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Dispatches from Book Tour, Part 2
Dispatches from Book Tour, Part 2
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About this episode
Traveling across several U.S. cities, the hosts share vivid impressions from Providence, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Denver, and Boulder, highlighting each city's unique urban design, transit challenges, and vibrant advocacy communities. They discuss issues like highway expansion, parking overabundance, transit funding crises, and homelessness, while celebrating local culture, food, and grassroots activism. The episode also reflects on the emotional impact of meeting passionate advocates and the complexities of building walkable, bike-friendly cities amid sprawling development and political obstacles. A surprise flight diversion to Detroit humorously caps their journey.
Topics:
urban advocacy
transit funding
highway expansion
bike infrastructure
parking issues
homelessness crisis
city walkability
community engagement
regional differences
book tour experiences
Cars:
Buick Century
We are back home in Brooklyn but we can't stop talking about everything we saw out on the road on our Life After Cars book tour. Listen for our takes on the second leg of our trip, which took us from Providence to Austin to Houston to Denver to Boulder…and then ended with a surprise diversion to an unexpected destination. We've seen so much along the way—like just how destructive freeway expansions can be. But also how cities can reclaim automobile infrastructure for humans! Plus, a shout-out to all the people who took such good care of us along the way.
Our book tour continues! Find out where we'll be next at lifeaftercars.com.
Support The War on Cars on Patreon and receive exclusive access to ad-free versions of regular episodes, Patreon-only bonus content, Discord access, invitations to live events, merch discounts and free stickers!
Order our new book, Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile, out now from Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Thanks to Cleverhood for sponsoring this episode. Listen to this episode for the latest discount code and get the best rain gear for walking and cycling.
www.thewaroncars.org
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So, we're recording right now, and it is pouring outside in Brooklyn.
Yeah, it's one of those rains where they actually send you an alert on your phone about it.
Yeah, I would like an alert on my phone that tells me to wear a clever hood.
That would be a really good way of making these kind of dire announcements a little more
cheery.
That's right, because if you do put on your clever hood, then you could just go outside,
you're not made of sugar, you won't melt, you will be able to enjoy the day.
I rode a bike over here wearing my clever hood.
I walked over here wearing my clever hood.
We both ignored the emergency warnings.
Maybe we're going to get hit by flying debris, but we will be stylish and we will be dry
in our clever hoods.
And you too could feel this sense of confidence in the face of even rather alarming weather
alerts.
Courses of the war on cars can save 15% on the best rain here for walking and cycling
now through the end of December with code BE A GIVER.
Just go to cleverhood.com slash war on cars.
Clever hood, don't be alarmed by the weather.
Just check your phone.
This is the War on Cars.
I'm Sarah Goodyear, here with my co-host, Doug Gordon.
Hello Doug.
Hello.
How you doing?
Good.
Tired, but getting some rest from our book tour.
I've been sleeping in a lot of days, but getting a lot done and it's great to be back
home in Brooklyn.
Yeah, it feels really good to be back in Brooklyn.
Brooklyn, we love you.
We're in our home studio here with our home engineer, Josh Wilcox.
God bless.
I feel like Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz.
There's no place like home.
That's so true.
And you were there, and you were there.
Right, right, right, right.
We got back a few days ago and here we are sitting down to record this.
We took a slightly circuitous route home from the mountain west.
We'll get into that later.
We'll talk about that later.
Yeah.
This is going to be a full rundown of the second leg of our book tour.
But first, we have a little business.
We are on Patreon at patreon.com slash the war on cars pod.
And of course, our book, which is the whole reason we are out on tour.
Life After Cars is out now.
You can go to lifeaftercars.com, get it at any bookstore, preferably an independent
local bookstore.
We loved working with them around the country.
And also, we got the third leg of our book tour, which is basically many legs that we're
going to talk about really quickly.
It's toes.
I don't know what it is.
Head, shoulders, knees, and toes, and legs.
We are going to be in Miami.
Miami in January.
I'm into that.
Thank goodness.
With Chris and Melissa Bruntlett, who we love, who have been on the show before,
they have a new book, Women Changing Cities.
And we are teaming up with them with Transit Alliance Miami for an amazing event
in Coral Gables.
Yeah, I'm really excited about that.
That's going to be fun and sparkly.
That's like a Superman meets up with the Avengers.
I don't know what the exactly, it's a crossover event.
Yes.
Then we're going to be in Jersey City, Columbus, Ohio, with the Ohio State
University, go Buckeyes.
We're going to be in Pittsburgh or bike PGH.
And then big news, we're going to be in Toronto with Cycle Toronto.
Yeah, I'm really looking forward to Toronto.
We're going to try to spend a few days there because, of course, that is,
in some ways, the home origin place of the War on Cars podcast.
And we'll get into explaining that when we go to Toronto.
But I realize we're saying Toronto.
I'm saying Toronto.
Yeah, I just heard a little tea in there.
I definitely said it.
We got to work on it.
I'm trying to split the difference.
I've had many debates with people from that fine city about this.
Well, we'll get to Canada and we'll say sorry a lot because that's what they do up there.
Sorry.
Yeah.
Yes.
And then we're going to be going back to DC for the National Bike Summit.
Yeah, which is going to be really exciting.
And we're going to have some great news about how that's going to work
and what it's going to look like that we'll be announcing soon.
All right.
So let's get into all the cities we visited on this most recent round.
And as we said last time, there's a sort of speed-dating element to this where,
you know, like you have to get to know each city really quickly
and you get feelings for that city, you know.
I think we said, fuck, Mary, kill.
Well, that's what you said.
Yeah, we, I'm taking, it's called the War on Cars.
It's not called the Doug Gordon show, by the way.
So first, we were in Providence right after Thanksgiving.
And Sarah, I want you to go first because I grew up in the Boston area.
I have spent a lot of time in Providence.
And you have not spent quite as much time up there.
What were your thoughts?
Well, Providence, I will say, was not in its best light when we were there
because it was really cold and pouring rain.
So that considered, it looked great.
I really like the bones of downtown Providence.
You've got a lot of beautiful architecture.
You've got a lot of very human scale streets.
And they've been doing a lot of work to reclaim the riverside over the years.
They've got a great new pedestrian bridge in.
And, you know, it had a feeling of a place.
A pedestrian bridge, by the way, built on an old highway.
The pylons that they use for that bridge are from the old highway.
So great reuse of old car infrastructure.
Yeah. And the whole place just kind of had a feeling of, you know,
like that there was a lot of potential that could be activated there.
And it was a little hard to judge because of the weather and the time of year.
Like, what would that look in the summertime?
Having lived in Maine myself for eight years,
I know that New England cities look very different in the fall and winter
than they do in the spring and summer.
So that said, and the theater that we were in, in Providence,
was also really beautiful.
And of course, the advocates were amazing.
So I had a pretty good feeling about Providence,
but it felt like it needed more activation.
Yeah, that was the uptown theater, by the way, beautifully renovated.
I will say that on our West Coast leg of the tour,
we were haunted by I-5 almost the entire time,
from Seattle all the way down to San Diego.
This time around, you know, Providence,
we were only in the Northeast for just a little bit.
I-95 really splits that city in just terrible ways.
And, you know, you would walk from one side to the other.
The theater was on the other side of I-95 from downtown.
And you can hear it.
You know, that's one of the big themes of these highways,
is no matter where you are,
you can hear the raging river of traffic
that is just out of sight.
