Life After Cars

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

From the hosts of The War on Cars podcast, a searing indictment of how cars ruin everything—and what we can do to fight back

When the very first cars rolled off production lines, they were a technological marvel, predicted to make life easier and better for all Americans; yet a hundred years later, that dream is running on empty.

Instead of unbounded freedom, the never-ending proliferation of automobiles has delivered a host of costs, among them the demolition of our neighborhoods, towns, and cities to make way for car infrastructure; an epidemic of violent death; countless hours lost in traffic; isolation from our fellow human beings; and the ongoing destruction of the natural world. Globally, SUVs alone now emit more carbon than the nations of Germany, South Korea, or Japan.

That’s why we need Life After Cars. Through historical records, revealing interviews, and unflinching statistics, Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, hosts of the podcast The War on Cars, and former host Aaron Naparstek unpack the scale of damage that cars cause, the forces that have created our current crisis and are invested in perpetuating it, and the way that the fight for better transportation is deeply linked to the fight for a more equitable and just society.

Cars as we know them today are unsustainable—but there is hope. Life After Cars will arm readers with the tools they need to implement real, transformative change, from simply raising awareness to taking a stand at public forums. It’s past time to radically rethink—and shrink—society’s collective relationship with the automobile. Together, let’s create a better Life After Cars.“As a city planner and lifelong car nut, I hid my eyes from the truth for years. But I can no longer dodge the clear conclusion: The problem is cars, and the way we have allowed them to reshape the human environment around their needs, not ours. Against this backdrop, I owe my continued sanity to the best podcast in the world, The War on Cars. It’s all in this book. Read it.”
— Jeff Speck, city planner and author of Walkable City

“The car may be the feature of modern life we take most for granted. But as this brilliant book makes clear, we should be asking deep questions about whether we want to keep shaping our communities and our lives around automobiles: We’re ready for the shake-up these authors inspire!”
— Bill McKibben, author of Here Comes the Sun

“If the great American love affair with the automobile in the twentieth century was really an arranged marriage, then Life After Cars are the papers served for a conscious uncoupling. By fighting for what’s best for cites from the street to the schoolyard, the authors are ultimately fighting for what’s best for our people and the planet.”
— Janette Sadik-Khan, principal at Bloomberg Associates and former commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation

“No matter how bad you think cars are for our health, happiness, and well-being, after reading this book you’ll realize . . . it’s worse than you thought. Life After Cars proves people are hungry for something better.”
— Jason Slaughter, creator of Not Just Bikes

“Life After Cars offers a comprehensive account of why our unthinking allegiance to cars makes most things in life worse—and a vision for how to make them better. Valuable and timely, this book will make you believe change is possible.”
— Megan Kimble, author of City Limits

“Life After Cars is a much-needed ass-whooping for the city stewards who have us stuck in traffic. With verve and facts, it shows that car dependence is not inevitable. We built this hell, and, together, we can change it.”
— Charles Montgomery, urbanist and award-winning author of Happy City

“Inspiring and hopeful. After reading the authors’ exuberant call to arms, I’m ready to follow them into battle in the war on cars.”
— Henry Grabar, author of Paved ParadiseSarah Goodyear is a journalist and author who has covered cities and transportation for publications such as Grist, CityLab, and Streetsblog. Doug Gordon is a TV producer and writer who is also a neighborhood safe streets advocate better known online as Brooklyn Spoke. Aaron Naparstek is the founding editor of Streetsblog, a news site that launched in 2006 and is dedicated to what was then called New York’s “livable streets” renaissance. They live with their families in Brooklyn, and they came together to create The War on Cars podcast in 2018 out of a sense that no one was covering the subject of cars and what they do to culture, society, and the planet in the way they felt it deserved. Doug and Sarah continue to host the podcast.1

A Brief History of the War on Cars

In the first panel of Action Comics number 12, published in May 1939, mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent is outside the offices of the Daily Star, a precursor to the more famous Daily Planet. A small crowd has gathered, and when Kent asks someone what has happened, he is shocked to learn that a friend of his has been hit and killed by a reckless driver.

