Rethinking Our Toxic Relationship with Cars
When Professor Dame Henrietta Moore first heard about an electric taxi operating in London in the 1890s, she realized we'd been trapped in a historical loop. "You had more choice about how you would get around London in 1890 than we have now," she explains. That revelation helped spark the co-authoring of "Roadkill: Unveiling the True Cost of Our Toxic Relationship with Cars" alongside urban designer Arthur Kay.
60-70% of car-related air pollution doesn't come from tailpipes. Even electric vehicles contribute to decreased air quality through tire wear, brake dust, and road particles. While the car industry promotes "zero tailpipe emissions," they're quietly sidestepping the reality that the problem isn't just fuel—it's the dominance of the car itself in our cities.
Moore and Kay's solution isn't anti-car activism. Instead, they advocate for what they call expanding our "transportation biodiversity"—the same variety of mobility options that existed over a century ago. Their book presents over 100 practical ideas for cities to reclaim space from cars and return it to people, from Barcelona's superblocks to Jakarta's innovative electric scooter battery-swapping networks.
The impact of car dependency extends far beyond emissions. When cities require parking spaces for new housing developments, they're directly inflating housing costs. When families cut park visits short because there's nowhere safe for children to play near busy roads, community bonds weaken. When 44% of Halloween trick-or-treating injuries involve cars, we're sacrificing our most vulnerable residents to maintain automotive supremacy.
Topics Discussed:
The hidden history of transportation choice in the late 1800s
How the "car industrial complex" has shaped our cities and mindsets
The true cost of car dependency beyond climate emissions
Why electric vehicles alone won't solve urban mobility challenges
Innovative transportation solutions emerging from Global South cities
Reframing 21st-century freedoms around livable cities instead of automotive access
Over 100 practical solutions for reducing car dependency
Links:
Episode Transcript:
Henrietta Moore (00:00):
When we think about the freedoms that the car has brought us just to go anywhere at any time, I would urge everyone just to see that as the freedom of the 20th century. The freedoms of the 21st century are going to be around having livable cities, having no carbon in the bodies of your children, having no chance that your area is so toxic. It'll be increasing your risk of dementia. These are much greater freedoms, and these are the freedoms we should be directing ourselves towards.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (00:34):
Hello everyone and welcome to We Are Not Doomed. We bring you interviews with industry leaders, authors, journalists, and real people who are making an impact on climate change every day. We Are Not Doomed is produced by Puddle Creative, we are a full service podcast production agency. And I'm Jonah Geil-Neufeld, the executive producer. Today, our guests are Professor Dame Henrietta Moore, one of Britain's most influential public intellectuals and urban designer, Arthur Kay. They're the co-authors of a new book called Roadkill, unveiling the True Cost of our Toxic Relationship with Cars. Now, our listeners may already be familiar with how car dependency, especially in the US, causes multiple interlocking threats to our health as well as the health of our planet. They're climate accelerant, a public health crisis, and a hidden driver of economic inequality. The authors challenge the seductive myth that cars give us freedom, but they also are not people who hate cars.
(01:35):
Cars are in fact a great solution to many problems, but they focus on the car industrial complex and how to see how our governments, as well as our society has drilled into us the need to own and use a car for most trips that we go on. But this is an optimistic podcast and we end by talking about the cities of the future and talking about some of the hundreds of ideas that they have in their book for reducing car needs. This was a fascinating conversation. I could have gone on for another hour, so hope you enjoy the interview. Please give us a follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. Well, Henrietta and Arthur, thanks so much for joining us today on We Are Not Doomed.
Henrietta Moore (02:29):
Lovely to be here. We are thrilled.
Arthur Kay (02:31):
Thanks for having us, Jonah.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (02:32):
Well, Henrietta, maybe I'll start with you and just tell our audience where you're joining us from today and maybe just give us a little preview of the book and then we'll dive into your backgrounds.
