Doug Gordon, advocate and co-author working on transportation and urban design. Sarah Goodyear, journalist and co-author focused on transportation policy. They debate how cars shape daily life and community. They explore tradeoffs of reducing car dependence, real-world wins like Ghent, urban and rural differences, and cultural resistance to rethinking streets.
01:11:41
forum Ask episode
web_stories AI Snips
view_agenda Chapters
menu_book Books
auto_awesome Transcript
info_circle Episode notes
insights INSIGHT
Cars Inflate Household Budgets
Auto dependence raises household costs by forcing tradeoffs between housing and transportation.
Doug Gordon notes new cars, insurance, and sprawl can push transportation costs from 10–15% to ~30% of take-home pay.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Neighborhood Friendship Sparked By A Dog Walk
Sarah Goodyear describes meeting a neighbor while walking a dog, which blossomed into a real friendship in six months.
The low-traffic street and incidental contact enabled connection she wouldn't have had driving.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Start By Having Fewer Cars
Reduce car use incrementally: aim for fewer cars per household rather than zero cars.
Doug Gordon recommends keeping one car instead of several as a realistic first step toward freedom.
Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode
Free Yourself from the Tyranny of the Automobile!! That's the subtitle of the new book Life After Cars, written by the hosts of the popular podcast "War On Cars." And listen, I am 100% on board: this quasi-hippy spent most of her 20s trekking around college towns on a crappy commuter bike. But like a lot of you, I also live in a place where the infrastructure has refused to catch up to my desire to have fewer cars on the road.
So here's what I absolutely loved about this conversation: we talked at length about all the ways that cars make our lives worse... and also talked about the ways that we need them (particularly in rural areas) and the movement they afford people whose freedoms are otherwise circumscribed. There is absolutely nothing fixed about our current car-contingent culture, and Sarah and Doug were so good at fostering a funny (and super smart) conversation about what sucks, what doesn't have to suck, and places that are working to make it suck less. This was one of those eps were Melody and I finished recording and couldn't stop texting about how good they were — so let's keep the conversation going in the comments.
GREAT NEWS: WE HAVE VERY GOOD EPISODE TRANSCRIPTS NOW! They come out within 24 hours of the pod — just come back and click here. We pay an actual human for help with these, so thank you for either being a paid subscriber or listening to the ads that make this model possible!
If you're a paid subscriber and haven't yet set up your subscriber RSS feed in your podcast player, here's the EXTREMELY easy how-to .
And if you're having any other issues with your Patreon subscription — please get in touch! Email me at annehelenpetersen @ gmail OR submit a request to Patreon Support.
Oh and check out all of the great War on Cars merch here
For more on the creative traffic solutions in Ghent, watch this YouTube video
We're currently looking for your questions for future episodes about:
HISTORICAL GOSSIP! We're talking with Nichole Hill, host of Our Ancestors Were Messy, about hot, messy, ideologically fascinating world of Black gossip columns during the golden era of Black newspapers (1930 to 1960). What do you want to know about how the Black press worked during this era — and how gossip in particular worked (both about stars, local celebrities, and normal people?) There's so much here!!!
Conversion Therapy (how it affects people late into life, how it still exists, etc. etc — we're talking to Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez about his new book, Conversion Therapy Dropout, and there are so many connections to the ways the current administration is currently trying to "de-trans" people in custody)
Anything you need advice for/want musings about for the AAA segment. You can ask about anything, it’s literally the name of the segment.
As always, you can submit your questions (and ideas for future eps) here
For this week’s discussion: THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: How would your life change with fewer cars on the road? If you have a car, what infrastructure improvement would make it easier to let it go?
Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world.
Got a question to submit, a prompt for Ask Anne Anything, or an idea for a future episode? Tell us here.
Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Culture Study Podcast 