Enraged, Kent calls the city's mayor and asks why Metropolis has "one of the worst traffic situations in the country." The mayor's response will likely be familiar to anyone who has tried to get an elected official to take traffic violence seriously. "It's really too bad," the mayor says. "But-what can anyone do about it?"

Kent vows to do something about it himself. He changes into Superman's iconic blue-and-red uniform and, in a single bound, takes to the skies, smashing through the window of a radio station and commandeering the live broadcast. "The auto accident death rate of this community is one that should shame us all," he tells listeners. "More people have been killed needlessly by autos than died during the world war!" Then, in a panel that shows the superhero in close-up for emphasis, Superman proclaims into the microphone, "From this moment on, I declare war on reckless drivers-henceforth, homicidal drivers answer to me!"

The subsequent pages and panels flow by in a cinematic montage of vengeance against automotive carnage. Superman descends upon a county tow pound where the cars of traffic violators are stored and proceeds to "smash and tear them to a pulp," gleefully stating, "I think I'm going to enjoy this private little war!" He confronts a used car dealer who knowingly sells dangerous lemons and destroys his inventory. He picks up a car with a drunk driver and admonishes him to "leave the liquor alone." At one point, Superman himself is mowed down by a "hit-skip" (or hit-and-run) driver. Pretending to be a ghost, he then jumps in the motorist's back seat and threatens to haunt him if he continues to drive recklessly. He targets traffic enforcement, stopping a police officer from taking a ten-dollar bribe from a driver who wants to get out of a speeding ticket. He redesigns roads, using his incredible strength to eliminate a dangerous curve through a mountain pass. Superman even confronts a motor company executive about prioritizing "profits at the cost of human lives," before laying waste to the entire automobile factory.

Finally, Superman goes after the man he believes is most responsible for the crisis: the mayor of Metropolis. Superman carjacks the politician and terrorizes him by driving so fast that the mayor, a bit of a lead foot himself, fears that Superman is going to kill them both. Then our hero flies the hapless elected official to the city morgue, where he forces the mayor to look at the maimed bodies of "auto victims," people he says the mayor killed with his lackadaisical approach to enforcing traffic laws. Scared straight, the mayor swears he will do everything in his power to make sure all traffic rules are "rigidly enforced." (In the story's humorous coda, Clark Kent is about to get in his car to drive to city hall to cover an announcement about the mayor's traffic safety initiative only to discover that, thanks to the city's new zero-tolerance policy for traffic violations, he's received a parking ticket.)

To modern readers, Superman's violent "war" on cars might be a bit surprising, and not just because the image of the Man of Steel as a menacing vigilante stands in stark contrast with the heroic "Truth, Justice, and the American Way" version popularized by the 1950s TV series or the classic 1978 movie starring Christopher Reeve. (At one point in the 1939 comic, the mayor calls him a "hoodlum" and laments that not even hundreds of police officers can stop him.) It's probably not even that this Depression-era Superman is shown using his powers to right social wrongs instead of stopping some megalomaniacal villain from destroying the city. No. What is most shocking is that the biggest threat to the citizens of Metropolis in 1939 was not a monster or alien invader nor even Superman's famous archenemy Lex Luthor, who wouldn't appear in print until a year later. It was the car.

Almost eighty years before we started The War on Cars podcast, why did Superman announce via a radio broadcast (the podcasting of its day) that it was time to start a "war on reckless drivers"?

In 1914-the year Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, were both born-approximately 4,700 people in the United States were killed in motor vehicle crashes, a rate of 4.8 per 100,000 population. In 1939, the year Action Comics number 12 was published, 32,386 people in the United States were killed in motor vehicle crashes, a rate of 24.7 per 100,000 population. (For comparison, as bad as traffic fatalities are today, they occurred at a rate of "only" 13.8 per 100,000 population in 2022, the most recent year for which comparable figures are available.)