So yeah, I like Providence.
Maybe I'll be insulting people from Providence,
if I call it mini Boston, but it has, you know,
it's kind of built up at the same time,
and it has a similar history in our revolutionary period.
And it does have, yeah, great bones.
Also, I'll just say, home of cleverhood.
So it was appropriate that it was raining.
Yeah, and then we did get to go have weenies
at the New York system, a hot dog place.
Well, you had a hot dog.
I had grilled cheese.
Yes, that's right.
And I will say that that was,
that kind of encapsulated Providence's charm to me.
There's, you know, bright orange and yellow booths
in this very old-timey place,
these old-timey counter guys.
Old-timey being what, like the 1950s or 60s?
I mean, like it's, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was a great little place.
It's the kind of place I feel like in college
I would have gone to at two in the morning
to stave off a hangover.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's got a kind of mid-century,
mid-20th century charm.
It was cool.
And I think that a lot of Providence
has that kind of retro charm of different eras.
Some of it's gorgeous 19th century architecture.
Some of it is kind of cool mid-century modern stuff.
And there's too many cars,
but I did sense a lot of great potential
and the thing that is one of the big fights
that's going on there right now has to do with transit.
And we're gonna be talking about transit
more in this episode,
but RIPTA, which is the Rhode Island
Public Transit Authority is under real threat
with funding cuts.
And so that was a big theme for the advocates.
The evening we were there was save RIPTA.
I got a save RIPTA t-shirt,
one of the great t-shirts that I got along the way.
And I just think that they're also talking about,
they have a transit center downtown,
the Kennedy Transit,
which has not yet been renamed the Kennedy Trump,
Trump Kennedy Transit Plaza.
Thank God, but they are talking about moving it.
And I think that would be a real shame
because it has this beautiful central location
that kind of says transit is important to this region
and putting it on the edges of the downtown.
I think would really take away from that message.
And I think there are obviously improvements
that need to happen to this transit center,
but I think it's been there for generations.
It's really important to keep transit central.
Rhode Island is such a small state,
transit can do so much there to bring people together
that we just really support RIPTA
and the efforts to save RIPTA
and the advocacy that's going on around that.
Yeah, and the neighborhood that the theater was in
is Federal Hill with some beautiful historic mansions
and homes and there is a campaign to put bike lanes,
protected bike lanes on Broadway,
which is the main boulevard that connects downtown
with that neighborhood.
And I'm really excited to go back
when that project goes in.
So hats off to the advocates there,
the Providence Streets Coalition
for all they're doing to save transit,
to make the streets better.
This will also be a theme of every city.
Every city had just incredible advocates.
That was the best part of this tour,
meeting all these people.
Yeah, and thanks so much to Riff Raff Bookstore and Bar
that provided the books for the event.
Another really cool Providence institution, really.
And also our hearts go out to the city
in the wake of this terrible shooting at Brown.
You know, it felt different to me having just been there
knowing what it must be like,
knowing how tight-knit that community is
and how people really care about each other
and show up for each other.
And yeah, we send our thoughts to Providence on that.
Okay, Austin, Texas.
So we should say we took Amtrak from Providence
to Boston to South Station.
Beautiful renovation.
I mean, we haven't been there either of us in a long time,
but it looks gorgeous, South Station,
at least the outer part of it now.
There's a whole building over the station
that didn't exist when I was a kid.
And then we took the Silver Line to the airport.
So like Boston, pretty good airport connection.
I know people there don't love it.
The Silver Line has its issues.
It's in mixed traffic at some point.
And that is a real crapshoot,
depending on the time of day
where you get into the airport.
But that was a big theme.
We really would try to take transit to and from airports
where we could.
And we both took Amtrak to Providence.
So, and then, yeah, it was really cool
that we could make that connection and make a flight
and really do it reliably
by doing Amtrak plus the Silver Line.
And yeah, we got on a flight to Austin
and we went to Texas,
which is obviously a completely different universe
than Providence in so many ways.
I think in Austin, we had to take a car service
to get from the airport to the...
We did.
Yeah.
I really liked Austin.
I had never been before.
I will say from the get-go, the vibes in Austin,
off the charts, like incredible vibes.
Impeccable.
Yeah, great food.
We should probably get into that a little bit.
Yes.
I joked that I was gonna eat my weight in tacos
and I pretty much did.
Yeah, Doug and I are both on sort of an austerity program
in the wake of having gone on this tour.
Yeah.
Well, I can't even look at a taco now
because they're just not gonna be as good
as they were in Texas.
Yeah, so I really liked Austin.
I will say the downtown kind of stinks.
It's really dead.
There isn't a lot of life there.
What it has going for it is the access
to the trails by the river,
Lady Bird Lake and the pool that is just up the creek.
I ran those and Sarah, you did too.
You walked a little bit.
Yeah, no, I ran and biked and walked all of those.
Yeah, they're an incredible asset for the city
and having a body of water.
I've always said like, it's really important for me
to live in a place where I know where the water is.
So New York, of course, we've got water all around us.
When I go to Chicago, I sort of always know
where the lake is so I can always orient myself,
obviously in LA, where the ocean is,
Austin having the river was great
because I sort of was like walked out of the hotel,
pointed myself downhill and boom, I'm at the trails.
So that was what I thought was great
about the downtown actually.
We did notice that Austin has to be
the parking podium capital of North America.
Yeah, sorry, Austin, what is going on with that?
I mean, we saw right from the first night
we were there,
I was just kind of like, wait, what is that?
And it was an apartment building perched atop
a pile of parking that was so tall
that it looks like it seemed like
the apartment building was like way, way, way up in the sky.
So you regularly see 10, 15 story parking podiums.
I guess there's one that's 27 stories.
Yeah, something like that, 26, 27.
And my question was, okay, so you get home,
I was like, is there an elevator
or something to take your car up?
No, you have to drive around
and around and around and around,
I guess, depending on where your parking space is to.
Yeah, so you get home
and you still might have 10 minutes before you're home.
Yeah, that was really disturbing.
And there were some buildings
that actually looked like the parking
was so disproportionate that it took over
most of the building.
Like it seemed like the apartments
were sort of an afterthought.
Yeah, there's that old Canadian National Film Board film
from the 1960s.
It's called What on Earth?
I believe it was nominated for even one,
an Academy Award for short animated film.
And the premise of that film is that aliens come to earth
and they're observing all the cars everywhere.
And they assume that cars are the dominant species
on planet earth.
And to go to downtown Austin,
and this is also not to knock on Austin,
this is true of a lot of US cities,
you would assume that that's true.
Because like you said, it was sort of like
the cars get all this luxury housing
and people get a place to sleep as a treat.
Right.
Yeah, so that was tough.
Yeah, and also, like I understand
a lot of these buildings with these parking podiums
are new and they're baked into the city.
This is not gonna change anytime soon.
These are brand new buildings.
The architects really tried hard.
They have like little vines growing out of some of them
or different kind of cladding on them,
trying to make them look stylish.
That's gonna be there for a while.
But what Austin also has in just an insane amount
are surface parking lots in the downtown,
in the sixth street area,
which is sort of the entertainment district.
And also just freestanding parking structures
pretty much everywhere you go.
I have never seen so much parking in my life
as I saw in Austin.
That can be changed.
That can be infilled.
That can, a freestanding parking structure
is not something that has to be there forever.
