that Americans uniquely alone just sort of — what, through some genetic mutation, love big cars. It makes no sense. We’ve swallowed that story so easily.
Sarah Goodyear
There were some very deliberate policy moves made that made this more profitable. And as soon as the auto companies realized the loopholes that they could drive through, they drove through them and then they made the vehicle so big you couldn’t get through a loophole. But yeah, I mean, this is the thing. It’s like again, you go to other parts of the world and you see — I mean, I was in Milan and, you know, I saw guys in their beautiful suits going to work in these little sort of electric bubble vehicles.
David Roberts
Little three-wheelers, like jitneys.
Sarah Goodyear
Yeah. And there’s all sorts of things that could be out there. And those vehicles do truly mitigate the impact that cars have. So I know that the whole micro-mobility field has been very slow to get off the ground, and it’s a sketchy area in terms of the marketing of it and so forth. But I think that there could be some easy wins here if we had policy that encouraged infrastructure that could accommodate sort of golf-cart-sized —
David Roberts
Yeah, this is another infrastructure chicken-and-egg thing. If you just throw those things out into normal bike lanes, you’re going to get conflicts.
Sarah Goodyear
Well, there shouldn’t be in bike lanes, they should be in their own lanes. And, you know, and then so again, just think of it. 150 years ago, there weren’t any cars, and we managed to construct all of that. So look at what clever people we are. We surely can do better than this.
Doug Gordon
I think that’s the thing that most confounds people about our movement, which is that you often hear, “Oh, you’re Luddites. You know, cars were just the progression of technology. First there were trains, then there were bicycles, and now there are cars. And eventually there will be flying cars and all the rest.” And, you know, I often say that the solution to the 21st century’s problems can be found in 19th century technology. And that’s really confounding. It’s buses, it’s trains, it’s bikes.
David Roberts
Well, go to Tokyo for a couple of weeks and come back to any US city and tell me that cars are futuristic.
Doug Gordon
We joke on the podcast about something we call “Copenhagen syndrome,” which is that feeling any American gets when they travel to a country with first-world transportation options.
David Roberts
I’m still suffering nine years later.
Doug Gordon
Just getting home from the airport where you live could be enough to throw you into a depression for months. I mean, look, I think we do understand this intuitively that a life after cars, a life with fewer cars is better. Nobody goes to these places. Nobody goes to Amsterdam or Paris or Disneyland or Vatican Square and says, “You know, what would make this place so cool, so much better? Robot cars. Bunch of robot cars going up and down Main Street, USA, or the canals in Amsterdam.”
David Roberts
I don’t know. I feel like there is a small class of emotionally stunted, dysfunctional tech guys who would go to Copenhagen and be like, “Too many people. Ugh, I have to interact with too many people. I should be floating above this in some sort of pod with, you know, an avatar down there, dealing with all the people.” The people who are running things are broken in some fundamental way that I think is not reflected in the populace.
Doug Gordon
That’s what Elon Musk wants.
Sarah Goodyear
If we could only make it so that they couldn’t go anywhere in a car for a month, and they had to walk, bike, and ride transit everywhere, they would be different people at the end.
David Roberts
Yeah. Make Sean Duffy actually use New York City.
Sarah Goodyear
I really. I would so love to have Sean Duffy — but imagine that Elon Musk had to walk around. These people don’t touch grass. They don’t actually know what is going on out there. So obviously we’re under this very sinister oligarchy, yes. These people don’t have any connection to reality. But again, I think that that’s an opportunity and to get back to sort of the provocation and, you know, leftists saying what they actually mean and what they actually want, instead of trying to be rightists, saying that billionaires and massive corporations and international fossil fuel conglomerates are the ones who are trying to keep you in your car and to keep you from enjoying the freedom and the greenery and the fresh air and the interaction with your friends and neighbors and your children’s joy, that that is what the billionaires are trying to keep you from.
David Roberts
And this is becoming a cliché, but I think maybe I heard this on your pod also. Another thing someone said that always stuck with me is that reforms in the direction of walkability and stuff like that improve lives —
Doug Gordon
Yeah, that’s my line.
David Roberts
— but no one makes more money.
Doug Gordon
Yes.
David Roberts
In fact, net GDP might go down because there’s just fewer transactional — do you know what I mean? Everybody’s just living. Everybody’s just out there living. They’re not spending or making money.
