I have not driven a car for the past forty years, which is to say my entire life. Like most nondrivers, my commitment is part ideological and part practical, though it is often difficult to separate the two. I grew up in London, where excellent public transport provision meant there was no real need to learn to drive, and where the bicycle provides a means of getting around that is both quicker and more exciting than driving ever could be. In my twenties I worked as a bicycle messenger, reveling in the sense of renegade outsiderness that job afforded. Back then cars were a sworn enemy, and pedestrians simply a hazard to be navigated. By day I would weave in and out of traffic delivering packages. On Friday nights I would clatter through the streets with my comrades, racing from checkpoint to checkpoint in illegal bicycle races.
Now that I have lapsed into middle age, I view cars with a mix of suspicion, fear, and disdain. I still cycle into my office several times a week, even if I am now more likely to stop at red lights along the way. I ferry my children around in a large cargo bike, tutting at speeding motorists as I go. It seems self-evident, in these moments, that cycling is the most practical and civilized way to travel, at least in London, where journeys tend to be short, and there are few hills.
One reason the conflict between drivers and nondrivers can be so vicious is that driving is a skill, but not driving is often perceived—by both drivers and nondrivers alike—as an identity. In this, it is a bit like teetotaling, or veganism: behaviors seen by their detractors as an aberration of social norms and by their proponents as a good topic of conversation at parties. If I’m honest, I do secretly think of driving as in some way incompatible with human flourishing, even with a certain kind of creative, literary life. Many of the writers I most admire—C. S. Lewis, Vladimir Nabokov, Ursula Le Guin—never learned to drive (though most were happy—such is the nondriver’s hypocrisy—to be driven by others). I nod along with W. H. Auden, who thought the internal combustion engine was one of the “infernal machines” of modernity. I endorse the views of Richard Tull, the narrator of Martin Amis’s Information, when he observes that “poets don’t drive. Never trust a poet who can drive. Never trust a poet at the wheel. If he can drive, distrust the poems.” Tull, a loser in life as well as literature, could drive—a “Maestro, whose days were numbered”— as could Martin Amis, unlike his father, Kingsley.
Like many nondrivers, I mask my instinctive anti-car prejudice behind more pragmatic objections. Nondrivers are keen to be seen as embracing the progressive reasonableness of civic urban planning. We preach the virtues of centralized and affordable public transport systems and fifteen-minute cities, and wax fanatical about the health benefits of the bicycle. There’s an element of futility to all of this proselytizing, of course. Despite what seem to us their obvious evils, and despite the increased general awareness of the environmental and social damage caused by them over the course of my lifetime, it often feels like being vocally anti-automobile is to mark oneself as eccentric, wilfully obtuse, even socially irrelevant. “Any man who finds himself riding a bus after the age of twenty-six,” Margaret Thatcher is reported to have once said, “can count himself a failure in life.”
In Life After Cars (the title feels sweetly hubristic; one might as well write a manifesto against air, or the seasons) Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek call this state of affairs “motornormativity”: the uninterrogated assumption that “car ownership is a magic portal to ease, comfort, and personal freedom.” Even though cars have done “far more collective damage to the world, in terms of death, illness, and environmental destruction, than nearly any other invention in human history,” they write, we seem increasingly unwilling to question their role within society.
Their book is part an account of how we got here, part a manifesto for how to fix things. It is, they argue, “way past time to radically rethink—and shrink—society’s collective relationship with the automobile.” It is perhaps a mark of the entrenchment of motornormativity that how plausible you think this sounds depends to a large extent on where you already stand on the question.
