TEASER: Jessie Singer on the Problem with Public Service Campaigns
Release Date: 02/18/2022
Vehicular Cycling and John Forester, Part 2
The War on Cars
NOTE: This is part two of a two-part episode. To hear both parts right now and without ads, . In part two of our deep dive on John Forester and his 1976 book Effective Cycling, we take a look at the paltry data and research underpinning the alleged safety benefits of vehicular cycling and the long-term impact Forester had on cycling for transportation in the United States. Even though cities such as New York started building protected bicycle lanes in earnest in the late 2000s and early 2010s — and even though quality bike infrastructure has existed in places such as Davis, California...
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Vehicular Cycling and John Forester, Part 1
The War on Cars
NOTE: This is part one of a two-part episode. To hear both parts right now and without ads, . "Cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles." That quote is the core philosophy of John Forester, the father of vehicular cycling. Forester, who died in 2020, was a major figure in the the world of cycling advocacy and transportation policy, and his influence shaped street design and bicycle safety in the United States for decades. We take a deep dive into Forester's 1976 book, Effective Cycling. Part guidebook, part encyclopedia, part polemic, Effective...
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Critical Mass Nairobi with Cyprine Odada
The War on Cars
Cyprine Odada is the Executive Director of Critical Mass Nairobi and an urban planner specializing in active mobility. Ever since founding the Kenyan capital’s chapter of Critical Mass, the largest gathering of non-competitive cyclists in Africa, Cyprine has helped get more people on bikes from different neighborhoods, ages, and social and economic groups, changing the perception of who rides a bike in Nairobi and building more political support for bike infrastructure in a city where cars dominate. By focusing on the joy of cycling and the way in which the bicycle can connect people and...
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Killed by a Traffic Engineer
The War on Cars
Because it has the word “engineering” right in there, the field of traffic engineering is something most people assume is governed by science and rational rules. But a new book, written by a traffic engineer himself, argues that is not the case at all. In , Wes Marshall — a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado Denver — says that the idea that the design of our transportation system is based on science couldn't be further from the truth. By examining a century's worth of history, studies, old professional journals and current standards, Marshall argues that his...
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Women's Freedom to Ride
The War on Cars
Why don’t more women ride bicycles in London? The advocacy group wanted to know, and so they asked. What they discovered was disturbing: Among more than a thousand women surveyed, nine out of ten said they experienced verbal abuse and aggression while biking. Ninety-three percent said drivers had used vehicles to intimidate them. One in five said they had given up riding permanently or temporarily after they had been harassed. And when women reported incidents of aggression to the police? The cops almost never followed up. We spoke with the London Cycling Campaign’s Kate Bartlett about...
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Kathy Hochul's Congestion Pricing Flip-Flop Fiasco
The War on Cars
In this emergency episode, we discuss New York State Governor Kathy Hochul's 11th-hour decision to "indefinitely suspend" congestion pricing, the program that would have charged drivers to enter Manhattan below 60th Street. Her move, announced in a prerecorded video on Wednesday, June 5th, came mere weeks before congestion pricing was set to launch, jeopardizing what was set to be a major funding source for transit and a revolutionary plan to reduce traffic in a way never seen before in the United States. Why did Hochul do this? Is it bad politics or atrociously bad politics? What does this...
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TEASER: The War on The War on Cars
The War on Cars
This is a preview of a Patreon-exclusive bonus episode. For complete access to this and all of our bonus content, . For this month's exclusive Patreon bonus episode, we take a look at three states that have attempted to ban everything from bus rapid transit to taxing driving by vehicle miles traveled. While most of these initiatives have failed, one of these states successfully banned bus wraps, but not because bus wraps make it harder to see out of bus windows. What is going on? We take a look at recent news from Indiana, Arizona and Florida.
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Winter Cycling in Oil Country
The War on Cars
An unlikely cycling revolution is happening in one of the coldest big cities on the planet: Edmonton, Alberta. Despite freezing temps, lots of sprawl, big trucks and an economy built on pulling oil out of the Albertan tar sands, the Western Canadian city is in the midst of a four-year, $100 million CAD investment in active transportation that will connect far-flung neighborhoods with a network of safe, high-quality, protected bike lanes. Many of these bike lanes will even get priority over roads for cars when it comes to snow removal. We traveled to the home of the NHL’s Edmonton Oilers to...
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When Driving Is Not an Option with Anna Zivarts
The War on Cars
The United States has built a transportation system centered around automobiles. But one-third of the nation’s population can’t drive, whether because of disability, age, financial hardship, immigration status, or any of a host of other factors. Those tens of millions of people are often invisible to planners and elected officials, and that’s why Anna Letitia Zivarts, herself a low-vision nondriver and a longtime activist for better transportation choices, has written a new book titled When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency (Island Press). We talked with Anna...
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TEASER: Dodge’s “Deeply Weird” Pitch for Electric Muscle Cars
The War on Cars
***This is a preview of a Patreon-exclusive bonus episode. For complete access to this and all of our bonus content, .*** We were getting ready to record our "" episode with Ed Niedermeyer last month when Ed happened to bring to our attention to . It's a promotional video for Dodge's new, "Next-Gen Charger," the electric-powered version of the very same "muscle cars" that Doug confronted at the New York International Auto Show in Episode and Aaron rode along with back in Episodes and . The move from gas-guzzling, window-rattling, V8 engines to electric motors has clearly plunged...
info_outline***This is a preview of a bonus episode. Become a Patreon supporter of The War on Cars for ad-free access to this and all our exclusive content.***
Jessie Singer joined us on Episode 80 to discuss her new book, There Are No Accidents. We had promised Jessie she'd get a chance to explain the problem with public service announcements and why educational campaigns don't do much to prevent accidents.