A personalized review of Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile
By Ethan Andersen
Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile is a new book from the co-hosts of the The War on Cars podcast Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek. The Brooklyn-based trio has been producing the podcast since 2018 and have been livable streets advocates in NYC since the early 2000s.
In their own words, the podcast showcases the people, places, and ideas that are pushing back against car culture. They started it to spread their message, namely that “it’s way past time to radically rethink—and shrink—society’s collective relationship with the automobile.” (Gordon, Goodyear, & Naparstek, 2025, p. xiii). They’ve got a dignified list of guests at this point in the show’s history to co-sign their message, including figures such as certified wartime messengers Donald Shoup and Mikael Colville-Andersen, courageous politicians NYC Comptroller Brad Lander and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, and genuine celebrity advocates like Nick Offerman and Adam McKay.
If you’d like, The War on Cars’ raison d’être can be distilled into just one “CARS BAD” paragraph that outlines the pervasive negative externalities of cars (p. xii). It’s the idea that the automobile, which once promised the idea of limitless freedom, has produced a host of costs and burdens. The demolition of neighborhoods and cities to make way for freeways. Sprawling surface parking lots that sit empty much of the time. Car dependence which forces grinding financial servitude, an epidemic of violent death, countless hours lost in traffic, social isolation, and the ongoing destruction of the natural world.
Tyrannical, indeed.
That’s enough for me to get on board, but if you’re thinking that the war on cars has already been won, think again. Cars are dominant in America, where the auto industry makes up 3% of total U.S GDP and more than 90% of households own at least one car (p. 127). Even in a walkable haven like New York City, the data tells us that cars still rule the streets. Open Plans recently published an analysis of NYC vehicle travel data from the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice. They found that vehicle miles travelled has increased by 16% from 2005 to 2023. Another bewildering stat showed that car ownership has increased by 10% since 2010, while the population has only increased by 1%.
The implementation of congestion pricing in NYC has been a landmark victory for the war on cars and it has unsurprisingly shown to be quite effective, but advocates in the city have taken our fair share of losses this year. We had protected bike lanes removed just months after being installed, desperately needed street changes unfinished or delayed, e-bikers unfairly targeted by the NYPD, and our Mayor wondered aloud that perhaps the fight for vision zero has been too focused on cars. That’s not to mention the barrage of threats and very real attempts to pull funding for transit and bike infrastructure in cities that have come from the Trump administration this year.
All of that is to say: this war is far from over.
I’m a genuine supporter of the The War on Cars podcast. I’ve been a listener for years, bought a shirt and some stickers at a meet and greet in 2023, saw a live show of theirs earlier this year, and pre-ordered the book as soon as I got the email back in April. And I’m certainly a supporter of the cause, generally speaking. But it wasn’t always this way!
It’s ironic — I remember my passion for the podcast burning hottest when I was moving to New York City in the summer of 2022. I drove 20 hours to New York from my hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska and I must have spent half of those hours listening to The War on Cars podcast. A dirty little secret of mine is that I lived on Staten Island for the first 6 months of my time in NYC. I still had a car during that period, but I almost exclusively used it to drive to the Target or Carvel on Forest Ave. With a growing appreciation for public transit, I gradually left my car behind more and more often. I even took pleasure in daring to do what I coined the triple threat: taking the S61 bus to the Staten Island ferry, then the ferry to Manhattan, and then the subway to anywhere in the world. That’s how it felt anyway. I was, at least ideologically, fully bought into the war on cars. By the end of my short time on the island, I was sold on the idea of moving to a more permanent home in Brooklyn and ditching my car completely.
July 2022. My first time laying eyes on the New York City skyline.
I’m only slightly embarrassed to admit that the day I sold my car was one of the best days of my life. It finally happened a couple weeks after moving to Brooklyn as I was still trying to figure out alternate side parking and how the hell I was going to pay the Verrazzano Bridge toll without an EZ Pass. I felt such relief, and it wasn’t just because I got the $2,500 I desperately needed to help recover from the financial trauma that is moving into a new apartment. It was the feeling that I was in good hands. The hands of a city — region, even — that’s essentially entirely accessible by foot, bike, or public transit.
That transaction was the end of an 8-year run I had of driving basically everywhere. I drove my car to school everyday unless absolutely necessary, even though I lived less than half a mile away (a ten minute walk!), and the thought of taking the bus anywhere in the city never crossed my mind. I relied almost exclusively on my car or other people’s cars for transportation, as is the case with many Americans.
My journey towards being an official card-carrying member of the war on cars started even before I knew about the podcast. It was in large part, as detailed in Life After Cars, fueled by a “shift in consciousness sparked by the converging crises of climate change and COVID” that made myself and many others think more deeply about transportation and our relationship with it (p. xvi). It was also influenced by a car-less month spent in a Maryland suburb of D.C where I worked as a Jimmy John’s bike delivery person and took the Metro for the first time. It was also the sort of furious discovery you get when internet access meets genuine curiosity. I’d posit that the Venn diagram of The War on Cars listeners and r/fuckcars members is damn-near a circle.
