Is There Life After Cars? These Authors Think So

Second in an Occasional Series

Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile

By Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek

Thesis (an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC), 2025

When I stopped owning cars, I began to see and feel how non-drivers navigate their days. And I became, almost without meaning to, an advocate for things like public transportation and pedestrian downtowns. But it was only after doing some research that I began to sense that I was

part of a movement, small but growing, a pushback against the ubiquity of the car culture and the damage it has wrought.

I discovered a whole body of literature on the subject. In 1997, Boston architecture critic Jane Holtz Kay published Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back, the subject of the first installment of this series.

Nearly 30 years farther down the freeway, an update would seem to be in order. What, if anything, have we taken back? Are we any closer to the end of the Automobile Age? Will there be life after cars?

Life After Cars, the new book by a trio of authors who also host a podcast and live events, begins with death. In the first chapter we learn that in 1899 Henry Bliss was the first person in the United States killed by a car, run down while stepping off a streetcar in New York. In 1924, 18,400 Americans were killed by cars. That same year, the New York Times ran a front-page story under the headline: “Nation Roused Against Motor Killings.” In the first three decades of the 20th century, public protests condemned the increasing death toll from these new mechanized invaders. According to the authors, “anger at cars and their drivers permeated the culture.”

Their podcast is called The War on Cars, a cheeky nod to the in-your-face media culture in which we live. In the book’s introduction, the authors explain: “Think of how a company asking it employees to say ‘Happy Holidays’ … is transformed into the ‘war on Christmas,’ or how an all-female reboot of a beloved 1980s movie gets spun into a ‘war on men.’ That’s how taking a few parking spaces to install a bike lane equals ‘a war on cars.’ When you’re

accustomed to driving, sharing the road feels like oppression.”

The authors make the case that aggressive advertising convinced the public that the “freedom” of the automobile was worth the yearly carnage. America’s purported “love affair with the car” was a marketing slogan before it was a cliché.

Much as Kay did 28 years ago, the authors lay out a litany of the automobile’s offenses: to life and limb, of course, but also to our economy, our neighborhoods, our public services and sense of community, and our natural world. And they offer some possible pathways out of the morass in which we have entangled ourselves. They cite examples of traffic improvements from

places where cars no longer rule. Pedestrian rights, parking reform, congestion pricing, bike lanes, buses and trains – an agglomeration of these things would surely make it easier to live without a car in many parts of the United States. What’s needed is the political will to make them happen.

My favorite part of the book might be the penultimate chapter, titled “Do It Yourself,” in which the authors chronicle stories of what might be called guerilla tactics in the war on cars. While cautioning against anything too blatantly against the law, they demonstrate a sense of humor that is often the first casualty in arguments over policy. They admire the “playful subversiveness” in hacking highway signs and marking impromptu bike lanes with potted plants.

They tell of two men who paid for a parking space and put down a roll of sod, a bench, and a potted tree to create a temporary social space. They write of “tactical urbanism” as way to take back space from cars and return it to people.

Life After Cars is fun to read. At the same time, it serves an important contribution and update to our cultural conversation about cars. Have things improved since the publication of Asphalt Nation? It’s hard to see how. Surely there are more cars than ever. If anything, American

culture is even more car-centric than it was in 1997. But Life After Cars gives me reasons to be hopeful. It’s a timely salvo in a battle that has just begun.