Still, now seems as good an opportunity as any to remake the case for the prosecution, and the authors here do it energetically, if a little leadenly. The list of charges they have assembled is long (the trio runs a popular podcast called The War on Cars, and you feel that much of the research for this book started life as studio notes). First, they assert, cars have ruined childhood. Where once children played safely on the streets, roaming their neighborhoods or traveling to school under their own steam, now, in many parts of the world, they are ferried around by their parents in cars. By making streets too dangerous for pedestrians to navigate and cutting communities off from one another, cars have “stolen a fundamental part of childhood from children: their ability to experience the world independently.” The statistics bear this out. In the United Kingdom, three-quarters of children spend less time outdoors than prison inmates (on average, a fifth don’t leave the house day-to-day at all). In the United States things are just as bleak. In 1969, eighty-nine percent of children living within a mile of school walked or cycled to get there. In 2009, that number had fallen to thirty-five percent.
Cars have had enormous negative impacts on the environment, and not just in terms of the pollution they emit. The whole infrastructure of driving—the vast network of tarmacadamed streets, the millions of acres of parking spaces—has over the past hundred years defaced the American landscape (on some metrics things are even worse in the U.K., no part of which lies more than two miles from a road). Vast multilane “stroads” cut through what might otherwise be walkable towns, severing communities from one another as they go. Driving infrastructure isolates communities of animals from each other, reducing genetic intermingling and leading to species decline. Concreted land causes flooding, bringing pollution and road runoff, not just from gasoline and engine oil but from tire and brake pad wear. Half of the coho salmon in the Pacific Northwest die before they can reach their spawning grounds, poisoned by a molecule called 6PPD used in the manufacture of car tires.
Then there are the animal deaths caused more directly by automobiles. An estimated two hundred million birds and thirty million mammals are killed by cars on European roads each year, while bird fatalities in the United States are between eighty-nine million and three hundred forty million. This is to say nothing of the ongoing catastrophic effects of human-created climate change, a significant proportion of which is driven by emissions from petrol engines. “If SUV drivers were a country,” we are told, “they would be the fifth-largest carbon emitter in the world.”
It’s telling that the most significant and obvious devastating effect of motornormativity—the human death toll cars leave in their wake—is also the one that feels most intractable and unspoken. The first motor vehicle victim was a man named Henry Bliss, killed on September 13, 1899, in New York by an electric taxi. The driver was acquitted of manslaughter after the defense (in the first instance of pedestrian victim-blaming that has now become routine) accused Bliss of walking into the road without looking. Since then, between sixty million and eighty million people have been killed on the world’s roads, and at least two billion more have been injured. The billion and a half cars on the planet nowadays cause one in thirty-four deaths globally every year. We accept these deaths simply as the price of doing business with the car. Today, the authors write, “There are basically no consequences for killing another person as long as you do it the right way.”
One of the most compelling arguments in Life After Cars is that the obvious downsides of automobile transport are widely accepted in part because the car has become as much a symbol as it is a machine. In the American literary imagination in particular, the car is associated not just with convenience and efficiency but with personal discovery and re-invention. The sheer geographic scale of the country, combined with the driver’s position of semi-isolation—at one remove from the world but still able to observe it—makes the car the perfect site for personal epiphanies, just as the road trip has replaced the pilgrimage as the archetypal spiritual journey. How could we give that up?
Cinema, too, is a fundamentally car-centric art form, with the windshield a kind of personal projector screen; the driving anthem a soundtrack to motornormativity. Such associations serve only to obscure the fact that driving—as both activity and technology—is never a solo endeavor, however it might feel to the individual driver. Cars depend on a socialized model of roads and a national infrastructure of traffic lights and urban planning, and also on the vaster networks of exchange and extraction that underpin the fossil fuel industry. You might say that it is the cyclist—self-powered, independent, able to fix his own machine by the roadside—rather than the driver who truly embodies the rugged individualist spirit of frontier consciousness.
There has always been a dark undercurrent to the distancing effect created by driving. The Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti claimed to have been inspired to found the movement when, in 1909, he crashed the motorcar he was driving into a ditch while trying to avoid a pair of cyclists. In the first Futurist manifesto, he went on to describe the speeding motorcar as “more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” J. G. Ballard’s wonderfully bizarre novel Crash concerns a scientist who obsessively recreates famous car crashes from history in an attempt to experience a “new sexuality, born from a perverse technology.” The death drive was, for Ballard and the Futurists as for all of us, a literal condition.