Siegel and Shuster, like a lot of people living in the United States in 1939, would have known their share of people who had lost their lives or suffered life-altering injuries because of reckless driving. Only a few decades into the mass automobilization of North American cities, the duo also would have had recent experience living in cities before cars really took over. The problems caused by automobiles would have only grown over the course of their lifetimes, as would a culture of complacency as the death toll continued to rise. To Siegel and Shuster, it must have seemed like only a superhero could stop the carnage.

Cars and the War on People

The only reason anyone knows the name Henry Bliss today is that he holds the macabre distinction of being the first person in the United States killed by a car. According to a report in The New York Times, on the evening of September 13, 1899, Bliss stepped off a downtown streetcar on Central Park West and Seventy-Fourth Street, when he was suddenly struck by a taxi (an electric taxi, interestingly enough). Eyewitnesses said that Bliss was flung to the pavement, his head and chest crushed by the impact. He was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, but his injuries were too severe to treat, and he died the next morning. Henry Bliss was sixty-nine years old.

The taxi driver, Arthur Smith, was arrested, charged with manslaughter, and held on $1,000 bail-the equivalent of about $37,000 today. As the Times reported, Smith claimed "a large truck occupied the right side of the avenue," leaving him no choice but to drive extremely close to the streetcar and making it impossible for him to avoid striking Bliss. Smith was later acquitted, achieving another kind of distinction as the first in a long line of drivers to face zero criminal consequences for killing a pedestrian.

Most histories of automobiles in the United States begin in 1896 with Henry Ford and his Quadricycle, a two-cylinder, gas-powered vehicle made from bicycle wheels, a seat from a horse-drawn buggy, and other miscellaneous parts. Or they begin on October 1, 1908, with Ford's Model T "rolling off" (in every telling, it's always "rolling off") the assembly line at the Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit. The seeds for the United States' status as the dominant economic superpower of the twentieth century were planted by Ford, the invention of cars, and the efficiencies he pioneered at his factories. The automobile industry built the American middle class, which in turn bought the cars and houses that created the postwar suburbs, entrenching what we now know as "car culture." The history of the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is, in a very real way, the history of cars-and vice versa.

As the saying goes, history is written by the victors. In many ways there's no bigger victor in American history than cars, especially when one considers how completely they have shaped the economy, pop culture, politics, the built environment, the natural landscape, and even the climate. That's why we at The War on Cars believe there's an alternate history of cars that must be told, one that includes a more honest reckoning with mass motoring's effects on all of the above. That history should begin not with the triumph of Henry Ford, but with the tragedy of Henry Bliss. Given his status as patient zero in what has been one of the biggest public health crises this nation and the world have ever known, he deserves to be remembered as the first victim of car culture instead of just the answer-or, sorry, question-in a Jeopardy! category. ("I'll take Famous Firsts for $400.")

At least twenty-five more people would be killed in auto-related fatalities in the United States through the end of 1899, a high number given that only around 2,500 motor vehicles were produced in the country that year. (As long as we're focused on an alternate history, there's an alternate reality, too, where the country looks at a new invention with an annual deaths-per-product ratio of about one to one hundred and stops it from ever being adopted at scale, or at least delays it until it can be made safe. Don't be surprised if our next book is a science fiction story about a team of time travelers who go back to stop the rise of the machines.)

In the nine years before the Model T hit the streets, more than 2,200 Americans were killed by cars. Things would only get worse from there. Much worse. In 1910 alone, nearly 1,600 people died in motor vehicle crashes. In 1920, it was 12,155 people. In 1924, twenty-five years after Henry Bliss was killed, the death toll was 18,400 people. The crisis was so obvious and widespread that The New York Times ran a story that same year headlined "Nation Roused Against Motor Killings" above an illustration of a caped figure with a skull for a face driving a massive, open-topped car over a crowd of terrified people, mostly women and children. The caption: "The Modern Juggernaut."