Henrietta Moore (02:43):
Well, today I am in rural England, someplace you've never heard of, but this is a good way to do a podcast. We could be connected to the world by all this wonderful technology. In terms of the book, I think what's exciting about it is that we think we're driving the cars, but actually we argue that the cars are driving us and we go beyond the normal anti-car book because we're not actually anti-car, although we go through all the ways in which of course the car is ruining our finances, ruining our family life, ruining our health, ruining our streets, et cetera. But we try to focus on positive things on what we can all be doing to make the difference that we need to make and especially in cities. And I think that's what makes the book a bit different. It doesn't say, this is a kind of finger wagging book that tells you you shouldn't be in your car. It says, okay, so cars are perhaps the most successful consumer object ever made, but what are they doing for us in the 21st century and how can we think about that differently?
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (03:48):
And Arthur, anything to add there? And where are you joining us from today?
Arthur Kay (03:52):
I'm from here calling in from London, and I think that was an amazing summary. I mean, we go through in the book all the crimes of the car, but also a lot of the massive benefits it's brought as well. And then towards the end of the book, we come up with a lot of over a hundred different, what we call a crib sheet of solutions. So thinking about one of the real challenges, it touches so many different parts of our everyday life. And so what people often want is one single thing, a silver bullet that's going to transform the world. And what we provide is a little more complex than that. So hundreds of different approaches one can take to invite the car proactively into one's life rather than having it there as a default. And so that's really what the book's about, about reframing, rebalancing, and rebuilding a different relationship with the car than one we've inherited by accident from the 20th century.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (04:46):
And both of you come from different backgrounds. So maybe Henrietta, tell us a little bit about your work and how this book came about.
Henrietta Moore (04:55):
I'm a writer and a thinker and an academic and something of a failed philosopher like most academics are or try to be. Anyway, I'm an anthropologist by training and I am the director of something called the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London. And what the institute is about is what do we need to do now? At the moment, we have arrived at this specific historical moment about improving the quality of people's lives. So instead of talking about, oh, we did a great job after the second World War and the 20th century, or we did quite a good job around 1983, which is the kind of thing you hear governments saying when everything is going horribly wrong in today's world, we are not thinking about those fantasies of the past. We're thinking about what can we do now and what can we do collectively by working together in a different way. So if you can get a lot of different people into the room, if you can get citizens plus businesses, plus civil society organizations, plus local, all sorts of people together, they're going to come up with different ideas. And from those different ideas, you can drive new ways of thinking, and from that you can drive new kinds of solutions. So that's what we do for a living.
Arthur Kay (06:11):
My background is very different. I studied architecture at University College London, and my passion has always really been around how we can build solutions for sustainable cities, how we can live better together in cities. And working with Henrietta has been incredible because not only is she far cleverer than I am, but her way of thinking about and framing some of the issues we touched on the book is completely different. I came at it really from a perspective of grumbling about the car and the city and Henrietta helped me step back and see it from a much deeper and richer perspective. Then through that foundation we could then start to address some of these specific challenges and opportunities. And the way I approached this is the same as I've approached a lot of challenges I've worked on, which is as an entrepreneur. So the two companies I've founded, one is a company called Bean and the other is a company called Skyrim.
(07:05):
And I've been working on those for most of my career since studying architecture. And then today I work more in an advisory capacity sitting on the board of a number of institutions here in London, the Royal Academy of Engineering Transport for London, which is London's equivalent of the MTA for New Yorkers, but the Transit Authority for London, and then also a place called the Museum of the Home, which helps think about the past, present, and future of home. So that's my world, and as they've been very, very amazing to work with Henrietta on this book.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (07:39):
Yeah. So how did the book come about? What's the story of not only starting to explore this work together, but maybe how did you decide that a book was the thing to do?
