Carsick

Increasingly, young people attach more cachet to their smartphone than their car — if they have one at all. And developers are finding a market for parking-free condominiums. As the Toronto Star's award-winning urban affairs columnist and architecture critic Christopher Hume writes in his new Star Dispatches ebook, vehicles are losing their stranglehold on the culture. Pulling no punches, Carsick: Reclaiming Our Cities from the Automobile traces the car’s drastic effects on cities: newer communities, especially, have been designed to be much more friendly to machines than people. And then there’s the long agony of commutes, our roads’ death toll and the surprising costs of parking. “For now we are car-bound,” Hume laments while showing that the signs are beginning to point the other way.

Star Dispatches is a weekly series of quality journalism in ebook form from the newsroom of the Toronto Star, Canada's largest newspaper.