Advocates like myself needn’t worry about how someone gets to the war on cars. Only that they arrive there at all.
To put it plainly, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. The authors are agile and well-equipped to combat detractors. They’ve got the sort of rhetorical preparedness you get after 20-plus years of pedestrian and biker advocacy in NYC. It’s clear that they come from a place of genuine passion and compassion.They’re light-hearted, but still biting. Add a couple years of honest book research on top of that and you get Life After Cars, a rather encyclopedic compendium for your enlistment, evidenced by the some 233 cited sources that range from their own guests, tweets, books, and research papers. Perhaps the most convincing part about the co-hosts’ messaging is that it’s always about putting people first.
You can tell that they take great care to thread the needle between holier than thou preaching and standing up for what’s right and what we know will ultimately make for better cities and a better society. Nuanced supporters of the movement like Gordon and Goodyear are able to articulate this expertly. They know that fighting this fight ought to come with the admission that a car-free lifestyle is a pretty distant reality for most Americans in 2025. Rightfully concerned with being viewed as out-of-touch urban elites, the authors are sure to note that part of their aim is to create a world where car ownership isn’t necessary for full enfranchisement in a community. A world where people who truly have a need for cars (like some people with mobility disabilities, workers delivering heavy loads, and residents of rural areas) don’t have to compete for space and resources with people whose use of personal motor vehicles is unnecessary, wasteful, and inefficient (p. 225). The truth is that, in many parts of the world, a comfortable walkable lifestyle is a luxury good. The handful of cities where you can get around reliably by biking and walking or by public transportation have become cripplingly expensive for most.
Maybe my favorite parts of the book are the bursts that encapsulate the why of the war on cars so succinctly. The ones that are so densely impactful that they warrant an immediate reread. Like this one from chapter 7 “Cars Are Unjust” (p. 137): “At the heart of car culture is a series of paradoxes. Cars open new vistas of social mobility; cars also erect barriers that keep populations in their place. Cars are liberating; cars are also burdensome and confining. Cars enable freedom, but only on their own terms—terms that include a steep financial cost and the assumption of a variety of risks, some of them life-threatening.”
Life After Cars is a relatively light read in the universe of planning and advocacy writing. That is, if you can steel yourself long enough to get through Part II of the book, which is bluntly and aptly titled “How Cars Ruin Everything.” Making your way through the pure onslaught of the horrors cars have produced, you realize that there’s little room for subtlety when discussing the death of a child or a neighborhood razed for a highway. The authors coined the term ‘Standard American Unit of Mortality’ to describe the routine 40,000–50,000 motor-vehicle fatalities the U.S. sees each year (p. 100). The frequency of traffic deaths in America has become a desensitized reality, subconsciously chalked up as the cost of doing business.
They also call out that there’s no avoiding the intersectionality between the broken transportation system and other inequitable systems. The housing affordability crisis fueled by land-use regulations that favor single-family homes, painfully long and expensive commutes, traffic policing that takes a disproportionate toll on Black and brown communities, women bearing the burden of a transportation network still geared toward men, and the climate crisis that’s worsened by the toxic emissions from gas-powered cars.
But there’s hope to be found in Life After Cars as well. You’ll read about triumphs of political will in Paris, Ghent, and Emeryville, California, a heartwarming story about Gordon’s daughter, and Banksy-like feats of tactical urbanism. These morsels of hope are meant to lead you forward. To lead you into the war on cars without fear.
Ultimately, the aim of The War on Cars is to make water visible to fish. It’s an idea that philosopher and noted media theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote about in 1968. The idea that “just as water is invisible to fish, hardly any of us can perceive the swirling sea of cars and car-centric infrastructure around us. It’s just the world in which we’re swimming.” (p. 209) That is, in a nutshell, what this book and the podcast are about. Spreading the message in the hopes that one bike lane at a time, one parking lot turned apartment complex at a time, one car ride traded for a bus or train ride at a time, we can repeal the damage that cars have done to society.
But it’s not just peeling back the layers and layers of stink, it’s revealing the positives that you get on the other side. It might be more useful — more hopeful, certainly — to flip the narrative. To instead describe all of the positive externalities associated with going car-free and developing more pedestrian-friendly transportation systems and communities. It’s a very useful truth for planners and advocates that walking, rolling, or taking transit is cheaper, healthier, and more climate-friendly than driving.
After all that, the most pressing thought I had after reading was “Ok, that was great. But who is this book for?” I’m not quite sure how to answer that. Neither are the co-authors, who tried answering the same question in a recent accompanying podcast. It’s definitely for me and my fellow warriors, for whom this book is likely to feel more like a victory lap than a rallying cry. But it’s more for the person in your life that is curious about the way cities have come to be. For the person that hasn’t ridden a bike since they were 14, but has always wanted to get back into it. The person that commutes by car an hour each way to work every day. The person that takes a vacation to Barcelona and wonders why it feels so much better to get around there. The person that vents about the traffic and parking in their city’s downtown area. Are you this person? Do you know one of these people? Then Life After Cars is for you. More importantly, whether anyone reads this book or not, a Life After Cars is for all of us.
Welcome to The War on Cars.