Host: SUV.

Sarah Goodyear: SUVs. Yep. Yep. And um and then there's the effect on, you know, animals that were killing them. They can't reproduce properly because they don't have their habitats that are cut up by roads. Uh there is also the cost to society and I think this is one of the ones that I really think about all the time. What we're what we're losing when we put ourselves into a system that requires us each to be in our own individual metal box all the time to do anything. We're not interacting with our neighbors with our fellow citizens and in the city. Um, and so, you know, there all of these costs, they're piling up and we're blind to them a lot of the time. We don't understand all of these negative effects that are happening because the car is just a thing that you have to use, right, to do your business, to go to work, to go to school. And so, you know, I I what we're trying to do with the book is to help people see that there are these terrible, terrible costs that cars extract. I I haven't even talked about the financial cost for people

Doug Gordon: about to jump in and say, in the US, a new car is over $50,000. Insurance has gone way up. You know, it's absurd that if you want to live in most places in North America, the cost of entry is a giant metal box with rubber wheels and glass all around you. We are born as human animals with the ability, most of us, to walk um or to roll around on our own power. And it is really absurd that if you took us out of New York and plopped us in, you know, a suburb of Toronto or Atlanta, Georgia, the price of admission for full infranchisement in society is car insurance, a license. You know, god forbid you get in a crash and have to deal with the hap the health impacts of that or the inconvenience then of not having your car because it's in the shop. And if you really step back, it it's absurd that we built our society this way.

Host: I want ask you about the title of your your podcast, the war on cars. It's a little tongue and cheek, I guess, but or but where did it come from actually? I I know we had a mayor, Rob Ford, many years ago. He ran a campaign against the war on the car, and he won, but I'm assuming we can't take credit for the

Doug Gordon: Oh, or can we? Oh, really? Okay.

Sarah Goodyear: Absolutely. We were following Rob Ford very closely during those years. And when we decided to start a podcast back in 2018 and we were thinking of what to call it and we came up with all sorts of really boring bad names and streets pod no and [laughter] um and so I just blurted out one day I was like you know what this podcast is this is the podcast of the war on cars and we all laughed and then we said wait that's it. So yes, it's basically we're trying to take back from people like the late Rob Ford. We're trying to we're trying to take that and okay, we'll we'll we'll appropriate that for ourselves. You want to call us the war on cars? Okay, maybe we will be. And so yes, there is a tongue-in-cheek nature to it. I've had a lot of people say that the name of the podcast is too confrontational. The truth is that in order to break through and get people's attention sometimes in media, you have to really try to shake things up a little bit.

Host: I mean, that's why Rob Ford screamed about uh a war on cars because he knew it was a like red meat for the culture war and he, you know, it worked for him, right? He he got elected. So, but I thought was interesting the you went back in into the early 20th century and there was kind of a war on cars or there was like at least a campaign because there were a lot of deaths from autoreated accidents or car crashes I think is the term you prefer. Um, and even in in the Superman comics of the day, you want to tell us that story. How how was Superman sort of fighting against uh reckless drivers?

Doug Gordon: So, we open the book with uh Action Comics, which was published in 1939, where um Clark Kent comes out of his office and sees that a friend has been hit and killed by a driver. And Superman, Clark Kent then turns into Superman and says to the city's mayor like, "What are you doing about this problem that's affecting our city?" And the mayor sort of has a sort of what can anybody do feeling about it, which a a lot of mayors might say today. And Superman then goes around and he destroys a used car lot. He destroys um an automobile manufacturer's lot. He stops a cop from taking a bribe for a guy to get out of a parking ticket. Um and he's really battling this enemy. not Lex Luthther or some alien from outer space, but the car because at that time um in the 1930s, nobody had experienced mechanized industrial death on the scale that the automobile visited upon North American cities. The only thing close had been World War I. Um and at that time people were equating the victims of automobile crashes to the victims of war to soldiers who had been killed on the battlefield. There there were white star mothers who had lost children to traffic violence. There were parades and memorials to bring attention to this issue. And um you know Shuster and Seagull who actually I think were born here in Toronto. Um Shuster was