So I think that there's a lot of potential for infill.
They have gotten rid of parking minimums.
The problem is...
The funny thing about them getting rid of parking minimums
and it's great is that now they need parking maximums
because, so what you get then
is instead of an 800 space parking podium,
you get like a 612 space parking podium.
So technically it's gone down by 15% or whatever,
but you still have hundreds of spots.
I think part of the problem with downtown Austin,
we should get to the neighborhoods a little bit.
There's so many good things to say about Austin.
But it's a state capital
and state capitals with some exceptions like Boston
are often a lot of municipal buildings
and parking lots that aren't in use
for a good portion of the year.
And especially with the Texas State Legislature,
which is not in session all the time.
Like there's just so many dead spaces around the capital
and that takes up so much of the downtown.
I did run around the capital building.
It's beautiful.
10 Commandments and a Confederate Memorial there.
So make of that what you will.
But yeah, so we should get into the neighborhoods
because like we said, I mean, Austin vibes.
Just Austin vibes.
It's a real thing.
Are so good.
So I-35, another one of the freeways that haunts us.
And that is being widened.
And that is being widened inexplicably.
Oh, I can explain it.
There's a lot of money.
One more lane, we'll fix it.
There's a lot of money to be made
by highway contractors and concrete
and cement factory owners.
And that is why this industrial complex continues.
Yeah.
And so you see the blight around I-35
where the widening is gonna happen.
Businesses that are gonna be displaced
or businesses that were two or three blocks away
from the freeway are now gonna be right up on it.
And I-35 divides East Austin from West Austin
and on the East side of the freeway,
there's some great neighborhoods
and some really great stuff happening.
And my first day there, I just got on a bike share
and followed a bike lane out of downtown,
a really excellent protected bike lane
that took me underneath the freeway to the East.
And I found just like a really cool neighborhood
that is new transit oriented development
that's done really well at scale
with a ton of ground floor retail
that is a really exciting place to go out.
At night that has a lot of fun businesses
and at night has a really fun vibe
and it's got light rail running out there
and it's got a terrific world-class bike lane
that is protected and that brings you
into an urban environment in a really great way.
That said, I then tried to follow
what the bike share app told me to do and go,
I was like, oh, I'll go back a different way.
And it took me up to a street
that had a line of paint on it
that was barely far away from the curb
for me to ride in between that line and the curb
and pick up trucks doing 80 miles an hour alongside.
I was like, no, I will not be riding
that alleged bike lane.
So they do have some poor bike infrastructure as well,
but they have a lot of really, really great infrastructure
and that network is being built out.
And we were knocking the downtown
but the downtown bike network where they have it,
that's some good stuff.
There are building some really nice stuff.
I went to the Hyde Park neighborhood
on the suggestion of one of our friends down there,
Cutter Gonzalez, thank you for everything you did for us
and went to the first light bookstore and cafe
and that was great.
Beautiful homes, like lovely neighborhoods
wouldn't take much actually to turn places like that
into kind of low traffic neighborhoods
by changing the direction of some streets.
I went to Tyson's tacos,
not too far from that neighborhood
and that was really good.
Speaking of tacos, I wanna shout out
Mayor Pro Tem Vanessa Fuentes
who was one of our guests at our show,
just an incredible elected official,
not only was she down with coming on a show
from the war on cars and talking about life after cars,
she gave us a good recommendation for tacos,
Vera Cruz, which some locals told me
was not their favorite.
My experience with tacos
and I'm sorry to the audience
because this is gonna be a taco themed episode
is an average taco in Texas
is sort of like an average pizza slice in New York City.
If you're from somewhere else, it's incredible.
Yeah, I loved all the tacos we had there,
although I am more of a California style taco person myself
but nonetheless, I-
You like a corn tortilla.
I do like a nice soft handmade corn tortilla
but there's so many things to call out
about Austin that are great
and one of the things that I wanna say is that,
Austin is a classic blue dot city
in the middle of a red state
and the counter cultural feeling is really strong
and the queer community in particular
is just so vibrant and so really holding their own.
And a few years ago, people were lamenting the fact
that a lot of cities don't have queer neighborhoods
the way that they used to
because queerness has become
or at least 10 years ago, people were saying this,
they had become sort of normalized
to the extent that people-
Queer neighborhoods get gentrified quickly
in a lot of places.
Well, and also you don't need to live
in a queer neighborhood to live a queer life safely anymore
or at least that has been true
in many parts of the United States.
Austin really still has that feeling
not just with the queer neighborhood
but with counter cultural people in general
that like we have to hold this place.
We have to defend our right,
as they say, keep Austin weird
but it's more than that.
It's like we have to defend our right to freedom
inside a state that is extremely
against a lot of the freedoms
that we're talking about here.
And in a way, it reminded me of being in West Berlin
during the Soviet period to a much lesser degree
but it had that same sort of a defiant air to it.
And we were in-
West Berlin, if the Berlin wall was a 12 lane highway
that they're gonna end
you can freely go underneath it if you choose.
Exactly.
So that was really interesting
and we were in this dive bar the last night we were there.
We had been doing a little book talk
at this wonderful place called the Little Gay Shop
where Urban Austin Reads has been having some of its events
and there was a bar next door
and they had a big rainbow flag that said on it,
y'all means all.
And it was just so beautiful.
Like it's just such a great way
of reminding ourselves that a state like Texas
is filled with people who are fighting the good fight
who believe in all the same things that coastal elites
are fighting for the freedom for self-determination,
the freedom to be ourselves without fear
and the freedom to live fulfilled lives.
And so like I just was really, really moved by that.
The Little Gay Shop had a holiday market
and I went to that holiday market
and there was a drag queen story hour.
And you know, and it's like you hear about these things
when you're in New York and you're like,
oh, that's nice that they're doing that
but being there and seeing a wonderful drag queen
doing a story hour at this event,
it just, you really felt why that's important
and why it's something that we need to fight for.
I will say about the highway widening is that,
yeah, I loved Austin.
Like I said, the Hyde Park neighborhood was beautiful
and the people there are just awesome,
the food and all the rest.
I've never been to a city where I actually have seen
a highway widening in progress through a city.
I've seen highway widenings in the countryside
or in less populated cities.
It was like being transported back to the 1950s
and the 1960s and seeing like neighborhoods
being demolished and it is pretty striking
to see lots with signs of property
that has been eminent domain by the state
where you're not allowed to go.
And there clearly was a business there
and there are abandoned buildings
or just lots that have already been wiped out
by the incoming highway.
And that was pretty scary and weird to see.
I've never experienced, it was like watching
a bad slice of history happen right in front of your eyes.
Yeah, the other thing that I wanna shout out
is the transit in Austin is actually really good.
I will say what we each did on our weekend off in a second
but like I stayed in the farther eastern part of Austin
and used a bus to get back and forth to that spot.
And it was great, like it really worked.
It really came when it said it was going to,
so nice bus service in Austin, really appreciated that.
And also we can't stop talking about Austin
before we mentioned Book People Bookstore
who is the bookseller that was our partner there
which apparently is the third largest bookstore
in the United States.
Yeah, it's Powell's in Portland,
the Strand bookstore here in New York
and Book People in Austin.
It was awesome.
That is a really great store, really tremendous.
And so yeah, so there were so many good things
about Austin.
I honestly, if we are doing fuck Mary kill,
definitely fuck Austin as a sexy town.
