Welcome to Life After Cars

Hey everyone, it's Doug.

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This is Life After Cars.

It is?

No, we haven't renamed the podcast, but this is a big day.

Yeah.

I'm Doug Gordon.

I'm Sarah Goodyear.

And as you are listening to this episode, whether you are listening to it on the

day it comes out, the day after or a year later, our book, Life After Cars, Freeing

Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile is now out.

Yeah.

You know, you wait and wait and wait for something like this, and it's been a two

and a half year process altogether from the time that we really decided we're

going to write this book, wrote the proposal, shopped it around, then had to write

the book when we were...

Yeah, that happens after you sell the book.

You do have to write the book.

Yeah.

The proposal, you can't just publish the proposal.

The proposal was so detailed and long that sometimes I was like, could we just do this?

But yeah.

And then just the whole writing of the book.

And then there's another year after you hand in the full manuscript when you're

going through the editing process, the copy editing, fact checking.

And now it's like, wow, it's happening.

Okay.

So hold on to all of those thoughts.

Let's treat this a little bit like a regular episode.

Folks, it's going to be a little weird because we don't have a guest.

We don't really have a subject for this episode other than the book is out.

We're going to get into some of it a little bit, give you a preview.

But let's do what we normally do, Sarah.

First, some business.

You can buy our book, Life After Cars, Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of

the automobile, wherever books are sold.

And I highly suggest you do buy it.

You can also go to lifeaftercars.com to find out more about it.

And we are going out on tour.

So by the time this episode drops, there will probably be new cities to this

list that I'm going to read.

The list of cities that we're visiting is expanding literally by the day.

We're getting all these great emails from folks and advocacy

organizations and bookstores around the country, in Canada, Europe,

although we're not headed there just yet.

But the book comes out on October 21st.

The day this episode drops, two days after it comes out, we will be on our

way to San Francisco for two events.

One at the Litquake Festival in San Francisco.

The other with the Yimbi Action at the Grand Theater in San Francisco.

Then we will be at the Black Cat in Washington, DC on October 30th.

We will be in Seattle on November 5th with City Nerd.

That show is sold out, but you can get live stream tickets.

We will be in Vancouver with Vision Zero Vancouver.

We will be in Nanaimo, British Columbia, with Strong Towns Nanaimo.

November 13th, Portland, war-torn Portland, Oregon.

We are going to go in our frog costumes and we are going to read from the book.

We're really excited to be in Portland.

Love Portland.

We're doing something at the Bike Happy Hour with Bike Portland.

We're really excited about that.

Legends.

November 16th, San Diego.

November 17th, Los Angeles, California.

December 2nd, Providence, Rhode Island.

December 4th and December 5th, we will be at two events in Austin.

December 10th, Houston.

December 12th, Denver.

And that is just the end of 2025.

We've got lots of stuff for 2026.

I will not go through the whole list because that would be the whole episode.

We also, I should say, have our show in Brooklyn on October 28th at the Bell House.

I think it might be sold out.

But check, they might release a few extra tickets as we get closer to the actual show.

Again, that's Tuesday, October 28th, with an amazing special guest,

Jeanette Sadekhan, who I just got to shout out, her book Street Fight and all the work

that she did to make this city and other cities.

The cities that they are today.

I don't think there's life after cars without Street Fight.

There's definitely not life after cars without the work that she pioneered.

And we're going to get into that at our live show.

We're so grateful that she will be there.

Yeah, I mean, I think that Jeanette's work and Jeanette's example really epitomize

something that we talk about a lot in the book, which is the importance of political

leadership and integrity, sticking to your guns, believing in your design,

believing in the principles that are animating what you're doing and being able

to just stand and take questions and address concerns and say, you know what?

We're going to go ahead and do this.

And you're going to see that it's going to make life better for everybody.

And there's nobody in New York right now who would say, oh, I think we should go back

to having Times Square be just traffic lanes or get rid of city bike or get rid of city bike

or get rid of all the dozens of pedestrian plazas that have sprung up around the city.

Well, there are probably two people who believe that Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Liewa

who are running from there.

And that's just a reminder.

If you are in New York City, go ahead and cast your vote for Zoran Mamdani.

I am going to just say right here.

We are not a non-profit.

We can endorse, we're allowed to endorse candidates.