Sarah Goodyear
They’re not making a $600 car payment a month.
David Roberts
This is a whole family of reforms that there are no capitalist advocates for because no one stands to make a bunch of money.
Doug Gordon
No venture capital firm like Marc Andreessen is not giving me, you know, $700 million for my brilliant idea of just “walk to the grocery store.”
David Roberts
Dematerialize, buy less.
Doug Gordon
But I do think we actually improve our lives in many ways and economically. And that’s part of the problem too — is that we know that these places are better. Why? Because the prices reflect that when you have a walkable, bikeable, transit-friendly, pleasant urban core, housing prices go through the roof.
David Roberts
I always wonder about the people who are watching Fox. I know maybe they’re not thinking a lot, but insofar as they do, do they ever just wonder: “I’m told that these cities are crime-ridden, immigrant-ridden, homeless-ridden hellholes where you have to wade through urine and fight off marauders to get to the store. Why, if that is true, does everybody want to live there?” Why are people knocking on the door? Why are prices so high? Do they ever wonder why people want to go live in crime-ridden hellholes? How do I square that circle?
But no, there’s no...
Doug Gordon
And I think to the point of advocacy, it’s maybe we need to spend a little less time trying to convince the mouth-breathers who read the New York Post and a little more time activating the people who — you shut down a street to cars and you open it up to people and suddenly everyone’s dining outdoors. Do those people know that they have to fight for these things? That they don’t just happen? I think we as people on the left, as progressives should spend — and I think social media has sort of ruined this for us, we spend so much time arguing with people who will never agree with us. We need to activate the latent support.
David Roberts
Well, how do you reach those people? And that’s the thing, just by doing. Who are they listening to?
Sarah Goodyear
David, I have the answer. And I do it every day. I just, I ride the subway up and down New York City, and everybody I see who looks lost or confused, I help them. And by doing that, I’m showing them what a beautiful life we have here in New York.
Doug Gordon
It is wonderful.
Sarah Goodyear
They are immediately included in it as soon as they arrive. But I’m kidding. But I’m not kidding because I do think, and Doug and I have been talking about this, that empathy is really important in advocacy. And it’s something that the 90 plus percent of Americans who live in car-dependent environments are not our enemies. These are our people. This is our nation. This is our country. And I’m not leaving it for one thing. And what, what’s interesting is once you open the conversation and I’ve found this has gotten easier to do over the last 20 years, once you open the conversation, they’re like, “Oh, my God, that would be so amazing if I didn’t have to drive every day. I can’t even imagine how great that must be.” And I have this conversation a lot with people from all over the country, and the message is kind of getting through. I think that that is a much easier conversation to have than it used to be.
David Roberts
It is a political question. Right? I mean, that’s what I mean. You are rendering it political for people. Another aspect of this is, and I don’t know if you guys have addressed this directly on the show, but everybody, I think, feels that something about COVID and the post-COVID recovery has made all of US life, public life, crude and mean. And you just, I can see it just walking around on Seattle streets. The way drivers behave these days, it is worse than it was pre-COVID. I’m not imagining —
Sarah Goodyear
No, you’re not.
David Roberts
People are insane. And it’s not just driving. It’s just waiting in line. It’s just everybody is on edge. Everybody. No one trusts anybody else. And I really feel like, you know, to get back to the loneliness epidemic and all that, we can sell walkable, dense life as a balm to that. And I feel like people want an answer to that. Everybody feels that, and no one knows what to do about it.
Doug Gordon
Yeah, I think. Not to be too grandiose about it, but I do think cities are sort of the answer to fascism.
David Roberts
Yes!
Doug Gordon
New York City is not without its faults. We have racists and all kinds of bad people who live here, too. But we also have maybe the greatest multiracial democratic society in the history of the world. And I think it’s a model for other places of lots of people who don’t ostensibly have much in common with each other. But you get on the subway, you go to Central Park, you go to Prospect Park, you go to your local bodega, and it’s just different types of people all getting along.
David Roberts
And they’ll all have enormous catalogs of small things that annoy them. But none of them would leave New York. All of them love it. I mean, it is, in a sense, the frictions and the difficulties that give it texture, that give it substance. You know what I mean? That make it a life.