Henrietta Moore (07:51):
Well, it's always an interesting question how you come to the idea, especially now that a book is a thing to do because of course we could have made a film, we could have done even more podcasts than we have done. We could have have made a documentary, could maybe even have written a song, we could have done all kinds of things, right? Well, how to play written a play. But I think what's interesting about the book format is the scope it gives you for framing a problem completely differently or framing it in a new way and then being able to bring all of the new kind of thinking that's necessary. So some of that is science, but some of it's about new ways of thinking about what our problems in life are. And so one of the things we were both interested in is why is it so difficult for all of us to drive the kind of change we all know we need to bring and what's holding us back?
(08:45):
And so we thought, well, starting with the car is a really good idea because cars are something that we're all familiar with. Most of us can drive. Many of us love cars. I mean, think of all those wonderful cars of the 1970s that looked like space rockets. I mean, they're beautiful objects. There are lovely things about cars. We all like them. We all find that we need to use them from time to time, and yet they're causing us real problems and not just us, but people who are very, very distant from us, but who are dependent on the way we live. So the car allows us to think about really complicated things. So why do we want to change? Why is evidence not always enough to make us change? What are our responsibilities to other people, the people who are very close to us, but also the people on the other side of the planet who are very, very far from us and yet they're affected by the way we're living. So how do we come to think about those things in a way that makes us all believe we can make a contribution rather than making us all think, oh my goodness, this is too much, it's too difficult, it's too hard, and I'm going to go and do something else. I'm going to go to the gym. I'm going to go down to the local bar. I'm just going to run away. I don't want to think about this problem. It's too big.
Arthur Kay (10:03):
And that's why a book was a really good format to think it through in a slightly calmer and longer form environment. I mean, in literally the first few pages of the book, we describe the complexity that the car touched on as a Gordian knot has so many different parts of it from, we obviously at its simplest, it's a way of getting from A to B, but it touched on everything from our global economy to our personal finances, to the air we breathe, to the design of the homes we live in, to the way that our global supply chains work. We could go on and on. And so that complexity means that whenever you, it's a bit like that story about a lot of people wearing blindfolds, touching different parts of the elephant, and some describes the tail on this, it's all B bristly and so on is touching the leg and says it's all bumpy and gnarled and someone's stroking the tus and saying, oh, it's smooth and hard and it's all these different parts.
(10:57):
And when we were exploring the very rich literature in this space, you would find really thoughtful, detailed pieces talking about let's say air quality and air pollution and talking about the specifics of it there. And then you'd hear people talking about the history of the car and the complexity of the second World War and how the interstate highway system got built. But as far as we could find nothing that really brought that all together in one place and try to explain it in a coherent narrative around all the different elements I discussed. And that's why the institute that Henrietta runs the Institute for Global Prosperity is pretty unique in the world because it actually, one of the big challenges in academia generally, which Henrietta can talk about in more detail, is channeling into different silos of different academic disciplines. And what the institute does is it brings together a whole bunch of different skill sets, disciplines, ways of thinking to be able to imagine some of these different futures. So that was pretty amazing to be able to do in the book here.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (11:59):
Yeah, you mentioned, I was going to say, I feel like the beginning of the book, there's a good amount of time spent talking about philosophy as well, which I was surprised to see. But it was a really nice kind of framing and also just the amount of stories that were in the book, I found it very readable in a way of, there is theoretical context as well, but there is a lot of just, especially in the historical parts when you're talking about the different late 18 hundreds and early 19 hundreds and then through to the highway system and stuff, there's just a lot of nice narrative about things that happened that made it very nice to read in a way, which was great.
Henrietta Moore (12:43):
Well, thank you for saying that. We're really pleased to hear it. And it's good to use stories because we all know from watching movies or from reading a book that you can get drawn into a world by a story and you can see things differently. You can see things from the point of view of another person. And that's really important because one of the challenges around these big problems that we're faced with like climate change or biodiversity loss or overheating of cities or whatever it might be, is that we need in these very contested times, much more empathy than we're sometimes able to bring to the situation. That is, we need to be able to see things from other people's points of view. And one of the ways you can do that quite often most productively is of course to think about history because we all have a history and history as being different.