Yeah, exactly.

And, you know, and I think it's really important if you care about these issues

to elect people who actually believe in things.

And while Curtis Liewa certainly fits that description, he doesn't believe

in the same things that I believe in.

Andrew Cuomo apparently doesn't believe in anything as far as I can tell.

He believes in putting his hands wherever he wants to put his hands.

That's right.

And also in taking money from whoever has a lot of money to give him.

Yeah.

But I think we told you this was going to be a weird episode.

We are giddy with excitement that this book is coming out.

Yeah.

Let's finish up the business.

We are also on Patreon.

We are.

At patreon.com slash the war on cars pod.

If you support us, you make everything possible.

The podcast, the book.

Everything.

And our Patreon supporters get first dibs at most of the tickets for our

live shows and also get special things related to the book.

So, you know, please sign up.

And I would just like to say that as much as Jeanette Sadegkan is part

of what made life after cars possible, the book, I would like to say that

our Patreon supporters certainly are a major contributor to what made

this book possible because not only have you financially supported the

podcast and made it possible to produce the podcast over the past seven years,

but you have also been in constant dialogue and conversation with us.

You've been telling us what you see, where you are.

We've been learning from you and we also just feel so supported.

And like we're doing it for somebody and for a real reason.

And that feeling is what keeps us going when things are hard or it seems overwhelming.

And we do this on a shoestring and the shoestring has been provided by our

Patreon supporters.

You guys tie the shoes, basically.

We really, no, you know, I always say that there are two very valuable

things in every person's lives and that is your time and your money.

Your money, if you're giving it to us via Patreon every last dollar,

whether you're giving three bucks a month or more, we appreciate it.

Whether you give for one month or you have been giving from the beginning,

we appreciate you equally.

Your time by listening to us, by wearing shirts out at

Ciclovias, putting up stickers, the time that you guys take to support us.

That's a thing you can never get back and it is probably the most valuable

thing that you have.

And we appreciate so much, whether again, you've listened to one episode or all

160 episodes and the bonuses, like I'm so humbled that people do listen to us.

So we're really, again, look, this is going to be a very weird episode.

We have so many people to thank.

I just want to say really thank you to every last person listening.

I also want to say that part of the way that we produce the podcast is

by thinking to ourselves, we have some of the smartest listeners of any podcast

I can think of, we have planners, we have elected officials, we have people

who are just hobbyists and who know this stuff at a high level and we try

to live up to the knowledge and understanding that we have to make a

show that speaks to the people we're trying to bring into the fold,

the people who know nothing about the subject, but sort of sense maybe

something could be better and all of you who are just pros at this in one

way or another.

And we're so grateful when we get feedback on episodes, it's always

constructive, it's always helpful and it helps us make a better show.

So I could go on and on about how much I value our listeners, but it

wouldn't be enough.

Actually, it's really important to us.

So thank you.

Before we get too deep, let's give people a little preview of the book.

We're going to play a little bit of the audio book, Life After Cars.

A love affair or an arranged marriage?

For generations, automobiles have been promoted as an unmitigated

technological marvel.

If you question the role of cars in society or politely suggest that

cities invest in public transportation and protected bike lanes,

you risk being called a Luddite.

The auto dominant paradigm rests on the idea that the problems

cars create can be solved only with new and different cars, electric

cars, autonomous cars, cars that fly.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Far from being anachronistic relics, 19th century inventions such as

trains and bikes are the best tools we have for solving 21st century

transportation problems.

Organizing our entire transportation system around personal automobile

ownership is a historical blip.

One that was pushed on society by corporate and government interests

and that does not truly represent societal and consumer preferences.

Sometimes when we tell people we host a podcast called The War on Cars,

we get a little pushback.

That's to be expected when you take any position outside the dominant

culture and point out its flaws.

Sarah was once talking to a guy at a cocktail party who after

finding out what she did for a living, asked belligerently whether

the podcast also covers all the positive things about cars, as if

a hundred years of car culture, billions of dollars in annual highway

spending and the marketing departments of every major automobile

company weren't already taken care of that.

Some critics dismiss us as out of touch urban elites.

They point out that because we all live in New York, one of the

few US cities with enough density, bike lanes and good transit

to enable a comfortable, car-free lifestyle, we can't possibly

understand the way real Americans live.

