Daniel Knowles hates cars, and he wants you to hate them too. Or, to put a finer point on it, Knowles – the Midwest U.S. correspondent for the Economist magazine – hates what cars have done to the world, and especially to our cities. His new book, “Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It,” shows how they pollute the air, inefficiently consume enormous amounts of natural resources, take up too much space and kill and injure too many people.
They make cities into worse places: less pleasant, less walkable and bikeable, harder to enjoy, dirtier and louder. They stress us out and make our lives more sedentary. We need, Knowles argues, to get as many of them off the road as we can, as quickly as possible.
Review
“Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It”
By Daniel Knowles
Abrams. 248 pages.
$28
In the service of this argument, Knowles marshals examples from around the world, sketching nimble case studies of cities – Houston, Mumbai, Nairobi – where we see cars and car-centric planning at their worst: filthy air, congested roads, sprawl, appalling levels of road death. He contrasts these hellish carscapes with places that are, from his perspective, doing a better job with transit: Tokyo, Amsterdam, Paris. Knowles also goes back in time, giving a potted history of how, after World War II, cars came to dominate so many urban streets worldwide. From all this he extracts lessons in the form of policy interventions that car-clogged cities could deploy in the service of a brighter transit future, one where the movement of people is prioritized over the movement of cars.
I should say, in the spirit of full disclosure, that I’m entirely on Knowles’ side. Unlike him, I do own a car, but reluctantly and resentfully. I get fired up listening to the “War on Cars” podcast, and I frequent Reddit forums where people complain about car culture and its excesses. My appetite for the arguments “Carmageddon” makes, and the types of information it presents, is high. It’s well-written, sliding casually between research findings, the historical literature, journalistic observations from across the globe and personal experience.
But for better or worse – and the answer will vary from reader to reader – the book is a perfect example of a genre I’ve taken to calling the “liberal problems and policies tour.” In these books, you are first presented with evidence that the problem exists. (Cars are awful.) In all likelihood, it’s even more of a problem than you already know. (Cars are really awful, shaping our streets, cities and lives for the worse.) You learn the problem’s history and lots of edifying facts along the way. (Did you know that, for the average American college student, getting to and from school accounts for 20 percent of their overall education costs?) Finally, you’re introduced to policies that, if implemented, would make things better. (The massive network of protected bike lanes in Paris, the steep car taxes and parking restrictions of Tokyo, and so on.)
Implicit in this approach is a theory of how change works. According to this theory, people take in arguments, weigh their merits and decide what problems are worth solving and what solutions are worth implementing. When enough people’s minds converge on the same solutions . . . voilà! Elected officials attuned to public sentiment and motivated by the public good take it from there, as long as they’re brave enough to do their jobs. “These are realistic measures that can be taken, often by city governments, with a dose of political courage,” Knowles writes. “What is happening in Paris could easily be implemented in Berlin, Chicago and Toronto, if the politicians in those cities just tried.”
I don’t mean to suggest that this theory of change is entirely false. But, in general, politics is not a process through which the “will of the people” is translated, by politicians, into policy outcomes. Politics, especially in America, is an ongoing battle between shifting coalitions with competing interests, waged on multiple simultaneous fronts, often including institutions (like the Senate and Supreme Court) that are essentially antidemocratic by design.
“Carmageddon” will be a great read for someone newly interested in the negative influence of cars. Even readers like me, already curdled against cars, will learn things. But precisely because I share Knowles’ sense of urgency about ending car dominance before it becomes even more entrenched, I turned the last page with a sense of dissatisfaction. The policies he highlights – investment in transit, protected bike lanes, lower speed limits, congestion pricing, road closures, fewer gargantuan SUVs and pickups – are all good ones. But these were all identified as effective measures long ago.
The challenge now, for transit as for so many other issues, is not to identify the best policies but to figure out how they might be implemented on the rough terrain of politics. That is: Who benefits from widespread car dependence today, and how can these beneficiaries’ positions be weakened? What existing coalitions might be willing to fight these battles, what new coalitions will be needed and how might they be formed? Once formed, how might those coalitions actually win?
The near-total absence of these considerations from “Carmageddon” – its elision of political problems in favor of technical fixes – makes the book feel, like so many of its genre-mates, disconnected from the very problems to which it draws our attention. I can imagine Knowles convincing some readers that yes, something must be done. But how? We could cross our fingers and hope that American legislators will soon, out of the goodness of their hearts, start acting more like Parisian ones, at least on transit issues. But for more useful, realistic answers, readers will have to look elsewhere.
Peter C. Baker is a writer in Evanston, Ill., and the author of the novel “Planes.”
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