Given all of this, it’s a wonder driving could ever be thought pleasurable. The reality is that most car journeys are short, uncomfortable, and unnecessary, and would be far better conducted by foot or pedal. On the sclerotic streets of most modern cities, cars are the least efficient means of moving around. One statistic I liked to bore people with when I was a bicycle messenger was that the average speed of traffic in London—eight miles per hour, or the speed of the horse—has remained the same for the past two thousand years. Building more roads won’t do much to solve the problem of congestion; it would lead only to more cars trying to use the streets through a model of “induced demand.” If you build it, they will come.
Life After Cars shows there was a time when it was possible—or at least more possible—to criticize car culture, and to think of alternative futures for personal and social transport. Goodyear, Gordon, and Naparstek cite an issue of Action Comics from 1939 in which Superman does battle with reckless drivers (who even by that stage had killed more people than died during World War I. In the early decades of the automobile, they write, victims of car crashes were memorialized in tributes that “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 in memory of the one hundred thirty children who had been killed by drivers during the previous year. You can’t imagine that happening today. Even jaywalking was an attempt to appease motornormativity, a crime invented at the behest of car makers to demonize pedestrians rather than hold drivers accountable for killing them (the name was intended to shame the “jays,” or rubes, who had arrived in the big city and didn’t know how to behave).
Since those times, pro-car propaganda has become a global industry. General Motors spent three billion dollars on advertising in 2022 alone, selling dreams of independence and comfort with their visions of rugged individuals speeding down empty roads through depopulated landscapes. It’s little wonder there doesn’t seem to be any way out.
Quite what committed nondrivers are supposed to do about all of this is less clear, or maybe just less thinkable. This is despite the fact that in recent years it has sometimes seemed as if the car might finally be getting its comeuppance. In the U.K., cycling has over the last few decades crept its way into the public imagination in a way that fifty years ago would have felt unthinkable. When my Dutch mother first moved to London, she was shouted at in the streets as she cycled around. Now she’s one of hundreds of thousands of London cyclists who use their bikes as their primary means of transport every day. There was a moment, not so long ago, when even conservative politicians co-opted the bike to signal their eco-credentials. When I was a cycle messenger, the sometime Mayor of London and later Prime Minister Boris Johnson was a regular fixture on his bike around Islington. Prime Minister David Cameron got stick for cycling into work in Westminster while followed by a ministerial car carrying his close protection officers, his briefcase, and a change of clothes.
Now that moment seems to be retreating. The rise of the electric car has put paid to some of the more urgent environmental arguments against private car use even if, as Goodyear, Gordon, and Naparstek point out, electric cars can be almost as polluting and just as socially damaging as their internal combustion equivalents.
You can agree with the diagnoses of Life After Cars (as I did, nodding my head enthusiastically at every fact and jarring statistic) all you like, but it’s in Part III—“How We Get Free”—that things get less convincing. It is perhaps a product of motonormativity itself that the answers the authors propose to solve the problems they diagnose and demonstrate—limit free parking in cities, build more bike lanes, ban cars from driving certain routes, ban cars altogether or limit the periods of the day they’re allowed to access certain streets, fine them for excessive pollution—come across as both impossibly ambitious and far too modest to fundamentally alter our relationship with driving, at least at a societal level.
In this the continued expectation that the car should be the norm, along with the infrastructure it depends upon and the special claims it makes over civic space and personal responsibility, feels similar to the way governments have warily embraced other disruptive technologies over the years (guns, or A.I., or the social media free-for-all) often overriding the best interests of their citizens in the process. This means that we are all—drivers and nondrivers alike—trapped by the logic of necessity the car brings with it. For those who oppose them, the questions that remain are sensible ones with rational answers. What rights might it be legitimate to be asked to give up in favor of a safer, cleaner world? How much should other people be compelled to sacrifice for what seems so self-evidently a social and environmental good? The fact that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the automobile might be one reason this book is necessary. But it’s also the reason its message will likely never be heeded.