Sorry kids, this is a sexy town.
Yeah, despite starting off on a negative point
about Austin, I will say, I just loved it.
It was great.
Okay, so we did have this weird little period
between Austin and Houston.
You stayed in Austin.
I went to San Antonio to meet up with friends
and run the San Antonio marathon.
Speaking of fuck Mary kill, I don't know where I stand
but somewhere between fuck and Mary.
The downtown of San Antonio is just awesome.
It's got so many great historical bones.
Now I will say I took the bus from Austin to San Antonio.
The bus showed up 36 minutes late.
It's 81 miles.
It should take an hour and a half to get there tops.
It took almost three hours from arriving at the station
to arriving in San Antonio.
Give me a train, please.
I just want trains in Texas.
I know you all do too.
But got dropped off right in the middle of San Antonio
and it's a great city.
Of course, the Riverwalk is a really good attraction
that is like a magnet that brings people downtown
and not every city is lucky enough to have that.
But the bones of that city, and there are plenty
of parking garages and surface parking lots
but the bones of the city are so great.
The marathon was actually a great way
to see so much of the city and they did such a good job,
the organizers of this race,
of showing off the best of that city.
We ran through the downtown of course
but the King William neighborhood
which is historic, beautiful neighborhood,
they took us through, and this will tell you
how hilly the marathon was.
I think it was like Alamo Heights,
Alamos Hills and like every neighborhood
had something like Heights or Hills in the name
but it was incredible.
And the marathon had mariachi singers and dancers
and just all of this great cross-cultural stuff
that makes San Antonio and I would argue the country, great.
I really loved it.
Tiny little bike lane network from what I could see
not a whole lot of great protected infrastructure,
very good bicycle share system from what I saw.
That was great.
And in the downtown and to get to King William
some other places very walkable, not a very big city
but it was great.
I really liked it a lot.
Really great trail system as well
because you could take these trails up to
and past a lot of historic missions.
So that was cool.
I went by one, of course I walked by the Alamo
and went on a tour there.
They're pedestrianizing the whole Alamo Plaza.
Like they're doing a better job
pedestrianizing the area around their biggest
historic landmark and tourist attraction
that New York City does in Times Square and Broadway.
It's really impressive to see.
So I really liked San Antonio
and also the people were really friendly.
So it was great.
Yeah, I'm sorry I missed that.
I've been to San Antonio in the past
and it's a great, great town
and a lot of really cool things happening there
and they have a lot of good stuff going on.
And I saw Pee Wee's bike at the Alamo.
So war on cars related and just fandom related.
So that was fun.
That's perfect.
While you were doing that,
I had a little glamping experience
where I stayed in East Austin
and these folks had a little camper in their backyard
that I rented.
And what was great about that
was it really got me out into a far neighborhood
that I never would have seen otherwise.
Very quiet, beautiful trail network along a creek there
and went for a great run.
And it was just kind of exemplified
the DIY spirit of Austin,
which is something very strong.
We also went to a DIY gallery
in the garage of some folks, friends of the show.
Yeah, we saw a bike themed exhibit there too.
That was called the Good Luck Have Fun Gallery
and it's operated out of this couple's garage.
Yeah, they just set up a gallery in their garage
and do events there.
And I think that that really exemplifies
this wonderful DIY spirit of Austin.
And then I got on a bus and went to Houston from Austin
and that actually was a completely seamless on time bus ride
that you go through the sort of the outskirts of Austin.
You can see where there's a lot of ranch land
that's being bought up
and that's gonna be subdivided
and become suburban sprawl as you go out.
Then you go kind of through this big state park area
that's really beautiful and hilly.
And then you kind of start approaching Houston
and really you feel Houston from 40 miles away.
It's coming and the freeway just starts getting wider
and wider and wider and wider.
And then you reach the Katie Interchange on I-10
which is this famous highway interchange.
And it's literally, I have to admit it's kind of majestic.
It sort of is like a cathedral of freeways
and it's beyond anything that I've seen anywhere else
including Los Angeles.
It's just this huge web of freeways
at like all different levels
that's kind of like sucking you into Houston.
The Egyptians have the pyramids
and we have the freeway interchanges.
Exactly like that was what it felt like.
And so yeah, and that was my entry to Houston.
And I feel like it was actually a really, really appropriate
way to enter Houston.
And now we're gonna start talking about Houston.
So I flew from San Antonio to Houston
and I'm ashamed to admit it
but it was just the easiest cheapest way
because I just didn't wanna deal with the bus again
because I didn't have a great experience on the bus.
And you get into the Houston airport
and you get in a car and you go down the highway
as you're approaching the city.
I have never seen more ads for personal injury attorneys,
more billboards for injured in a car wreck
and almost nothing else.
Like barely any fast food billboards or other things.
It was almost all pictures of trucks ramming into a car,
lawyers in their suits saying like injured, call us,
we'll get you a million dollars.
So as we said in our show there,
that's a sign you might have a traffic violence problem
in your city.
Yeah, for sure.
A literal sign.
Yes, a literal sign.
Yeah, so Houston is tough.
I mean, I think that we need to just be very real
about the fact that Houston is dealing with probably
the toughest challenges that you could face
in the United States of America,
which is probably the toughest country
for this kind of advocacy work that there is.
So hats off to the advocacy community in Houston
and we're gonna get into that in a second.
But I just wanna say what I did the night
before Doug got there was I had known that Houston,
I had never been to Houston before,
but I had heard that there's a huge Vietnamese community there
and that there's great Vietnamese food.
I love Vietnamese food.
So I looked up what's, you know,
some Vietnamese food near my hotel downtown
and most of the Vietnamese community is now
in a farther flung place that's impossible to reach
by transit, so, but there was this one famous restaurant
Wins that is downtown.
Guess what is happening to Wins?
They're putting in high speed rail
and transit and a bike share station up front?
No, it's been eminent domain for widening the freeway.
Of course.
So the whole former Chinatown, quote unquote area
of Houston is part of this massive eminent domain
freeway widening scheme that Texas Department
of Transportation has got on the table for Houston
and so I went to this incredibly nice Vietnamese restaurant
had an incredible meal, fantastic people working there,
owning it and tons of people eating there,
including several members of the Houston Police Department
and it just was, it was really kind of gutting
to hear one of the young women who's a member of the family
that owns the place talking about like,
oh, we think we're gonna be able to stay
through the World Cup next year
because they're not gonna be tearing it down before then
and just as you said before,
like making these mistakes that we made
in the 60s and 70s, just doing it all over again,
1,100 homes, 300 businesses and guess what?
Almost all in minority neighborhoods.
Have you heard this story before?
I mean, come on, man, how can we be doing this again?
Well, like I said, the highway industrial complex
knows no bounds.
We should say some good things about Houston.
Plenty.
Yeah, and there's a lot of good things to say.
First of all, of course,
the advocacy community there is just incredible
and especially because they're working
under such tremendous odds
and the people could not have been nicer.
Oh my God, the most enthusiastic advocates,
I think of any city, at least outwardly enthusiastic.
I know, you know, I don't wanna like separate out
all these different communities,
but they all have their special flavor, I should say.
Hats off to Joe Catrufo, old friend who was here
in New York working for transportation alternatives
who now runs by Houston.
He's just leading an incredible group of people down there.
We were treated so nicely by the board,
by the volunteers.
We went on a really great about 15-mile bike ride
using the Bayou Trail network, which is really impressive.