Doug Gordon
And that gives it, as we’re talking about, empathy. Because when you get on the train and you see a person who looks different than you, is a different age, a different race, different class. They’re just going to work like you are.
David Roberts
Yes. Everybody schlubbing at home on the subway looking exhausted at the end of the day is the same.
Doug Gordon
And they’re not really in your way, you know. Yes, subways get crowded and you might want a seat, not get one, but they’re not in your way in the same thing of, “Oh, there’s one spot left on my street for me to store my giant metal box. And, oh, no, you with your giant metal box, you stole it from me.” Like you said, these things are additive. So I do think, you know, where is the fight against fascism happening? It is happening in small towns. You are seeing people at town halls speaking up. But where it’s really happening is, you know, here in New York City, in town squares, in places where people can congregate easily. That is a big thing.
David Roberts
Cities have always been the response to fascism.
Sarah Goodyear
Which is why fascists hate them so much.
David Roberts
Yes. They always idealize rural areas because it’s more homogenous, it’s more controllable, etc. Cities are big, vast, uncontrollable, generative factories of new ideas and new ways of living. And if you are sitting on top of the status quo and you don’t want anything to change, cities are a threat to you. People allowed to mix freely will come up with all kinds of crazy cool shit.
Sarah Goodyear
That’s what makes the subway truly dangerous for Sean Duffy.
David Roberts
Yes.
Doug Gordon
You might see that that immigrant sitting across the way from you on the subway is just a dad like me, is just going to work like me, is not scary. We need to build empathy. And the way to do that is to get more people — again, it doesn’t have to be Manhattan — but just get more people in situations where they are not behind steel, glass, and plastic in this isolated bubble.
Sarah Goodyear
And just to get back to the book really quickly, what we really hope the book can be is, if you are somebody who is sort of marginally aware of this and you’d like to deepen your awareness, it works for you. But if you’re somebody who’s pretty aware that this is going on, this is the kind of book that you could buy for that person in your family who’s maybe open to being challenged a little bit, and you could give it to them and say, “Hey, read this and tell me if you can see the world the same way after you’ve read it.” Because that’s what we’re really trying to do. We’re really trying to give people the information they need, first of all, to just understand that there is a problem that actually is susceptible to solutions. It’s not the laws of physics.
David Roberts
Well, it’s so maddening, Sarah. It’s like everything else. It’s like universal healthcare. It’s like anything else. It’s not sci-fi. Look, turn on BBC — literally anywhere else. What is it? 32 of the 33 developed nations have figured out universal healthcare. Clearly figureoutable, you know, and it’s the same thing with low-car cities. It’s been done. It’s not sci-fi. You can just go, you can go visit one.
Doug Gordon
Yeah, I heard your interview with Alon Levy, and you know, we seem to be allergic to learning from other countries in this way.
David Roberts
Yes. I don’t get it.
Doug Gordon
I think you know that that’s changing. Sarah and I were talking about people are traveling a bit more in our post-COVID, “post-COVID” age. The Internet has opened things up to new ways of thinking and seeing. So I do think things are changing. It’s just we need those people in positions of power to start saying “This is a good thing for my city, for my state, for my country.”
David Roberts
I think I may have even said this on your pod when I was on your pod. But if I were a billionaire, I would just be taking classes of high school seniors, you know, 20, 30 at a time, just taking them to Barcelona, putting them up for a week. You know what I mean? Not requiring anything. Just be like, “Oh, just go walk around, have fun and bring them back home and just do that with one class after another.” I would do that all year round. Because if you give people that taste, if they see it, if they feel what it means to just walk around and mix people and to be able to hear conversations, you know, to be able to hear and not have that din, that roar everywhere, you know, just to feel it.
That would do more than all the arguments.
Doug Gordon
That’s what radicalized me was a trip to Amsterdam for an unrelated purpose. And I saw all the people, you know, a pregnant woman, an elderly man riding a bicycle, a seven-year-old riding a bicycle. And I thought, “Man, this, this is pretty cool. I should, I should think more about this stuff.”
David Roberts
Yeah, well, people should travel. Well, you guys, we’re overtime. Thank you so much. I knew this would be fun. Thank you for all your work over the years and good luck with the book.
Doug Gordon
Thanks so much.
Sarah Goodyear
Thanks to you, David.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you next time.