Host: Schustster was yeah

Doug Gordon: um you know when they were born there were something like 4700 people having been killed in car crashes in like 1914 1916 by the time that comic was published it was up to about 37,000 people at a time when the population of the US was about 130 140 million people so it was a a per capita rate that was just like 30 people per 100,000 so at that time they would have known a life before cars they would have seen more and more people getting killed. It would have been outrageous to them that you could just get killed walking across the street. Today, you know, people get killed walking across the street and the reaction is, "Oh, what did they do to deserve it?"

Host: Yeah. It's more individualized.

Doug Gordon: Yeah. They were wearing all black or they were looking at their phone or they were drunk and walking. And we never really stopped to say, number one, what was the driver doing? But number two, look at the system we've built where just the cost of going about your daily business might be that you die or get injured. That's another part of the absurdity that we've just accepted, you know, 40ish thousand deaths in the US alone, a million plus worldwide because someone needs to drive to get groceries. Like the cost could be death. That is absurd to me.

Host: What do you say to someone? I mean, you know, we're in Ontario, which is a big province. I mean, geographically, I think it's bigger than France and the UK combined is what I've been told. Um, and there's just a lot of places you you just can't live without a car. I mean, you can't get around, otherwise you're going to be walking for a while. Um, I guess what do you say to those folks who say that, yeah, you kind of just need a car in certain places.

Doug Gordon: I would say cool, use a car. A a car is a tool and just like you have different utensils in your kitchen drawer and sometimes you need a soup spoon and sometimes you need a steak knife depending on what you're eating. Depending on where you're going and what type of trip you're making, you know, a small car might be perfectly fine. A giant Ford F-150 is probably a bit of overkill if you're just going to get groceries. If you're going camping, it might be a perfect or you're to, you know, towing a boat. That's a great tool to use. I use a car when I take a camping trip with my family because it's the easiest and best way, but I ride a bike to the grocery store or I walk to the transit stop to get to work. And I think of mobility like that kitchen drawer of tools, like what's the right tool for the job I'm doing? And if it's a car, we've had to drive on tour to get, you know, from airports that are not accessible to the downtown by transit. What's the choice? And so we recognize that everybody is operating within this system, but also there are always going to be places where a car is going to be the best tool for the job. We just tend to not think that the middle of a dense city is the best place at all times for all people. The problem is that there aren't a lot of choices if you don't want to drive a car. In Europe, for instance, there are hundreds of cities that you could live in comfortably without a car. In North America, there are a handful of cities where you can live comfortably and really fully participate in the civic life of the city. What we advocate is for more cities to provide those options for people. There are a lot of dense cities and dense parts of cities in North America, you know, that could have better transit, better bike lanes, better sidewalks, and then that would give people options. And sometimes it's, you know, for a family of four to not have to have four cars. Maybe they only have one car or two cars. You know, these are the kinds of things it can be an incremental change. And I think incremental change is necessary when you're facing problems of this scale, right? But to say that, well, if you live in North America, you just have to own a car like that that seems that seems like a radical position to me. You know, I think that what's a much more reasonable position is to say, well, we have all of these cities that have dense downtowns and relatively dense residential neighborhoods. Shouldn't those places be ones where you can have more choices about having to get around and less dependence on these multinational corporations that are selling you fossil fuels and automobiles? You know, I think that people might want choices and it's frightening sometimes to imagine a world in which there are more choices or to even hope for one, but you know, really that's what we're advocating is is to just have more options.