I mean, it goes under some buildings.
They've carved out some space along the water
that gets you pretty deep into Houston.
And we did see some really nice neighborhoods.
The Rothko Museum back there was really beautiful.
That whole area, lovely old oak trees,
like some really beautiful historic neighborhoods.
It was really nice to see more than just the downtown,
which, you know, downtown Houston is tough.
Like they've got these tunnels in the same way
that Minneapolis has the Skyway system to deal with the cold.
They have it in Houston to deal with the heat.
And they're cool, but they suck the life out of the street.
And we went for lunch in one of these tunnel areas
that's connected to different buildings.
And it was nice.
We had a really lovely lunch,
but you look around and you think,
okay, all of these people look the same
because they're all working for the same types of companies,
if not the same company occupying one building.
And what happens, of course, in Houston is people drive.
They park their car in their office building garage.
They go up to their office.
They sit at their desk or in their conference rooms.
Lunchtime, they go down to the basement,
to the tunnel system.
They eat there with people who are like them.
Then they go back up and work
and then they go back down to the garage
and then they go home.
And so there isn't a whole lot of street life outside.
Even though the weather while we were there was perfect,
I realized it's not year round.
So that was something I would,
they need to fix the street life however they can.
They are working on it.
Main street where the light rail runs
or part of the light rail, they are pedestrianizing it.
Yeah, and that project was ongoing.
We actually saw workers putting down the paving stones
and making this beautifully designed pedestrian area
that will be opening up very soon.
And that's really radical in a town like Houston
to be going all in on pedestrianizing
this main street area.
That gave me a lot of hope.
Yeah, what I was told by Joe and other advocates
was that the mayor, John Whitmire, who sucks,
let's be frank, who sucks, he's ripping it.
We saw where he was ripping out a bike lane
on Austin street and spending hundreds of thousands
of taxpayer dollars to do so.
What I was told about the main street project
is that the mayor can kind of see that
as a downtown should be a destination.
So you'll drive your car, park in a nearby garage
and then you'll walk on this pedestrianized main street,
go to dinner, go to a bar or whatever,
then you'll get back in your car and you'll go home.
He doesn't really see active transportation
and pedestrian friendly spaces as just good for neighborhoods.
He sees it as a sort of business and tourist thing,
which is a mindset that is not unique
to the mayor of Houston,
but is certainly a problem specifically there
because it means they're not getting good stuff
elsewhere under him.
Yeah, and I will say that that fits in
with a little bit of a theme of Houston,
which was that we saw there was destruction happening
without necessarily positive repair happening.
Like we saw this bike lane that's being ripped out.
It's sort of half ripped out now.
There's no conviction about it.
It's not like they're putting something better in
that it's gonna be different
and add something to that neighborhood.
They're just putting back a traffic lane
but they can't even seem to get it together
to do that efficiently.
We saw also some rainbow crosswalks
in the Montrose neighborhood that had been destroyed
because of federal policy.
Because Sean Duffy, go fuck himself.
Yeah, and that was really kind of heartbreaking
to see a little strip of rainbow where it used to be
that's a neighborhood that has a lot of queer people in it.
And yeah, this eminent domain,
the blight that's caused by these constant highway widenings.
It's like people told us that one of the jokes
about Houston is it's gonna be a great city
once you finish building it.
I guess that's sort of a common thing to say about Houston.
But okay, that's true of all cities.
I mean, New York is always being renewed
and recreated every second.
But this seems like there's just a lot of blight
and destruction that happens
and then it's just replaced by freeways
and car infrastructure and nothing additive happens.
I mean, aside from this great trail network
and again, the advocates that we met,
Molly Cook, the state senator who appeared with us.
Awesome.
I wanna say about Molly Cook, by the way,
she might be the only elected official to get on stage
with the war on cars and say fuck cars.
At one point she did.
And she is just of that generation of elected official
that like really just wants to lay it out there
of like what the stakes are, what the problems are
and what the solutions are.
She was really impressive.
She got into being concerned about street advocacy
because she's an ER nurse.
So she has seen some shit.
What cars do to people's bodies.
And she was really passionate about the idea
that when she was in the ER or when she is in the ER
and seeing not just the injuries that cars cause
but the populations of people who live in our cities
who are marginalized and live in terrible conditions
because our downtowns are such a mess.
And she just felt like for her,
she was putting a band-aid on things as a nurse every day
that she wanted to change systemically.
And so kudos to her keep your eye on Molly Cook
down in Texas.
She is somebody who's going places.
We need more nurses running for elected office
and fewer car dealers and attorneys.
Yeah, so I would say like I overall found Houston
incredibly energizing and exciting
because they do have a lot of good stuff going on.
They've got a lot of good bike trails.
They've got some really good transit options as well.
The downtown bike network,
I will say where they had protected bike infrastructure.
It was really good.
Another theme of this part of the tour was that,
and this was true in Seattle and other places as well,
was as New Yorkers, we're just still dealing
with so much paint and plastic
for our protected bike lanes,
but other cities are actually building
concrete separation, which I know we have some folks
from New York City DOT who listen
and there are exceptions in the city to this,
but we don't have a whole lot
of concrete separated bike lanes.
It's like a technology that seems to be
beyond the reach of our city.
I don't know why.
Houston had some really impressive protected,
wide protected bicycle lanes.
Also, I will say, give me an urban walkable
downtown ballpark any day of the week.
Going over to where the Astros play
and just being able to walk there from downtown was great.
It's really cool.
They had bollards that were baseballs.
Yes.
I really liked that.
Yes.
And again, the light rail.
I really appreciate it.
Pretty good.
We used it quite a lot and it was very practical
and unlike light rail systems in a few other cities,
like you can actually just show up on the platform.
Yeah, the headways were really decent.
Yeah.
Yeah, pretty good.
Even late at night.
So Houston, keep up the good fight.
You're doing great and we love you.
Yeah.
Okay, so then we made our return visit to Denver.
We had not been to Denver since February of 2020.
Remember that time?
I don't remember anything from before March 17th or so, 2020.
Denver, man, talk about fuck Mary kill.
I would, anything but kill.
I would be in all kinds of relationships with Denver.
Somebody said to me, she's like,
you better say you're going to marry Denver.
Yeah.
So Denver, look, I'll say about Denver.
Let's get the bad stuff out of the way
because I think that's important.
Like the downtown, it has its challenges,
like especially the sort of more financial oriented
part of downtown, it's pretty dead.
That's a problem.
But the lower downtown district closer to Union Station,
incredible bones, maybe the best bones
of any city Denver size.
You know, old warehouses that are condos.
They fixed up the 16th street mall.
We were told they no longer call it the mall.
They just call it 16th street because it used to be
a symbol of a failure of pedestrianization
because nobody was using it.
It was really dead and they have made it so beautiful.
Some of the best place making we experienced
in any city, Larimer Street, which was pedestrianized,
the light game there, you know,
they have all these beautiful lights.
It was getting dark early cause it's winter
and you just felt like everywhere you looked,
there was something beckoning you to like walk down a street
because there were lights in the trees
or strung across the street to give it a sense of place,
almost like a roof to the outdoor living room
that some of these places were.
So that was really great.
And then the cool thing about Denver
that I really appreciated is they have this kind of
offset diamond grid in the downtown
that doesn't match up with the surrounding neighborhoods.