As University of Virginia historian Peter Norton describes in Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, his indispensable and outstanding history of the reaction to the rise of cars during the 1910s and 1920s, the nation was indeed roused against motor killings. In 1919, the Detroit Safety Council, seeking to draw attention to the epidemic, ran a campaign to ring bells at city hall, fire stations, churches, and schools "on any day in which a life was lost to a traffic accident." Many cities focused on the disproportionate number of child victims, putting the responsibility for their deaths, as Norton writes, "squarely on the shoulders of motorists and their cars."

Tributes to the victims of car crashes resembled the ceremonies and memorials to soldiers who had been killed in the Great War that had just ended. In 1922, the city of Baltimore erected a twenty-five-foot wood and plaster obelisk dedicated to the 130 children killed by drivers the previous year. Norton describes how 200 "White Star Mothers," each one of whom had lost a child to traffic violence, attended the march, their designation an echo of the honored "Gold Star" families whose loved ones have died in wars. Cities such as Pittsburgh (286 children killed in 1921), Washington (97 children killed in 1921), and St. Louis (32 children killed in 1923) memorialized their dead with similar monuments and solemn observances.

Comparing car deaths with war deaths was intentional. Cars were waging an all-out assault on urban residents. In 1926, automobiles killed 1,066 New Yorkers; 408 of them were children. Nationwide, 60 percent of automobile fatalities in the 1920s were kids under age nine. It was a horror almost without precedent in modern life, especially because it was the result of a relatively new technology that was hardly a necessity and was largely seen as a plaything for the rich.

Anger at drivers and their cars permeated the culture. To bring attention to this deadly scourge, public demonstrations and public thinkers did not shy away from using violent imagery and direct language. Pittsburgh's 1921 campaign included a safety parade featuring a float displaying "a little girl, crushed between two colliding automobiles." As Peter Norton describes, the base of a monument erected in Baltimore "had four plaster reliefs, each depicting lethal traffic disasters involving vehicles and children."

Newspapers frequently labeled motorists as "killers" and "remorseless murderers," and rarely questioned whether a driver was at fault for killing a pedestrian-the reverse of the prevailing journalistic assumptions these days. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch put it in a 1923 editorial, any driver who claimed that he could not avoid hitting a child, even one "darting into the street," was committing "the perjury of a murderer." In reporting on the forty-five men, women, and children killed in 1922 in Louisville, the city's Pioneer News named two of the motorists responsible and described them as "death car drivers."

Such descriptions were not limited to the operators of cars; they were frequently used to describe automobiles themselves. In 1923, a year before The New York Times ran its haunting illustration of Death driving a car, an editorial cartoonist for The St. Louis Star depicted a man kneeling before an automobile, the car's headlights appearing like eyes and its grille illustrated to look like a gaping maw. The man, wearing a jacket labeled "reckless and vicious drivers," offers a plate of children's bodies as a ritual sacrifice to what is labeled as the "Modern Moloch." (Compare this with the more modern crisis of gun violence, a problem the writer Garry Wills described in a widely circulated 2012 essay as "Our Moloch.") In late 1920s Harlem nearly ten people were injured by car drivers every day on a single one-mile stretch of the neighborhood, a grim preview of the racial disparities that mark traffic safety to this day.

Brooklyn, the modern home base of The War on Cars, declared its own war against cars. On May 10, 1927, the Brooklyn Safety Council, along with a group of "leading Brooklynites and high police officials," dedicated a big display dubbed the "Death-O-Meter." It was strategically positioned near a major traffic circle "where hundreds of thousands of automobilists on their way to Coney Island can not help but see it." Like an old-fashioned ballpark scoreboard, it kept a running tally of the number of people injured or killed on the streets of Brooklyn: 2,232 injured and 54 killed by the time of its dedication just five months into the year. The Death-O-Meter admonished drivers to "Slow Up" and asked them "What's Your Hurry?" In neighboring Manhattan, the City Club of New York produced what it called "municipal murder maps" to keep track of the carnage wreaked by automobiles; the 1928 edition featured 154 black dots marking the spots where children had been killed by drivers the year before.