(13:34):
And the history of the car is just actually something that makes me chuckle every time I think about it because the first patent for an electric car was in 1897. So it doesn't look like we've gone very far. We've gone around in some huge circle and in the late 1890s in London for example, you had a choice. You could drive an electric car if you were very, very wealthy, but you could take an electric taxi, you could also get on a train, you could get on the metro, the underground, you could walk, you could do all kinds of things. You had more choice about how you would get around London in 1890 than we have now. And one of the things we wanted to talk about in the book is how do we understand ourselves when we think about the question of what should we do?
(14:26):
So when we're asking ourselves the question, what should we do? We often think about it in terms of freedom. What are our freedoms? And when we were working on the book, there were all sorts of people who were very clear that cars represent freedom, but they also represent a particular kind of freedom. Because I had people writing to me sometimes getting very, very upset about things, saying, I want to be able to drive my car anywhere I want at any time, and I don't see why anybody should tell me where I can drive my car. Now, actually, of course, this particular kind of way of looking at things is a little bit off beam we could say, because we do have rules about where you can drive your car. You have to drive your car on a particular side of the road, for example, and you have to stop at stoplights.
(15:12):
And there are a number of things about the regulation of cars, which we've already agreed are important. The question is what are the new ones that we're going to agree that are important? And in order to do that, we have to take into account other people because if we're just thinking about where I'd like to drive my car, well that's not going to tell us very much about how we're going to get together to fix the problem. So getting together and telling stories and developing a sense of history and having some empathy are all important elements in making the story of the car work for all of us.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (15:45):
Yeah, I think so many people, myself included, would be surprised to hear about electric taxis in London in the late 18 hundreds. I think it's just, and it's an exemplary of one of those things that we forget this history kind of at our peril of we feel that the electric cars are a new thing and that the regular gas powered cars have been around forever, and that it just shows you how can be a different way of looking at things and perceiving what just basic transportation options we have
Arthur Kay (16:27):
To build on that. I mean, one of the amazing things that I always bang on about that we discovered when reading the book was it's not, I mean the electric car, yes, but also did you know about the electric bike or the e scooter? So I always think of it an scoters is the ultimate example because I'm on the board of Transport for London, and there's a big debate in London about should we allow Scoters onto our streets? So this is I'm sure in many other cities around the world as well. And we were amazed that there was this incredible suffragette activist called Priscilla Norman who as early as 1916, so over a hundred years ago, was zipping around London in full Victor, well later than Victorian, but during the first World War zipping around London as an activist suffragette where on her scoter. And this came in two different models.
(17:14):
It came in a diesel form and also in electric form. And so this kind of idea is, as he said in the late 19th, 30, 20th century, we had this huge, think of it as biodiversity, this amazing options, these different options that people had to get around their city. London was not that much smaller than it is today. And people could walk, they could even get a horse or car, they could get their car, they could get a taxi, they get an electric taxi, they get an electric bike, they get an nor bike, they could get an E scooter, who knows, they could balloon around if they wanted. But what has happened in a lot of our cities is we've gone from this huge biodiversity down to there is one answer, and that answer is you get in your car and the term we use is path dependency, that your options are limited, your freedoms are limited and channeled down this route of you have to drive.
(18:04):
And there's a whole bunch, as we unpack in the book in a lot of detail, there's a whole bunch of very large economic interests that sit behind that decision. You think that it's your decision and you think you're given choice because the car, what we call the car industrial complex says, oh, what kind of car would you like? You can choose from 400 different kinds. And then when you choose your kind, you can say, oh, you can customize it however you like. You can have 400 different mock colors. I think there's one example. You have that in a luxury Rolls Royce, you have something like 1600 different options of color you could choose. And then you have all the different interior fitouts and the different stereo fitouts and the different window tinting, and there was some wheel hubcaps and all the rest of it. And by the time of that, you're so exhausted that when they come to selling you the auto loan or whatever it has to be, you're just like, okay, let's just go with this one. Those options have all been massively constrained down to the car. And as soon as you choose a car, then you can start choosing again. We'll give you options at that stage.