Besides, people will say, Americans have a love affair with cars.

Good luck trying to change that.

In response, we like to point out that I was raised in a town

north of Boston on a cul-de-sac with no sidewalks.

After college, I lived in Atlanta, a poster city for

car dependents, urban highways and sprawl and drove a Volkswagen

Jetta to work.

Sarah, a proud New York native, lived for several years in rural

and small town Maine, where she owned both an SUV and a 1973 Ford

Mustang, Cherry Red with a black vinyl top.

We understand American car dependents quite well because we

have experienced it firsthand and rejected it.

We know that's not an option for most people, even the people

who'd like to make a different choice.

Being able to relate to other people while still explaining that

car dependency didn't win in a fair fight is part of our mission.

Even the famous expression, America's love affair with

cars was a car industry creation, not some folksy saying that

arose spontaneously.

Peter Norton discovered that the phrase appeared in a 1957

Chevrolet ad before being popularized in a television

special that aired on October 21, 1961 on NBC.

Called Merrily We Roll Along and starring comedian Groucho

Marks, the special was sponsored by DuPont, which at

the time owned a 23% stake in General Motors.

In the special, Groucho says that our love affair

with the automobile started long ago and that it was a real

love affair, one that changed our whole way of life.

The phrase became part of the popular lexicon almost overnight,

produced the same year that Jane Jacobs published her seminal

book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities and airing

just as the highway revolts were gaining steam.

Groucho's hyping of the love affair was a brilliant

defensive ploy on the part of the automobile industry.

For generations, that hype has successfully obscured the darker

reality of a world built for cars.

People over parking.

On August 10, 2018, Madison Leiden, a 23 year old tourist

from Australia, was riding a bicycle on Central Park West when

an Uber driver suddenly pulled ahead of her into the

painted bike lane. According to news reports, Leiden swerved

into the adjacent car lane to avoid the Uber and was hit

by a sanitation truck. In an eerie echo of what happened 120

years earlier, Leiden died just seven blocks from the spot

where Henry Bliss had been killed.

Even though it's against the law to block a bike lane, the

Uber driver who obstructed Leiden s path was not charged.

He wasn't even ordered to pay the fine for such an

offense, which is $115. The driver of the sanitation

truck Felipe Chavez was allegedly drunk at the time of the

crash. Investigators found three beer bottles on the floor of

his truck's cabin, and he was arrested and charged with

driving while intoxicated, among other offenses. However,

just as taxi driver Arthur Smith was acquitted after he

claimed he could not avoid hitting Henry Bliss, the man

who drove into Madison Leiden got off easy. Prosecutors

ultimately dropped the main charge against Chavez, concluding

that even if he had been sober, it wouldn't have made any

difference because he was driving in his lane and obeying

the speed limit at the time of the crash. He was released

with just a $1,000 fine, the equivalent of about $27 in

1899. Madison Leiden s death spurred a wave of activism

in New York, supported by her family in Australia. A year

after she was killed, the New York City Department of

Transportation installed a protected bike lane on 18

blocks of Central Park West. The full stretch, running 51

blocks, or about two and a half miles, was completed in

2020. But for the most part, the story remained local, as

most traffic deaths do. Even the coverage the protected

bike lane did receive in the local press showed the way

pro-car bias has pervaded mainstream media. In 1924, the

New York Times published that haunting image of the grim

reaper driving over women and children under the bold

headline, Nation Roused Against Motor Killings. This time,

that same paper published a story headlined the people

of Central Park West want their parking spaces. Sorry,

cyclists. Increasingly, though, advocates for active

transportation aren't accepting sorry as an answer anymore. Since

Henry Bliss was hit by that taxi in 1899, cars and

automobility have killed anywhere from 60 to 80 million

people and injured at least 2 billion worldwide. After

decades of weary acceptance, there's a growing global

movement questioning the inevitability of the ongoing

toll. More and more people are asking what the first warriors

against cars asked. Why must we sacrifice our loved ones to

appease the automotive gods? When will people matter more than

parking? When will we say enough that people are

asking these questions gives us hope, but it will take more

than questions and hope to turn the tide. Hope is a

discipline. We have to practice it every day, says the American

activist and organizer, Maryam Kaba. All over the world,

individuals and advocates are practicing the discipline of

hope by changing their own relationship with driving, joining

up with larger campaigns to fix streets where they live and

staging direct actions that challenge the dominance and

alleged inevitability of cars. There's just one thing every

advocate for a better, less car dependent future always finds

standing in their way. The culture will be right back after

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Cleverhood.com slash war on cars code livable city.