And that can be confusing for some people,
but what I liked about it were the terminating Vistas.
So you would look down one street
and there's a mountain, beautiful.
You'd look down another street and there's a bridge,
a pedestrian bridge.
You'd look down another street
and there was like a church.
And it just created a really beautiful walking environment.
As a Disney fan, I was,
I would compare it to Main Street USA
with Cinderella's Castle at the end
because you could see something worth walking to
at the end of your view.
And I loved walking around downtown Denver.
It was really easy to walk around.
Yeah, the first night we were there,
I set out and just started following
what seemed to be a path that the city was showing me,
you know, in various ways.
There's great wayfinding, signage.
Yeah, I wanna get to that in a moment.
We'll talk about that.
Yeah, but then there was a pedestrian,
you know, I could see that next to Union Station
there was a pedestrian bridge
and it sort of naturally called me to go up those stairs
and then, oh, here's a vista of a park
and there's another path that goes down these stairs
and there's another bridge beyond that.
And I found myself in the middle of a park
on the banks of the South Platte River
that was just so beautiful and it was sunset
and there were people gathering on the hilltop
to watch the sunset and the city was telling me
how to use it.
And this is something that we were thinking a lot about
as we were on the road,
is that people in North America, a lot of them, sadly,
have never had the experience of being in a city
and really using a city.
And so they don't know how to do that.
They just haven't had that experience
using public transit, walking around.
They don't know how to do it
and I feel like Denver was a city that was telling you
every step of the way, here's how to use this space.
Here's what you can do here.
Here's the possibilities.
Don't you wanna come over here
and kind of inviting you into a relationship with the city?
It was very romantic in its way.
The Seasaws in front of Union Station.
That was really cool.
Like I said, the placemaking was really great.
Yeah, on the theme of using the city,
I think one of the things that we really noticed
and Denver also has a problem with parking podiums
and too many surface lots.
I think that there was one picture in our slideshow
that I called the Turducken of parking.
It was like street parking, surface lot
and parking garage and podium in the background.
Cities are building a lot of housing,
not as much as we need,
but you did see new condos
and new apartment buildings everywhere,
but I would walk around a bunch of cities,
including Denver to an extent
and say, where are all the people?
You have thousands upon thousands of apartments
within view and very few people out on the street.
And I think part of the problem
is that we're building so much parking
in so many of these cities
and we can sort of get into why that,
especially in Denver, why there's so much parking.
But what happens is you go home from your job,
sort of like we were talking about with Houston
and you have the car easily available to you
and there isn't ground floor retail
in a lot of these developments.
So what do you do?
You put in the car and you go to the big whole foods
or the target or whatever and then you drive back
and there isn't a culture of just going to buy
one bag of groceries and walking home
and just, oh, what do we want for dinner tonight?
I don't know, walk down to the corner market
and get lettuce and stuff to make salad
and pasta or whatever.
So the street life really needs to be improved
and I think so many of these new developments
that we're seeing around the country
are not cultivating city life.
They're approximating suburban life in a city space.
And so I think that's something
I would want city planners to change.
Like first of all, of course parking maximums
but like what is, how does the building meet the ground?
What is there on the ground?
Small shops, markets, a place to get a pair of keys copied,
place to get shoes repaired.
Like none of that seemed to exist
in a lot of the newer developments.
So that's something I would have changed.
Denver has a unique issue
in that half of the reason to live in Denver
is so you can access nature and the outdoors.
So people leave on the weekends
and they get in their cars
and they go skiing and hiking and whatever.
So I don't know how you crack that problem
because people want parking spaces
with their developments
but there's gotta be some way
to increase the street life for when people are at home.
Yeah, I mean, I would just point to Vancouver
because Vancouver, same thing,
it's a lot of the reason to be there
is those mountains and the skiing and the blah, blah, blah.
Very similar in some ways,
but look at the way the buildings meet the street.
We got that great tour from Brent Todarian
who really explained how that was done.
And they do have food stores and pharmacies
and that's planned.
That's not coincidence.
And so, I think that stuff really brings the street life
to Vancouver in a way that the United States of America
were still seeming to struggle with that.
I will say that in Austin,
some of the newer development,
it had a lot of entertainment stuff and restaurants
and that kind of thing.
It didn't have as much of that really practical
if you need to do your errands in a 15 minute walk.
Not quite sure why that's so hard for us to understand.
Yeah, yeah.
But also Denver, another walkable downtown urban ballpark.
Yes.
The Rocky Suck, but the ballpark is beautiful.
Yeah, ball arena is also within walking distance.
Yeah, let's talk about the wayfinding.
I made a goal of doing a 10K run
in every city we went to.
And there were two cities on both legs of the tour
where I did not run.
And those were Houston on this leg
and Los Angeles on the last leg.
What do those cities have in common?
They are so overdeveloped for cars.
We were staying in LA in the downtown
and I thought about going for a run
and I looked around.
I'm like, ah, I gotta go under a freeway.
There isn't really like a big uninterrupted stretch
of running available to me from where we're staying.
So I didn't run there.
Houston, I didn't run there despite the good trail system
because I couldn't intuitively figure out
from where we were staying.
And Sarah, you said you had this problem too.
How to access the trails?
There were no signs from where we were that I could see.
Denver, however, and this is a really good example
of how building a city for cyclists
is good for everybody.
Walked out of the hotel, went a block or two
and saw this adorable sign with a bear on a bicycle
that said like Denver Bikeway
that showed me different destinations
to both the Cherry Creek Trail
and then other destinations around the city and the mileage.
And while that was designed for cyclists,
I was like, okay, I now know that the Cherry Creek Trail
is a quarter of a mile away from where I'm standing
and I go that way.
I follow the bike lane and I got to the trail
and the trail was great.
And so I ran there.
So little lesson learned.
You know, I was joking earlier about
what urbanists call the popsicle test,
which is like the mark of a good city
is can a kid walk somewhere, get a popsicle
and walk home before it melts.
That's a sign you have a safe, good, well-designed city.
I would do the podcast host marathon training test,
which is can a podcast host from New York
drop himself in the middle of your city
and get a good 10K run in?
And if he can't, let's talk.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's a great metric.
So then we took a little side trip from Denver
out to the small, but definitely punching above
its weight in the bike department city of Boulder, Colorado.
Beautiful.
So beautiful.
And we were able to reach it
on an excellent, excellent bus service
called the Flatiron Flyer.
And that bus runs very regularly and reliably
out of Union Station and-
I think it was every half hour?
Yeah, yeah, not bad.
Yeah, and takes about an hour to get out there.
And I think there's an express
that goes even more quickly.
And yeah, then we went out to Boulder
and we're hosted by the people of community cycles.
And that was a really fun experience.
And shout out to Martha Raskowski,
longtime advocate in this space
and just an incredible human being
who helped us, picked us up.
I got a nice ride on the back of her turn
because we had to go get our bicycles
from community cycles.
So that was a really fun way to be picked up.
Yeah, we got to explore the trail system,
which again was very intuitive.
The way finding there was really great.
It just felt like no matter where you were,
you saw a sign for access to the trail,
which was really great,
even along some very strody highway-like infrastructure,
there was space for bikes by the university campus.
For example, there's a big road,
basically highway dividing one part of the campus
from the other.
And we were able to get across via trails.
We did learn about the $18 million
bike underpass in that place.
If you got $18 million to spend on bike infrastructure,
spread it around maybe.