Henrietta Moore (19:00):
What's interesting about that is that it's part of a larger process that we've gone through socially where we've understood freedoms or we've rethought what a freedom is in terms of a consumer choice. Consumer choice isn't the only kind of freedom that we would like to have in our lives, and I think that it's worth thinking about that. And I was reading earlier today an article which was talking about a woman who has two children who lives in Barcelona, who's moved from a situation in the last few years where she used to rush in the mornings to get her kids in the car, then jump in the car to drive a relatively short distance to take them to school, but then found herself in a traffic jam and stuck and late and hassled, and then you've got to throw the children out of the car to get them into the school because you can't leave the car there and then you've got to somehow get home again, all of which was taking a very long time. And now she's in a situation where her son walks to school by himself and the younger child goes with her, and sometimes they stop off on the playground on the way, and there's a lot less stress in life for everyone.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (20:08):
Yeah, there's so many threads we could pull out here, but one thing I wanted to go back to is just kind of personal stories on your relationship with the car and maybe transport in general and just maybe each of you could talk about, as we've mentioned, the car, it's not something that like, oh, we hate cars. It's honestly, really the car is a really great solution for a number of problems, one of which is probably not getting from point A to point B in a city in a relatively short geographic distance. So maybe each of you could talk about your relationship to the car now and maybe how it's changed and also, and then I can talk a little bit about my perspective as well.
Arthur Kay (20:51):
Well, I guess it's worth flagging that the book is very focused on the car in the city. So we're particularly focused, we estimate there's roughly 1.6 billion cars in the world, roughly 1 billion of them being in dense cities. And so what we are not trying to do in the book is to have any particular sophisticated commentary on the car in suburban or rural life. We're not particularly for people who love cars, who love driving cars, who are complete car fanatics for the beauty, the artistry, the joy of driving. We say, go for it. You should do what you love. For people whose profession and living depends on it, whether that's driving for a living, we're also not having any particular commentary on that. We think, again, there's a decision that people need to make there, and that's entirely up to them. We're specifically focused on people who are driving out of necessity, the billion cars registered to cities and people who are fine with driving, but they could frankly take it or leave it.
(21:50):
It's not, we steal a term from bizarrely of personal finance guru called Ramit Cefi called your rich life and saying that if a car happens to be part of a rich life, then go for it in all power to you. For a lot of people that does not happen to be part of their rich life, and therefore let's find ways to use that time, money, and other things that you may want to use for that, for things that are more beneficial for you. For me personally, the car is not part of my rich life. I have a driving license, I drive if and when I need to, but ideally not. I'm lucky that I live in relatively central in a large city which has got a very good public transit network and a warwa community. So I'm heavily biased towards that. But when I go abroad or need to drive, I do drive. So it's very much the options that are open to me in terms of that I take full advantage of, but I try to live as far away from car dependency as possible.
Henrietta Moore (22:44):
Yes. Well that's interesting. And I think that probably in a way, my attitude to cars has changed a lot. I mean, of course I drive, I drive very little in the United Kingdom, a bit like Arthur. I drive when I have to drive, and that's often when I'm away from the United Kingdom, but there's no point in living in Central London and driving. It's an insane thing to do. But certainly when I was in my early twenties, you could drive to the center of London to go out to a nightclub and park outside the nightclub probably. You certainly haven't been able to do that for a very long time. So it doesn't make much sense in terms of the enjoyment of the city is actually eroded by having to deal with the car. And that's something that we all of us recognize, I think. And it's hard to find any Londoner who doesn't think that.
