Reimagining car culture – Jon Udell

The Volts podcast continues to be my favorite listen. Climate change will wreak ever more havoc on the world, that’s just baked in. But the transition to clean energy is also now baked in. David Roberts delivers a steady stream of hopeful news on that front: plummeting prices for solar panels and batteries, “reconductoring” to grow the capacity of the existing grid, agrivoltaics, new geothermal techniques, and much more.

Cars are a big part of the story. Switching to EVs is great but if we only do that we are still stuck with too many large heavy vehicles that clog roads when moving, waste vast amounts of space when parked, and harm people who move through the world on foot or on bicycles. We don’t just want cleaner cars, we also want far fewer of them. This episode, with the authors of Life After Cars, explores the “tyranny of the automobile”.

American car culture always seemed wrong to me, for many reasons. On this show David Roberts crystallized one of them.

When you ride a bike through Amsterdam, you are a dozen times every minute making small adjustments to other people, and you are accommodating yourself and coordinating with other people in these micro ways over and over and over again as you ride through Amsterdam.

And it just has an effect. You realize you’re living among other people and you’re involved in a common project and you live in a common place and you’re together in the place.

I have long been fascinated by a video called A trip down Market Street. Filmed in San Francisco in 1906, shortly before the great quake, it’s a long shot that moves down Market Street toward the Ferry Building. You see a free-for-all of trolleys, pedestrians, bicycles, horsedrawn carriages, and cars. Clearly the cars are going to win but in this moment they are not yet hermetically sealed shells, they have open tops so drivers see one another and make the same kinds of micro-adjustments to cyclists and pedestrians.

In a San Franciso with fewer and more autonomous cars, can we imagine a way to recapture that kind of sociality?