Okay, we're back. So Sarah, I want to ask you, I guess we'll

interview each other about the book. How about that? Fair

enough. Folks, we did a lot of planning for this episode.

There's so much going on that we're just like, we're just

gonna talk about the book. Yeah, we're just gonna make it

a little more authentic. Yeah. Tell me about your process

of writing the book. What surprised you about the research

you did or just the process of writing it? You've written a

book before. You're a journalist. You've written lots of

things in your life. What was different this time? What

surprised you? Well, the book that I've written before was

fiction. So that was that was easier in terms of the fact

part of it. But yeah, I've written countless thousands

of articles. The thing that was different about writing a

book was the sense of responsibility to really go

deep, to really not just be writing what I could write on

deadline in a week or two weeks or even a month, but to really

sit with it and allow myself to go really, really deep on

this. And a couple of years ago during the pandemic, I went

to grad school and got a master's degree at the CUNY Grad

Center in biography and memoir, which in a way might seem

like it doesn't really have much to do with writing a book

like this. But I had so many great professors and fellow

students there with whom I learned a lot about research

processes that as a journalist, frankly, you just don't have

the time to do. And so I became much more comfortable

with archival research, much more comfortable with

library research and just more comfortable with the rigor

that you have to bring in an academic paper, right? And that

just carried kind of seamlessly over into the process of

researching this book. So I guess one thing that was

surprising was what time can give you, even though it's

a very, I think we wrote the book in about nine months.

It's a very accelerated schedule for this amount of work. But

it still was so much more time than I was used to working

with as a journalist that it felt like that time was a

responsibility and a privilege that I had to live up to.

Yeah. For me, this part of the process of writing it,

researching it, there was a piece of it that was both

surprising and not surprising. So I knew that we would

have to discard a lot. You know, you do a lot of

research and sort of the act of writing is the act of

editing. It's the act of discarding a lot of stuff,

you know, not being precious about stuff, kind of

throwing out your babies kind of stuff like that. The

amount that I wrote, and then just tossed because I'm

like, oh man, I would love to put that in, but it kind

of goes off on a tangent. Or I have more important

things to say about this. Or the fact that this is

such a fast moving subject, but yet the process is so

slow, and we were going to finish the draft of the

book and it wasn't going to come out for another year. I

think I was just surprised by the amount I left on the

cutting room floor. I think I could have filled two or

three more books just by myself. Never mind all the

stuff that like went into the book in general that we

left out. You know, we had at the point we started

writing like 130 podcast episodes or more, not to

mention 15 years of advocacy just on my part

alone, not to mention your journalism, all the

stuff that had gone into what made the book, what

it eventually became. It was sort of like this big

hourglass, except that the top of the hourglass was

bigger than the bottom, if that makes sense. And

we, the process of writing it is that narrow part at

the middle. Right. And so looking back, if I go

back and look at my notes, I'm like, oh man, that

was so great. It would have been great to put

in, but it's gone now. And you just have to

let it go. There's sort of an adage in my

television experience that like a project is never

done, it's just do. But at the same time, I

really felt like we created something that I can

be proud of, that we can all be proud of, and

that sort of like I was saying earlier, we had

to thread the needle of speaking to people who

know everything about this subject, which includes

a lot of our listeners, and the people we hope

to reach and bring into the fold, which are

the folks who know very little or nothing

about the subject, and might even be skeptical

that the idea of life after cars is even

possible in the way that we mean it. So sort of

a rambling answer, but I, you know, I'm just

I'm really happy with how it came out. I'm

really, really happy with how it came out.