(23:32):
But then you've got other problems, which is how do you decide what happens to people who come in from suburban areas who think that it's much more convenient to come into the center of town by car Now they are already feeling penalized by the fact that we have a congestion charge. That's something now that's a feature of life in New York as well and many other cities around the world. And so if they're coming in for work, they feel that the cost is going up for them, so that's eroding the value of their salary. Now, these kinds of questions is not that these things are not happening, but the question is how can we get together to think about how to improve everyone's quality of life? And if we are thinking only in terms of what we want to do, as I said earlier, it's very, very difficult to come up with those solutions which can actually animate conversations which are about trade-offs and difficulties.
(24:24):
And there are lots and lots of trade-offs that have to be discussed. But in terms of rural life, I think there are many ways in which we could improve quality of rural lives if we were not focusing them all on cars. So one of the things that's happened in continental Europe, and it's happened in the uk, it's happened in many other parts of the world, is that things that we used to do collectively, we now do individually. So getting children to school used to be a collective activity. Most kids used to go to school on a bus, now everybody's driving a car and they're not just driving a car, they're driving a bigger car. So one of the big complaints of a city like London is that when people are doing the school run, the whole of the city is blocked up by these massive SUVs. And whatever else we might say, it's an argument is made about convenience, it's made about safety for children, but that's only the child in the car. The safety for children is not the argument you make if the child's on the street and you're driving the SUV towards them. So there again, you have to take into account what's happening to other people and how you can put these two things together.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (25:33):
Yeah, I think in terms of my current relationship to cars, so I live in Portland, Oregon on the west coast of the United States, and compared to central London where I live would probably be considered a little suburban almost just because it's a medium-sized city. We have a car, but we have two e-bikes that we use for our kind of primary mode of transportation to get around. And there's definitely some trips. We have a pretty good public transit system here, especially compared to a lot of other medium sized cities in the us. But there are definitely some trips where you feel like here you need the car to get there. But I think one thing when I was kind of contemplating this interview, I grew up in kind of central Chicago without a car, and my dad also worked for a bike advocacy group my entire growing up.
(26:31):
So not only did I have this lived experience of not having a car, but my dad was always talking to me about various transportation issues. I think the main thing that I feel for so many people in the US is that the culture is so ingrained in us that nobody asks the question, how should we get there? It's not even something that comes into people's minds, it's just like we're going in a car. How many people are driving would be more like the question. And so I think that is, it's like the most basic thing sometimes is to open people's eyes to, even if you're living in a US city that doesn't have great public transportation, there are always options. And I think the first question is what could this look like? What are the other options? Maybe the best option sometimes is to drive, but that there are other options out there and how could we maybe make those a reality in our lives?
Henrietta Moore (27:32):
Well, yes, and I was just wondering whether you've been involved at all with this golden transportation wallet, which is something that's going on in Portland. Have you heard about this?
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (27:41):
No.
Henrietta Moore (27:42):
Well, I dunno exactly how far it's got with the development of it, but the idea was that you could swap your on street parking permit and the money you pay for it and be given the credit. So essentially you're taking public transport free, and that would be the case if you had an on-street parking permit. But it would also be the case if you were a member of a low income household so that you would get this allocation of free transport, which would be in your golden transportation wallet. But low-income householders have said is that one of the things it did is to make parts of the city accessible to them for the first time because they could actually drive into the city. So instead of having to not be able to afford to go on a driving trip other than when you were going to work and then have to pay for parking and then have to do all the other things, basically you took public transit and got into the center of the city and saw things and did things that you couldn't have done otherwise.
(28:46):
So you are getting more freedom from thinking about it differently. And certainly again, when I was younger and people didn't all have cars, so people had cars and perhaps some families had a car, but there were no two car families or three car families at that time. So if you wanted to go on holiday together with other members of your family, very often some people would go in the car and everybody else would be on the bus or the train. So you were moving large numbers of people and large amounts of luggage and so on, but you weren't always everybody going in the car because there were not enough cars to go around. So there are different ways of doing things when it comes to the question of how are we all going to go on holiday together?
