Carmageddon
How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It
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4.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A high-octane polemic against cars—which are ruining the world, while making us unhappy and unhealthy—from a talented young writer at the Economist.
“Briskly written, well researched, and with a knack for landing the significant statistic right after the crisply summarized argument.” —The New Yorker
The automobile was one of the most miraculous inventions of the 20th century. It promised freedom, style, and utility. But sometimes, rather than improving our lives, technology just makes everything worse. Over the past century, cars have filled the air with toxic pollutants and fueled climate change. Cars have stolen public space and made our cities uglier, dirtier, less useful, and more unequal. Cars have caused tens of millions of deaths and injuries. They have wasted our time and our money.
In Carmageddon, journalist Daniel Knowles outlines the rise of the automobile and the costs we all bear as a result. Weaving together history, economics, and reportage, he traces the forces and decisions that normalized cars and cemented our reliance on them. Knowles takes readers around the world to show the ways car use has impacted people’s lives—from Nairobi, where few people own a car but the city is still cloaked in smog, to Houston, where the Katy Freeway has a mind-boggling 26 lanes and there are 30 parking spaces for every resident, enough land to fit Paris ten times. With these negatives, Knowles shows that there are better ways to live, looking at Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Tokyo, and New York City.
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Car culture comes under furious attack in this high-spirited jeremiad. Revisiting the early 20th century, when "cars were seen as dangerous ‘pleasure' machines that killed children, while taking the road away from ordinary folk," journalist Knowles contends that the first "jaywalking" ordinance—passed in L.A. in 1925—signaled that "the street was not for people, but for vehicles." As cars gained popularity, cities and suburbs were designed to accommodate them and it became difficult to travel in other ways. Knowles details how the frenzy of road-building often came at the expense of Black Americans, whose neighborhoods were razed, and spotlights Jane Jacobs's successful fight to save Greenwich Village as a case study in fighting back. Knowles casts a skeptical eye on electric cars and self-driving cars, but finds hope for reducing climate change and congestion in cities like Paris, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen, where investments in bicycling infrastructure have paid off, and in Tokyo's mass transit system, an exemplar of a city that puts the interests of people before cars. Unfortunately, Knowles's case is somewhat undermined by his lack of focus on alternatives to driving in rural communities, and by a handful of broad and overly antagonistic statements ("Driving seems to bring out people's deepest racial hatreds"). Though it's sharply argued and solidly supported, this sermon is best suited for the choir.