Can I ask you, is there one thing that you

had to discard that made you particularly

sad? I had a vision for how I wanted to

frame the chapter on car culture and

bike lash that was different from how it

wound up turning out. And I think credit to

our editor, Megan, who rearranged a few

things. I wanted it to be originally more

of a sort of breakdown of bike lash and

like these are the 20 bike lash things

that people say and how do you respond to

them. Instead, we at her urging and with

a lot of work, you'll see when you read

it, fed these things into a story so that

the examples were more grounded in

something you could see and weren't just

theoretical. So if you look at my original

bike lash and car culture chapter, it's

much longer. And I think probably a lot

more boring, you know, because like, I

think it would have been good, but I

think it would have only spoken to the

people who want the tool of fighting

back against bike lash and not the

people who read a news story and just

take for granted some of the things

that people say. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I got so into some of

the history stuff. And off on these

tangents, I did a lot of research

about early women drivers driving

across the United States and doing

these kind of competitions and rallies

and that all disappeared. The thing I

think I'm saddest about was that I

had woven into the nature chapter,

the fact that Henry Ford was a really

avid birdwater. You'll see there's a

lot of birds in the chapter about

nature. And I was like, this is perfect.

Henry Ford was obsessed with birds and

loved birds and his inventions were

really obsessed with Nazis. Yeah. Well,

that made it in. Yes. Yeah. But

but yeah, so that was like, I was

very sad. I was like, I found this

elegant thing about him and his

birdwatching and the editor was,

you know, Megan McCormick and her

wisdom was like, you know, I think you

could leave this part out anyway. You

know, maybe I'll maybe I'll write about

that some other day. Who knows? I

think also like the hardest part in a

way was we were synthesizing so much

research from other people, including

people we've had on the show. You're

talking about nature like Ben Goldfarb,

you know, his book Crossings is

really, really great. Peter Norton,

the early history from the 1910s,

1920s that he talks about in fighting

traffic. And you know, it's a it's

a again a needle you have to thread

between like plagiarism, you know, just

like printing what these people have

written before and saying, no,

actually, this is really important.

And like, we're not expecting every

person who's reading this book to

have read all of the other books.

And so our job, sort of like as

podcast hosts is to take all of

this research and bring the best of

it to you in a fresh new way. And so

look, you know, our book stands on

the shoulders of all of those

researchers and advocates and people

have written books before. We mentioned

Jeanette at the top, but people like

Peter Norton and Ian Walker and

Ben Goldfarb and like Alyssa Walker

and all of these folks that we've

had on the show, whose journalism and

whose writing is so important. So this

is not a surprising piece of this,

but it was fun to go back over

that research and be like, oh man,

like, when people learn this piece

of the history or this statistic

about motor normativity, their minds

are going to be blown if they haven't

heard this before. That was fun to see

again. So one of the things people

ask me about the book before

it's out is, you know, who is this

book for? So I'm sure you're getting

that question too. Yeah, how do you

answer that? Which we talk about in

the intro a little bit. Yes, yes,

but yeah, we do itemize that.

But sometimes, you know, when you're

just or on social media, there have

been people who've just reacted seeing

that the title of the book, Life

After Cars. Well, there can't be Life

After Cars. What are you talking

about? You know, there's there can

be some negative pushback. So how

have you been dealing with that?

You know, I probably have been the

person in the past who read a

headline of a story and was like,

this sucks. And then you read

the story and you're like, this

does not suck quite as much.

And so I always try to now be the

person who like, unless it really is

like a crappy headline, as we see in

politics these days, I try to reserve

judgment until I read something.

Some people I think just like with

the war on cars or just like with

any proposal to put a bike lane on a

street, there are some people who

are just going to reflexively say,

no, our job as advocates, the way

I see my job is not to convince

the no way know how people, but

to sort of just present an argument

in a way that doesn't necessarily

cause people to say, like, that's

it. I'm giving up my car, but at

least gets them to say, hey, I

kind of see where you're coming

from and I'm open to this

argument. I think that's what we

tried to do with the book. That's

how I've been dealing with it. It's

just sort of like, hey, you know,

like, read the book and let me

know what you think. I think

you're going to enjoy it. We're

not actually making a no car

argument. It's not really an

anti car argument. It is too

serious. Like, read the first

few chapters. It is. And but we are

saying like, there are people in

places where cars make sense, like

for whom cars make sense and where

cars make sense. It's just that

we've over deployed them. So I

mostly just I want the book to

sort of like speak for itself.

They don't push back too much. I

think I think we did a really

good job of like, hopefully

disarming a lot of those people.