I have not driven a car for the past forty years, which is to say my entire life. Like most nondrivers, my commitment is part ideological and part practical, though it is often difficult to separate the two. I grew up in London, where excellent public transport provision meant there was no real need to learn to drive, and where the bicycle provides a means of getting around that is both quicker and more exciting than driving ever could be. In my twenties I worked as a bicycle messenger, reveling in the sense of renegade outsiderness that job afforded. Back then cars were a sworn enemy, and pedestrians simply a hazard to be navigated. By day I would weave in and out of traffic delivering packages. On Friday nights I would clatter through the streets with my comrades, racing from checkpoint to checkpoint in illegal bicycle races.
Now that I have lapsed into middle age, I view cars with a mix of suspicion, fear, and disdain. I still cycle into my office several times a week, even if I am now more likely to stop at red lights along the way. I ferry my children around in a large cargo bike, tutting at speeding motorists as I go. It seems self-evident, in these moments, that cycling is the most practical and civilized way to travel, at least in London, where journeys tend to be short, and there are few hills.
One reason the conflict between drivers and nondrivers can be so vicious is that driving is a skill, but not driving is often perceived—by both drivers and nondrivers alike—as an identity. In this, it is a bit like teetotaling, or veganism: behaviors seen by their detractors as an aberration of social norms and by their proponents as a good topic of conversation at parties. If I’m honest, I do secretly think of driving as in some way incompatible with human flourishing, even with a certain kind of creative, literary life. Many of the writers I most admire—C. S. Lewis, Vladimir Nabokov, Ursula Le Guin—never learned to drive (though most were happy—such is the nondriver’s hypocrisy—to be driven by others). I nod along with W. H. Auden, who thought the internal combustion engine was one of the “infernal machines” of modernity. I endorse the views of Richard Tull, the narrator of Martin Amis’s Information, when he observes that “poets don’t drive. Never trust a poet who can drive. Never trust a poet at the wheel. If he can drive, distrust the poems.” Tull, a loser in life as well as literature, could drive—a “Maestro, whose days were numbered”— as could Martin Amis, unlike his father, Kingsley.
Like many nondrivers, I mask my instinctive anti-car prejudice behind more pragmatic objections. Nondrivers are keen to be seen as embracing the progressive reasonableness of civic urban planning. We preach the virtues of centralized and affordable public transport systems and fifteen-minute cities, and wax fanatical about the health benefits of the bicycle. There’s an element of futility to all of this proselytizing, of course. Despite what seem to us their obvious evils, and despite the increased general awareness of the environmental and social damage caused by them over the course of my lifetime, it often feels like being vocally anti-automobile is to mark oneself as eccentric, wilfully obtuse, even socially irrelevant. “Any man who finds himself riding a bus after the age of twenty-six,” Margaret Thatcher is reported to have once said, “can count himself a failure in life.”
In Life After Cars (the title feels sweetly hubristic; one might as well write a manifesto against air, or the seasons) Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek call this state of affairs “motornormativity”: the uninterrogated assumption that “car ownership is a magic portal to ease, comfort, and personal freedom.” Even though cars have done “far more collective damage to the world, in terms of death, illness, and environmental destruction, than nearly any other invention in human history,” they write, we seem increasingly unwilling to question their role within society.
Their book is part an account of how we got here, part a manifesto for how to fix things. It is, they argue, “way past time to radically rethink—and shrink—society’s collective relationship with the automobile.” It is perhaps a mark of the entrenchment of motornormativity that how plausible you think this sounds depends to a large extent on where you already stand on the question.