Arthur Kay (29:28):
That's exactly right. And I mean to your point around awareness, Jonah as well is super important. I mean, I guess one of the most basic things we're trying to do in the book is to reveal what we call carb blindness to make people at the very, very simplest aware of the car around them. When you walk down the street, I certainly before writing this, would walk down the street and just say, oh, that's a normal street. Now when you walk down the street, I see, oh my goodness, almost all of this street is taken up with cars, even whether they're parked or moving. And so a lot of it's around just very simply recognizing the ubiquity of the car, the lifestyle it dictates. And then with that information, I mean Henry can talk more about the philosophy and the canteen framework that we've used to introduce this idea, but really at the very basic evidence saying, these are some of the facts around this issue, you can then choose to do with that as you will. You may choose to take action, you may not, but first and foremost, it's to raise awareness of this and to introduce this term car blindness about saying, look around you, it's everywhere.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (30:33):
Yeah. I think one thing that I also, besides blindness, the thought that roads are primarily for cars and that that's something that has not only always been that way, but something that always used to happen to me riding your bike is if a driver got mad at you on the street, often the thing that they would yell out the window is get on the sidewalk or ride on the sidewalk. And obviously in that moment of frustration for the driver, you can't explain to them that the streets are for biking as well. And in fact, in a lot of cities it's illegal to ride on the sidewalk. But that is something that has been so ingrained in us as drivers in the US especially that they think that no other mode of transport is even supposed to be there.
Arthur Kay (31:20):
It's absolutely extraordinary. I mean, what we call the car industrial complex has so successfully infiltrated every element of our life. The fact that it's literally illegal in many states in the US to jaywalk seen as dangerous, maybe even mad, to ride your bike on certain streets or to choose to walk or scoot you along certain streets is an extraordinary place to be. So I mean, there are amazing cities around the world who are doing different programs, which are called reclaiming the streets in various different guises. And often different mayors or different urban networks or local communities will organize these. But I mean it's very simple as it's saying, you may have one driver if that driver happens to be in a very large car, they take up more space, but also risk killing or injuring everyone who's anywhere near them. And these reclaim the streets movements are very simply saying, think of the person rather than the vehicle. And that may include some walking, cycling, wheeling, doing all sorts of other stuff. I mean, one of the most sad facts that we uncovered as research in the book was around the lethal nature of the car when children come into proximity to it. So I wonder if Jonah, you were able to guess the day of the year or even the hours of the year where there's an almost 100% increase in killing small children.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (32:38):
It's either there's the school drop off time, but then also in the US Halloween. I remember there was a part about that in the book.
Arthur Kay (32:46):
Yeah, exactly. So I mean it's very, very sad, but I mean the end of the school day after Halloween, the risk of being seriously injured by a car in the US jumps by 43% over that period in the UK by 34%. And then the death rate increases by almost double that again. So it's this very sad thing that when you do give that small little bit of increasingly parents are coddling children more and more. And there's a bit in the book we have as well about the lack of roaming that children are increasingly doing. And there's a whole bunch of reasons to that that we don't have time to go into here, but Halloween is one of the first tests as a small person, when you're given a chance to exercise some of that early freedom, and it's a pretty sad indictment, that's also the highest few hours of likelihood to die as well.