Host: Do you ever meet people who work in the auto industry? Like do they ever what do they say? Because I I know I've had cousins who've worked in the auto industry. It employs a lot of people. What do they say to you when you tell them

Doug Gordon: Well, there's the employment side of it, of course. Like these are huge industries and they're not going away nor should we get rid of them right we talk a lot about a just transition like the people building automobiles like they could be building public transit vehicles that would be a really great way to switch one for one these union jobs that are so important to Canada to the United States to a lot of countries but um a lot of we have a lot of car enthusiasts who listen to the show and what they will say is that I love driving I love working on my car and I love your show because I hate traffic. And what we often say is that if you love driving, if driving to work is your jam, you know, and you love the 40 minutes or so that you get to listen to music, have your alone time, cool. What you should want is for every other person on the road to have the option to bike or take transit instead. And so the car enthusiasts and people in the auto industry, they sort of get it. And I also think you can look at the auto industry right now and get that they understand they have a really bad product that people just don't want. Um, you know, most of the car ads don't talk about the features of the car anymore. Some car ads talk about how bad traffic is and how like isn't it nice to just relax in your little isolation chamber? Um, they just have a, you know, people talk about bicycles as this old-fashioned technology. The car hasn't changed all that much either in a hundred years. It's electric now. There were electric back then. Safety features have changed, but four wheels and a steering wheel and four seats, five seats, that's pretty much the same. Um, so we do have folks in the auto industry who say, "Yeah, we get it." Um, and even the head of Ford Motor Company has said that like maybe in the future Ford will be a mobility company, selling people different forms of mobility than just a car that you need.

Host: Well, maybe we can end on just some ways that people can wean themselves off the our car dependence.

Sarah Goodyear: You know, there are a lot of things that individuals can do in their own lives that I think are really interesting and important. And one of them is to just give yourself a challenge to use the car less in your own life if there are options. If you can walk sometimes, if you can ride a bike, if that is available to you, just try it. See how it feels. and maybe give yourself a week or a month where you say, "I'm going to use the car less." Um, I think that what you might experience is a new kind of engagement with your own community. Even if you're doing something like parking farther away from the store that you're going to and walking a few blocks through the community, you might see people, you might see stores, you might see things that you you never would have seen before. So, that's that's one way of doing it. And let's say that you you want to try using transit, but you're scared of using transit because you don't know how it works or you you're intimidated by it in some way because a lot of people in this continent anyway don't really know how to use cities very well. They maybe didn't grow up using transit and so that seems intimidating to them. Well, but maybe you have that friend at work who does take transit. ask them, "Hey, would you ride with me, you know, or if you're the person who does take transit, offer that to somebody else? I'll be your transit buddy. I'll be your bike buddy and show you how it works." And then it might start to unlock possibilities. I I think that's one really simple thing that you can do, but in order to do it, you need transit to ride and bike lanes to ride in and sidewalks to walk on. And that's where political will comes in.

Doug Gordon: I would also recommend people find advocacy groups like Cycle Toronto and pedestrian advocacy groups that find the people who are working on this and either ask how you can help or for just tips on how to get around. But yeah, the political will is just huge. And I think the thing that people who bike or people who want to walk and take transit more need to do is get organized. Find other people who are like-minded. One of the things we talk about in the book literally is just find your people. Talk to people in your community. A lot of people feel like, "Oh, I'm the weirdo. I want to bike to the grocery store. I want to bike to work." If you start talking to people, you might find that you're not alone. And then all it takes is two or three of you to go to a public meeting or to call your city council person. They're usually very accessible and say, "Hey, you know, I hear there's a plan to maybe put a bike lane on the street. We're in favor of that." because you know they're going to hear from the people who are against it. Um so I think you know speaking up and becoming a political constituency. Look, you do need those like forwardthinking elected officials who know that this is the right thing to do. Very few of those people pop up organically. They pop up because of the grassroots coalition that says, "Hey, we want something different and we will support you, the elected official, if you do good things." So when your elected officials do good things, tell them. When they do bad things, politely tell them maybe they should do something else. But like become a political force. You can with just a few people.

Host: Well, that's a great place to leave it. Doug, Sarah, thank you so much, guys. This is great.

Sarah Goodyear: Thanks so much.