Still, now seems as good an opportunity as any to remake the case for the prosecution, and the authors here do it energetically, if a little leadenly. The list of charges they have assembled is long (the trio runs a popular podcast called The War on Cars, and you feel that much of the research for this book started life as studio notes). First, they assert, cars have ruined childhood. Where once children played safely on the streets, roaming their neighborhoods or traveling to school under their own steam, now, in many parts of the world, they are ferried around by their parents in cars. By making streets too dangerous for pedestrians to navigate and cutting communities off from one another, cars have “stolen a fundamental part of childhood from children: their ability to experience the world independently.” The statistics bear this out. In the United Kingdom, three-quarters of children spend less time outdoors than prison inmates (on average, a fifth don’t leave the house day-to-day at all). In the United States things are just as bleak. In 1969, eighty-nine percent of children living within a mile of school walked or cycled to get there. In 2009, that number had fallen to thirty-five percent.
Cars have had enormous negative impacts on the environment, and not just in terms of the pollution they emit. The whole infrastructure of driving—the vast network of tarmacadamed streets, the millions of acres of parking spaces—has over the past hundred years defaced the American landscape (on some metrics things are even worse in the U.K., no part of which lies more than two miles from a road). Vast multilane “stroads” cut through what might otherwise be walkable towns, severing communities from one another as they go. Driving infrastructure isolates communities of animals from each other, reducing genetic intermingling and leading to species decline. Concreted land causes flooding, bringing pollution and road runoff, not just from gasoline and engine oil but from tire and brake pad wear. Half of the coho salmon in the Pacific Northwest die before they can reach their spawning grounds, poisoned by a molecule called 6PPD used in the manufacture of car tires.
Then there are the animal deaths caused more directly by automobiles. An estimated two hundred million birds and thirty million mammals are killed by cars on European roads each year, while bird fatalities in the United States are between eighty-nine million and three hundred forty million. This is to say nothing of the ongoing catastrophic effects of human-created climate change, a significant proportion of which is driven by emissions from petrol engines. “If SUV drivers were a country,” we are told, “they would be the fifth-largest carbon emitter in the world.”
It’s telling that the most significant and obvious devastating effect of motornormativity—the human death toll cars leave in their wake—is also the one that feels most intractable and unspoken. The first motor vehicle victim was a man named Henry Bliss, killed on September 13, 1899, in New York by an electric taxi. The driver was acquitted of manslaughter after the defense (in the first instance of pedestrian victim-blaming that has now become routine) accused Bliss of walking into the road without looking. Since then, between sixty million and eighty million people have been killed on the world’s roads, and at least two billion more have been injured. The billion and a half cars on the planet nowadays cause one in thirty-four deaths globally every year. We accept these deaths simply as the price of doing business with the car. Today, the authors write, “There are basically no consequences for killing another person as long as you do it the right way.”
One of the most compelling arguments in Life After Cars is that the obvious downsides of automobile transport are widely accepted in part because the car has become as much a symbol as it is a machine. In the American literary imagination in particular, the car is associated not just with convenience and efficiency but with personal discovery and re-invention. The sheer geographic scale of the country, combined with the driver’s position of semi-isolation—at one remove from the world but still able to observe it—makes the car the perfect site for personal epiphanies, just as the road trip has replaced the pilgrimage as the archetypal spiritual journey. How could we give that up?
Cinema, too, is a fundamentally car-centric art form, with the windshield a kind of personal projector screen; the driving anthem a soundtrack to motornormativity. Such associations serve only to obscure the fact that driving—as both activity and technology—is never a solo endeavor, however it might feel to the individual driver. Cars depend on a socialized model of roads and a national infrastructure of traffic lights and urban planning, and also on the vaster networks of exchange and extraction that underpin the fossil fuel industry. You might say that it is the cyclist—self-powered, independent, able to fix his own machine by the roadside—rather than the driver who truly embodies the rugged individualist spirit of frontier consciousness.
There has always been a dark undercurrent to the distancing effect created by driving. The Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti claimed to have been inspired to found the movement when, in 1909, he crashed the motorcar he was driving into a ditch while trying to avoid a pair of cyclists. In the first Futurist manifesto, he went on to describe the speeding motorcar as “more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” J. G. Ballard’s wonderfully bizarre novel Crash concerns a scientist who obsessively recreates famous car crashes from history in an attempt to experience a “new sexuality, born from a perverse technology.” The death drive was, for Ballard and the Futurists as for all of us, a literal condition.