But it was beautiful.
It was really nice.
And they have their issues there.
They've been trying to do some four to three
lane conversions to get better bike access
on some of the routes that are necessary
to actually get around the city for transportation
that are not addressed by the trail system
because the trail system really follows
the drainage system of the creeks there
and sometimes you wanna go in the other direction.
And there has been some backlash and fighting
about those narrowings of traffic lanes
because in part there's some serious concerns
about evacuation from wildfires
because this is a community that's under threat
from climate change in a number of ways, flooding and-
I think actually as we record this episode,
they're facing something like 80 mile an hour winds
and the risk of fire because it has been pretty dry there.
Yeah, and it was similar when we were there,
there were very high winds.
So they've got some really special challenges
but there's a very high level of infrastructure there
to build on.
And so I feel like Boulder is a place
where the conversation is happening at a higher level.
The really interesting thing about Boulder is,
they have this green belt around it
and they have a real problem there.
They have height limits, they have all kinds of stuff
blocking their ability to build more housing.
The housing is incredibly expensive there.
The most expensive of any city that we visited on this tour
and Boulder is a city of not more than 110,000 people
but they have 65,000 in commuters,
65,000 people driving cars into the city
and they can't really build enough to accommodate
the people who want to live there.
And so it's sort of the unintended consequences
where they've preserved this beautiful city,
this beautiful downtown and they have this green belt
around it to preserve the nature and the beauty
but beyond that is just Colorado sprawl
as far as I can see.
And that's a real problem.
Yeah, I mean, I sort of said that it's almost like
if Greenwich Village were a city,
I mean, a lot of people look at the preservation efforts
that have happened in Greenwich Village,
which was of course, Jane Jacobs' home neighborhood
and said like, this is bad because we're preserving these,
we're preserving it as if it were a museum of a city
and it's not a museum and then stuff around
it gets messed up because you can't do anything there.
Boulder is kind of that on a city level scale in a way.
And the sprawl development that we drove through,
which it seems pretty clear that that's gonna become
a continuous megalopolis at one point,
it's tough to see because there's a lot of bad development
out there.
There's a lot of really sterile development out there
and we didn't get add into those communities.
I understand that some of them are trying to create
like actual walkable and walkable downtown,
people are trying to build and all of that,
but it really kind of calls into question
this balance between preservation
of both urban fabric and nature
and the need for more housing,
what type of housing is gonna be built?
And these are all obviously really complex questions
that I think that whole Denver, Boulder corridor
really kind of throws that all into relief.
We're asked at a couple of cities
about our thoughts on the abundance movement
and I don't wanna get too into it here.
Maybe we'll do an episode,
but I looked around at some of the places where we were
and I'm like, we are building a lot of housing
in some places, it's just crap.
It's sprawl, it's not sustainable,
it's not good for our souls.
So like we can build stuff just not in the right places
and the right kind of things.
But just saying like take away regulation
and throw a lot of money at building stuff.
No, that's not.
It's not gonna be the solution.
I will say Boulder was just, yeah, it was just beautiful.
It was really nice.
Probably a good segue into things that people gave us.
Oh yeah.
A shout out to Chuck.
I just wanna name drop Chuck for a second.
You know who you are.
We showed up in Boulder and Chuck hands us both
Bert's bee's lip balm.
And at first I was confused
because I was like, isn't that from like Maine or something?
Maybe I'm wrong, he's giving us a local gift.
And then I realized it's so dry there
that he was like, you're gonna want this.
And it was so thoughtful of him.
So thank you, Chuck.
Yeah, it was just really lovely.
I felt really cared for.
I felt like really supported
and people wanted us to know how much
they cared about us coming
and they wanted us to be comfortable.
Okay, so.
Other cool things that people gave us.
Other cool things that people gave us.
I just have to shout out Bonnie.
Bonnie and Houston.
Bonnie and Houston.
One of the coolest people I've ever met.
And first of all, it's just like, boy,
what energy Bonnie brings to everything.
She is just a ray of sunshine in the world.
Also a nurse, so maybe these things are related.
Also a nurse, yeah.
Bonnie just was a fun person to be around,
but she had bought out the entire stock
of a local art supply store.
Very, she was very firm that she had not got.
Very civic minded.
Very civic minded.
She went to her local art supply store,
bought their entire stock of beads
and made dozens of friendship bracelets
that had messages that were taken from life after cars.
I have my car's ruined childhood
friendship bracelet at home.
I should put it on for the next show.
Yeah, I have two.
I have cars killed the coho salmon, which-
That's a deep cut.
That's a fact.
And cars cause ED.
That's erectile dysfunction
for those who don't know what that means.
Also makes an appearance in the book.
Thank you, Bonnie, for reading carefully.
You're not gonna see those at a Taylor Swift concert,
but we thank you, Bonnie.
Those were amazing.
Anything else?
Oh yeah, no, so we got in Portland,
we got some really cool zipper pulls
that were made of used bicycle tires.
Yes.
And also bookmarks
that had little bicycles dangling off the end of them,
also made out of used bicycle tires.
And then a big shout out to Becky Hawkins,
who is on Instagram as Becky and ShoulderAngel
underscore between those words.
A cartoonist and artist who made a comic for us
based on an idea of like a highway wreck
and what that means that like someone has died.
And not your normal subject necessarily
for like a ha ha comic,
but just a beautifully drawn piece of art
we're gonna have to fight over who gets to keep it.
We'll just have to have, you know-
I'll put you on contribution so we can afford an office.
Yes, we need an office.
But then in Providence,
we had a gentleman who gave us some beautiful postcards
of walking maps of Providence
and the area that he's done
that show how you can access nature
and quiet space in Providence without a car.
And they're beautifully hand drawn, hand colored.
I mailed two to my kids.
Yeah, just that was really moving.
We got a lot of t-shirts.
We got a lot of trucker hats.
Yep.
And stickers.
Many stickers traded hands in both directions.
Yeah, so, you know, it's just been really moving.
People are awesome.
Oh yeah, I know a guy, I can't,
I think it was on the first leg of the trip
gave us those feather shaped reflecting things
that you can put on your backpack
or whatever to make you more visible.
Yeah, it's just sort of really moving,
seeing what people have brought to us
and then also just huge thanks to everybody
who's just brought their story to the book signing line
and, you know, and taken the couple of minutes
to tell us something,
to talk to us about what your concerns are,
what your excitement is.
These things mean just a tremendous amount to us personally.
And, you know, I can't say enough
about how humbled I am
by the experience of meeting somebody like Bonnie
who has read the words that we've written so carefully
and then made something of her own from that.
Like that to me is exactly what we hoped
would happen with this book.
And it just has moved me profoundly.
Yeah, it was very humbling to be out there
in front of all these crowds
and to get to talk to everybody.
And I am at heart an advocate.
That is who I am.
That's how I got started in all of this.
And to meet people working under tremendous odds
who care about their city, who love their city,
but who recognize the ways in which it can be better,
whether that's Providence or Austin or Denver or Houston
or any place we've been to is just remarkable.
It's also, it's so great in a weird way
to see that everybody's struggles are the same.
I was saying to people in a few cities,
we've all been doing this a long time.
You and I have been doing this for a long time
and a lot of the people we know have been doing this
for a long time.
I've never heard a new argument against bike lanes.
It's all the same stuff.
Oh, what about emergency response?
What about old people?
