Big steel boxes hurtling around cities at high speeds, spewing toxic gases and killing thousands every year... what could go wrong?  Daniel Knowles (Midwest correspondant at The Economist) sits down with me to discuss his upcoming book Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It.  He's not saying we should ban cars cold turkey, but it might be time we start cutting back. 

Carmageddon will be available in March 2023. Pre-order it here. 

Follow Daniel on Twitter.

Join the olmsted Slack community!

Show Notes:

• The problem with cars in cities 
• Disney presents: the driver and the walker 
• Rise of the auto centric  era - US to them
• How the bike industry birthed its greatest foe (the car)
• 1920s anti-car protests in Baltimore, Cinncinati, NYC,  etc
• Jaywalking laws
• British used to cycle 18 billion miles a year
• The car can arrive and take over quicky
• Yossarian problem of cars
• Cars are sexy
• American transport consultants go globe trotting
• Speculative streetcar developers vs suburban sprawl developers
• People don’t like having their houses knocked down
• Detroit’s decline
• A parking lot the size of West Virginia
• A lot of our problems have autos at the root
• Roads as racial barriers
• We have way too many cars and we drive too far
• Cars and social trust
• Atomized existences 
• Oh yeah, cars kill millions of people every year
• When a road is taken away there’s no outpouring of anger
•  Paris’ rapid transformation to a cycling city
• Tokyo has no street parking