Given all of this, it’s a wonder driving could ever be thought pleasurable. The reality is that most car journeys are short, uncomfortable, and unnecessary, and would be far better conducted by foot or pedal. On the sclerotic streets of most modern cities, cars are the least efficient means of moving around. One statistic I liked to bore people with when I was a bicycle messenger was that the average speed of traffic in London—eight miles per hour, or the speed of the horse—has remained the same for the past two thousand years. Building more roads won’t do much to solve the problem of congestion; it would lead only to more cars trying to use the streets through a model of “induced demand.” If you build it, they will come.
Life After Cars shows there was a time when it was possible—or at least more possible—to criticize car culture, and to think of alternative futures for personal and social transport. Goodyear, Gordon, and Naparstek cite an issue of Action Comics from 1939 in which Superman does battle with reckless drivers (who even by that stage had killed more people than died during World War I. In the early decades of the automobile, they write, victims of car crashes were memorialized in tributes that “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 in memory of the one hundred thirty children who had been killed by drivers during the previous year. You can’t imagine that happening today. Even jaywalking was an attempt to appease motornormativity, a crime invented at the behest of car makers to demonize pedestrians rather than hold drivers accountable for killing them (the name was intended to shame the “jays,” or rubes, who had arrived in the big city and didn’t know how to behave).
Since those times, pro-car propaganda has become a global industry. General Motors spent three billion dollars on advertising in 2022 alone, selling dreams of independence and comfort with their visions of rugged individuals speeding down empty roads through depopulated landscapes. It’s little wonder there doesn’t seem to be any way out.
Quite what committed nondrivers are supposed to do about all of this is less clear, or maybe just less thinkable. This is despite the fact that in recent years it has sometimes seemed as if the car might finally be getting its comeuppance. In the U.K., cycling has over the last few decades crept its way into the public imagination in a way that fifty years ago would have felt unthinkable. When my Dutch mother first moved to London, she was shouted at in the streets as she cycled around. Now she’s one of hundreds of thousands of London cyclists who use their bikes as their primary means of transport every day. There was a moment, not so long ago, when even conservative politicians co-opted the bike to signal their eco-credentials. When I was a cycle messenger, the sometime Mayor of London and later Prime Minister Boris Johnson was a regular fixture on his bike around Islington. Prime Minister David Cameron got stick for cycling into work in Westminster while followed by a ministerial car carrying his close protection officers, his briefcase, and a change of clothes.
Now that moment seems to be retreating. The rise of the electric car has put paid to some of the more urgent environmental arguments against private car use even if, as Goodyear, Gordon, and Naparstek point out, electric cars can be almost as polluting and just as socially damaging as their internal combustion equivalents.
You can agree with the diagnoses of Life After Cars (as I did, nodding my head enthusiastically at every fact and jarring statistic) all you like, but it’s in Part III—“How We Get Free”—that things get less convincing. It is perhaps a product of motonormativity itself that the answers the authors propose to solve the problems they diagnose and demonstrate—limit free parking in cities, build more bike lanes, ban cars from driving certain routes, ban cars altogether or limit the periods of the day they’re allowed to access certain streets, fine them for excessive pollution—come across as both impossibly ambitious and far too modest to fundamentally alter our relationship with driving, at least at a societal level.
In this the continued expectation that the car should be the norm, along with the infrastructure it depends upon and the special claims it makes over civic space and personal responsibility, feels similar to the way governments have warily embraced other disruptive technologies over the years (guns, or A.I., or the social media free-for-all) often overriding the best interests of their citizens in the process. This means that we are all—drivers and nondrivers alike—trapped by the logic of necessity the car brings with it. For those who oppose them, the questions that remain are sensible ones with rational answers. What rights might it be legitimate to be asked to give up in favor of a safer, cleaner world? How much should other people be compelled to sacrifice for what seems so self-evidently a social and environmental good? The fact that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the automobile might be one reason this book is necessary. But it’s also the reason its message will likely never be heeded.