Right. And I think for me as

someone who despite having been

a journalist for a long time,

who's gotten a lot of negative

pushback about things that I've

written for pretty much my entire

career, I still have kind of a

thin skin. I'm still a sensitive

person in a lot of ways. And and

I can feel hurt if people assume

bad faith on my part. It's not

so much that I get hurt if people

don't like my arguments. It's

more if they if they act as if

I'm not arguing in good faith and

not arguing with a knowledge of,

yes, this is a very auto

centric society. I've had so many

people tell me, wow, but do you

know that the US is a really

auto centric society? No,

shit. Yeah, that's why I'm

here. Yeah. So, you know, I

think that for me, like, it has

actually been helpful to write

the book and have the book and

to be able to say, like, I did

my due diligence here and I put

it into this book and and we

really have something to say

that's very authentic and it's

very closely argued and it's

evidence based and it's

compassionate and it's

thoughtful. And it recognizes

the reality of the way that most

Americans and people around the

world live and I can stand

behind that. And so that's helped

me to sort of it's almost like

my thin skin now has a book to

protect it.

Exactly. Look, it is one of

those things and you see this on

social media where like, people

see the one post that you put

up and just make all of these

assumptions without going through

your feet or even looking at

your bio and understanding who

you are. So that's just the

nature of the world that we live

in and the attention economy

that we live in. So you have to

deal with that. I feel like the

book is an authentic reflection

of who we are as journalists

and advocates and podcasters and

as humans. I think it speaks

to the people we want to reach

out to, like you said, I think

we are as compassionate as we

can be towards people operating

in a system that just doesn't

work for most people. And I'm

proud of what we did. It's

really fun to see it out

there in the world. We have

our physical copies right here

with us. We've signed a couple

copies already. My wrist is

getting stiff just thinking of

the numbers that we're going to

have to sign. It's so amazing.

It's incredible. It's so awesome.

I mean, I think we could ramble

on forever just about how

awesome this is. But I want

to ask you, so is there

something that you put in

the book that you were able

to write that that you're

particularly excited for people

to read or you think might

be a little surprised without

giving away too much, but

something like a little nugget

in there that you think is

going to be fun for people or

interesting in a particular

way. There are two. One is

place-based, one is more

personal. So the story about

Ghent and how Ghent has

transformed itself in a very

short amount of time is

probably my favorite part of the

book. Selfishly, I went

there and reported on it for

the book. So it has a

special place for me in terms

of the amount of work I did,

what I experienced, and I

wrote it in a way that is not

just evidence-based, but is

really experiential-based, if

that makes sense. And then

there's a little piece about

my daughter that I threw in

there in the chapter about

kids. I don't want to say

much more than that, because

it's a really fun story and

sort of sums up the argument

we're trying to make in that

chapter. How about you?

Yeah, I think for me, I

really liked writing the

chapter about nature and the

effect of cars on nature,

because that's something that's

very easy for us to ignore

and that it's a really

important thing to open our

eyes to and also to see

ourselves as human beings as

part of nature that we're

animals to. And the way that

cars affect animals is the

way that cars affect us. So

that part is really

important to me. And I think

that the research I did for

that was kind of life changing

for me in a lot of ways. But

there is also a personal

little nugget in there, which

is if you've ever wondered

about my last name and

its connection to the

automobile industry, we have

a little section where I

explain that. So your

curiosity will be satisfied.

And I have researched the

hell out of it and I

summarize it in this book.

So final question, because

we really could just talk

about this for hours and

bore the hell out of people.

And we'll have to talk about

it for hours.

Yes, on the road. Yeah. That's

the part that I'm really

looking forward to is getting

out on the road. Kind of our

favorite thing about this

podcast has been the people

we meet in person, whether

that's at Meetups in Brooklyn

or the few live shows that

we've done. Now we're going

to do as many live shows in a

month as we've done in seven

years, meeting people in

person and seeing the work

that you're all doing to

realize life after cars,

whatever that means in your

definition. That's been the

best part. You know, we are

just part of a movement that

is really picking up these

days and changing cities

despite all the headwinds,

the federal government and

elsewhere. I think we're

winning the culture war in a

lot of ways. And that's

been fun to see. And I'm

just so excited to get out

on the road and talk to

people. So really, final

question. We sell the movie

rights to life after cars. Who

plays you in the big screen

adaptation of life after

cars? Oh, my God, I'm not

going to pick for you because

I just feel like I would say

something. I don't know. I

wouldn't get it right. Like,

has anyone ever told you, oh,

you look like or this

person is like you, you

know, not not of anyone

who would be like of the

right age. I actually have

been told that I remind

people of Bette Midler,

which has always been strange

to me and also Amelia Earhart,

which is very strange to me.

