From Blog to Book: The Journey of Slower Traffic

Anyone who’s ever written a book knows that it requires solitary, anonymous toil, and that every part of the process takes longer than you think it’s going to. You can write a blog post and upload it to social media the next day. It can be just as quickly forgotten. But a book is an artifact. It must remain relevant from conception to composition, through publication and shelf life, over a span of years and occasionally generations.

I spent the first half of July going over the edited manuscript of Slower Traffic: Life without a Car in Maine, USA. The book will be released next spring by 12 Willows Press, a local Maine publisher in Winterport.

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I began writing the blog in 2015, eight years after getting rid of my last car. But the book had to be more than a collection of blog posts. Themes emerged and coalesced into chapters. At various times, I wrote about bicycling, trains, the local bus system, climate change, and the economics of owning a car. I wrote about transportation in California and Bulgaria. It was challenging to adapt essays written for the moment into a cohesive narrative for the present and future. Many new words needed to be written, and many old ones taken out.

Fortunately, I’m blessed with two good editors, who have meticulously gone over the book, asked questions, and pointed out inconsistencies, mistakes, and stylistic awkwardness. Good editors are worth their weight in gold.

By the time I gave up car ownership, I had read enough books and articles about the American car culture to know that I didn’t want to be a full, willing participant. But few of them addressed the practical question of how an individual lives day-to-day without a car, especially in a place like Bangor, Maine. There’s plenty of top-down literature about the costs of cars to the economy and the environment, but little about the lived experience of the average American trying to kick car addiction.

I gave up cars primarily for economic reasons. But many of my fellow citizens don’t have a choice in the matter. The car culture effectively excludes the disabled, the poor, the elderly, and the young. As I began living this new life, I observed how they got through the day. And I became an advocate for longer bus hours, pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, and limits on parking – all the things a community needs to do to promote alternatives to driving.

Many people with environmentalist leanings own cars. Understandable, because we’ve created car-centric communities and defined that as normal. But all the electric cars and hybrids and vegetable oil engines will not mitigate the damage of parking and sprawl. I think a lot of environmentalists would give up cars if they thought they could.

I get it, because I was one of them. Maybe you are, too.

Hank Garfield's memoir, "Slower Traffic" is expected in 2027.