What about traffic, et cetera?
Nobody's gonna use the bike lane, for example.
But every year that I do this,
every week that I do this, I hear new arguments for it.
It keeps expanding.
The tent keeps getting bigger.
And the people trying to solve these problems
are just more diverse, more interesting
than they've ever been.
And it's so cool and heartening,
especially now when things are so tough
to meet people who are saying,
I can't fix every problem in the world,
but I can fix this.
And that's really inspiring.
So thank you to everybody who hosted us,
every advocacy organization,
every person who came to a show,
every person who, we would just show up in a town
and like 10 or 15 people would show us around.
Rob Toftness in Denver, for example,
and a whole crew of people who just would show up.
I mean, we had like, how many people
on that bike ride in Houston?
Like 12 or 15, yeah.
And they just were like, hey, look at this.
Look how cool this is, or look how shitty this is.
And they would just give us the honest truth
about their cities.
And that is a gift.
It was amazing.
We felt so taken care of.
So thank you.
Shout out to YouFreeBikes, also, really liked.
Oh, in Houston.
In Houston, we wrote.
Super beautiful bicycles.
Yeah, great bicycles made, companies based in Houston.
So I gotta talk about two things that are negative,
and then we're gonna end with something
that's kind of funny.
So stick with us through the negative.
We can't not say,
and I know we talked about it the last time too,
the crisis of people who are living unhoused
in this country, shameful, is shameful.
And this is what you see in the downtowns
of so many of America's great cities.
Instead of seeing vibrant street life
and businesses that are thriving,
you see a lot of people who are in distress,
who are suffering from a combination of being unhoused,
of mental health issues, of addiction issues,
all of the above.
And that is a real thing that I think in New York,
because we do have such a vibrant street life
because we do have so many people
who are not suffering from those issues
who are on the street all the time
that even though we do have those problems here in New York,
they're not nearly as visible.
In Denver, for instance,
I walked home from our event on 17th Street
instead of 16th Street.
I did not follow the beckoning lights, which I should have.
I was like, oh, the hotel's on 17th Street.
I'll just walk down 17th Street.
And it was really disturbing.
And I wasn't scared because the people who were there
were not doing anything except for trying to mind
their own business and survive.
But I saw a guy huddled over an open fire
with a windscreen around him at 10 o'clock at night
in downtown Denver.
It looked like something Walker Evans would have photographed.
I mean, this is just unacceptable,
especially because these cities that we went to,
and I'm especially thinking of Houston in this regard,
are just dripping with money.
Well, that's something we talked about last time.
I think about Houston with all of this oil money
and fossil fuel money.
Austin, huge tech town now.
There's no excuse for this level of despair and distress
among our fellow human beings
when there's so much money to take care of them.
If only we would tax the right people
and deploy services in an efficient way.
And Denver with some really high real estate prices
and a generally good quality of life
for most of its residents,
there's no excuse in this country
for why this is happening
other than a lack of caring from the people
who have the power to do something about it.
And yeah, like you said,
these people who are living on the streets,
they don't want any trouble.
Most of them are not gonna harm you
even if they are suffering
from some serious mental health issues.
But it creates this death spiral in your downtown
where people do feel uncomfortable.
And man, it would just be so easy to solve.
Like, we can do it.
And I'm not like a housing conspiracy assistant
of like, there's all these empty homes
and just put them there.
I'm talking about like,
we could build real supportive housing
to get these people the services
and the help that they need
because the number one thing
most of these people need first
is a roof over their heads
where they know they can just be safe
and then get the support that they need
hopefully at that place or in nearby facilities.
So I just keep coming back to this idea
everywhere I looked I was like,
this is fucking unacceptable
in a country as wealthy as ours.
Yeah, we get that it's not easy to solve
in the sense that each human being is a very complex
set of challenges and yet,
if we put half of the resources
that we put into widening a highway
or into building an app.
Or dripping out a bike lane in Houston.
Right, or building apps
that just are rent seeking mechanisms
to monetize stuff
that everybody has always done forever
and just give somebody else a cut of it.
If we spend half of the time and resources
that we spend on those things
instead on showing dignity and care
for our fellow residents
then I think we would be able to solve the problem.
It may not be easy
but like we've got a lot of resources.
It's a very wealthy country with a lot of brain power.
And also I just wanna say related
the transit funding crisis
is also something that's unacceptable.
We saw that in every city that we went to.
There are a lot of great advocates
out there fighting for transit.
We're gonna keep covering transit
because you cannot have the kinds of cities
that we aspire to on this show
without robust transit systems.
And that I think is going to be saving transit
in the United States of America
is gonna be a theme
that we're really gonna be looking at
over the next several months.
And we saw it everywhere we were.
Save RIPTA, save SEPTA.
Save them all.
Save them all.
Okay, so quickly.
There was a poetic end to this leg of the tour.
So we finished up in Boulder on Saturday
and we had a luxurious departure time
from Denver of around 11 a.m.
So we didn't have to wake up so early and rush out.
And we took off and things were looking great.
We were all set to go home.
I was excited to come home
for the first night of Hanukkah with my children.
I was supposed to be trimming the Christmas tree
that my family had gone out and bought that afternoon.
This season was merry and bright.
We were all set.
We were all set.
And then somewhere over the great state of Indiana
I believe I looked at the flight tracker.
I felt the plane sort of do a slight downward motion
as it does when it's beginning its descent.
And I thought, hmm, Indiana is awfully early
to be beginning our descent into JFK.
And then I noticed that the little plane
on the monitor was making the slightest of left turns.
And I was like, okay, what's going on?
And then right at that moment, the destination flashed
and it had changed.
It said destination Detroit.
Yeah, so we were diverted to Detroit due to a ground stop
related to wind and other weather related issues at JFK.
And so, I'm sure many of you have been through the drill.
We were diverted, we landed, we got hotel credits
and we stayed at the Skyline Hotel
which did not have a view of a skyline.
It had a view of highways.
And also technically it was not in Detroit,
it was in Romulus, Michigan.
So we've now spent the night in Romulus, Michigan
but there was a certain poetic feeling
to the war on cars hosts getting sucked
into the vortex of the automobile industry
right at the last minute,
right when we were about to get home.
Yeah, this was probably punishment
for whoever hacked those VMS signs
to put up cars ruined cities.
We have no idea how that happened.
We were willing to pay the price though.
Okay, that is it for this episode of the War on Cars.
Thanks for everyone's patience
with our production schedule as well
because we are maybe an episode short,
but we will be back on track
and we really appreciate everyone's support.
Yeah, we're gonna be coming back strong
in the month of January.
Remember, you can support us by signing up on Patreon
at patreon.com slash the War on Cars pod.
A big thanks to everyone who supports us,
including our top contributors,
Charlie G of Human Powered Law in Portland, Oregon,
Mark Hedlund, Virginia Baker, and Brandon DeCoster.
Thanks also to our friends at Cleverhood.
You can receive 15% off the best rain gear
for walking and cycling now through the end of December
with the code be a giver at cleverhood.com
slash the War on Cars.
The War on Cars is produced with support
from the Helen and William Mazer Foundation.
This episode was edited by Samantha Gatzek.
It was recorded by Josh Wilcox
at the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio.
Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear.
Transcripts are by Russell Gragg.
Our logo is by Danny Finkel.
I'm Sarah Goodyear.
I'm Doug Gordon, and this is The War on Cars.
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