If Amelia Earhart were

available to do the part, I

would certainly. Wait, wait,

wait. How do people know,

like other than like those

sort of like sped up black and

white photos where she's

like waving too fast? Like,

how do they know what

Amelia Earhart is like?

There are a lot of still

photos of her where she

looks very dashing. So, so

I'm trying to think that

that's what it is.

Bette Midler, I've never

seen you in a fish tail or

singing a song for beaches.

I don't I don't think that.

But there's an actor that I

really like named Jen

Tullock. She's in Severance.

She plays the sister.

She's awesome.

And she's pretty amazing.

And I like to think that we

have a similar vibe.

And so that's who I

that's that's who I would

cast. That's a good choice.

I like her. She's a good

actor for me.

I've been told in some

circumstances that I look

like Giovanni Robisi.

If you know who that is.

Yeah, I can see that.

You might have more hair than

I have now.

That's OK. I might be a little

skinnier.

I don't know how old he is.

I'm going to look this up.

Sorry, folks, we told you

we're doing this on the fly.

Giovanni Robisi.

Oh, he's 50.

OK, there you go.

He's age appropriate.

Born the same year as me.

So age appropriate.

So if you know who he is

from like Avatar

and other independent films, too,

I think that would be it.

Yeah. OK.

And then I mean, you know,

what would life after cars

the movie be?

I mean, obviously would be

different from the book.

I would like to think that it's

kind of a superhero movie

in which we would

or our characters would

just go around the world

making the world

save for life after cars.

I think it's the opposite of

the fast and the furious.

It's the slow and the courteous.

That's life after cars.

OK, good enough.

OK, so the book is out.

You can go to lifeaftercars.com.

We really encourage you

to purchase the book, obviously,

wherever it makes sense for you.

Get it at your library.

If you can support a local independent

bookseller, please do.

Many local indie bookstores

are our partners on our book tour

and we're so grateful for their support.

Also, if you are a Patreon supporter,

we want to hear for a year end

bonus episode.

What does life after cars mean for you?

So we'd love for you to record

like a 30 second to one minute.

Take on that.

Give us a specific example

of something you've done

or your vision for the future

and you can send it to us.

We will send instructions

for how to do that

in a Patreon blast.

That's it for this episode

of the war on cars.

I think you mean life after cars.

Yeah.

No, we are not rebranding.

No, we're not.

War on cars is a great thing.

Still, still war on cars.

Remember, you can support us

and get exclusive bonus content,

pre-sale access to live show tickets,

free stickers,

chance to contribute to the podcast

and more by signing up on Patreon

at patreon.com

slash the war on cars pod.

And a big thanks to everyone

who supports us,

including our top contributors,

Charlie G of Human Powered Law

in Portland, Oregon,

Mark Headland, Virginia Baker

and Brandon DeCoster.

We also want to give big thanks

to our friends at Cleverhood

for sponsoring this episode,

our friends at Upway

for sponsoring this episode.

Our sponsors are a huge part

of what makes this possible as well

as is the Helen and William

Mazer Foundation,

a really important sort of support for us.

Yes, thank you so much

for your generosity.

This episode was edited

by Samantha Gatzek

and a big thanks to Josh Wilcox

at the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio.

Who is sitting right here

recording this episode?

This podcast, this book,

none of it would be possible

without his expertise

and his friendship.

Thank you, Josh.

Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear

and yes, Nathaniel Goodyear

is related to me.

He is my son

and I'm very proud of him.

Transcripts are by Russell Greg.

Thank you, Russell.

Our logo is by the great Danny Finkel.

Audio excerpted courtesy

of Penguin Random House Audio

from Life After Cars

by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon

and Aaron Napristak.

Read by Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon.

Penguin Random House, LLC.

I'm Doug Gordon.

I'm Sarah Goodyear.

And this is The War on Cars.

Welcome to Life After Cars

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