Henrietta Moore (33:33):
Yes, and it's interesting that very often when you are looking at reports about car accidents for example, it's extraordinary how often the report ends up saying that it's the pedestrian who needs to take more care. Quite extraordinary, in fact, and thinking about your story, Jenna, about drivers saying, get on the sidewalk, you might want to consider moving to Rotterdam because in Rotterdam they've been encouraging people to get back on their bikes because people who were residents of that city were rather less frequent cyclists than the rest of the Netherlands. So they were encouraging them, but they come up with a brilliant idea, which is to put up sensors across the city so that when it's raining, bicyclists actually get priority on all roads. So they would be going ahead of the car. And since it rains in Rotterdam quite a lot of the time, you wouldn't be having that problem of having to give way to the car.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (34:29):
Oh, wow. That's a really cool idea. We need that in Portland too because it rains a lot here. Yeah, I mean there's so many different things that we could pull into. But before we run out of time, I want to do two things. One is at the end kind of focus on the positive side. You mentioned all the hundreds of ideas that you guys have in this book, and maybe we could categorize or just highlight a few of them. But before we do that, because this is a podcast that we've talked about climate change a lot, I did want to highlight one thing that I think people don't think about a lot, which is of course we have a huge, huge problem of the tailpipe emissions of cars, which is something that I think everybody knows about at this point, how big the transportation sector and cars in general are contributing to climate change. But something that you guys talk about in your book are all the other pollutants that cars emit that are affecting us and our environment specifically. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that.
Arthur Kay (35:29):
Yes, absolutely. So the car industrial complexes try to reframe a lot of arguments in its time. So we touched about accidents just so car crashes just now, they call 'em accidents and they try and reframe it as human error. Well, I dunno who else's error it's going to be, but that is one of the way they've tried to reframe it. And congestion is too many people on the road in the city's bad traffic management. But also one of the things they've tried to do is reframe, the only way that a car is environmentally damaging is through tailpipe emissions and exhaust. And therefore the answer is electric cars. This is not our research, I should say this is from Imperial College London, but also from hundreds of other researchers around the world, which shows that between 60 and 70% of the air pollution related to driving a car in a city, it's actually not from the exhaust at all.
(36:15):
It's from a whole range of other forms of air pollution that are created from it. So things like tires, things like road dust, things like brake wear and tire wear, all of these contributes to decreased air quality and large quantities of air pollution. And often some of these are actually more damaging than what would typically come out of an exhaust. So what we're trying to do is say that yes, moving to an electric car can have some incremental benefits, but these are not, the framing of zero tailpipe emissions may be technically true. Yes, there are no zero tailpipe emissions. However, there are still lots and lots of emissions related to driving a car. So very crudely, we are saying that the issue is not the fuel that happens to be driving the car, or when we talk about autonomous cars, we're not saying it's the person who happens to be driving the car.
(37:01):
The issue is the form factor of the car itself and the dominance it has and the spatial implications it has in terms of how we design, think about our city, think about our safety, think about the quality of our lives. So the reframing of that challenge of that is a very clever slight of hand of the industry and is one of the reasons that there's vast amounts of electric cars being sold all over the world, frankly. I mean, there's an amazing study that's just come out of Norway. Norway has one of the highest adoption rates of electric cars in the world. Last quarter, I think 94 9 4% of all cars, new cars sold in Norway were electric. This is an amazing stat and one that other governments in Europe are looking at enviously. However, the very bizarre stat from this was that you think you switch from diesel to electric, aren't you a wonderful person? The bizarre stat from this came that the people absolutely end up driving their car between 10 and 20% more than if they had a conventional car.
Henrietta Moore (37:59):
So Jenna, one of the things that's interesting is what are we spending our money on? So we have traffic jams or we have traffic congestion in our cities, so we build more roads and when we build more roads, we have more traffic congestion. So we haven't solved the problem, but we have spent a huge amount of government money, which is taxpayers money on building new roads and on building infrastructure for cars, particularly for parking. And one of the fantasies here is that we think of the car as always being on the move and as always being a convenience, but actually cars are not necessarily the most convenient way to live our lives, and they are 95% of the time completely stationary, so they're going nowhere. But what they are doing is having an impact on things that people haven't thought or had a chance to think about.
(38:52):
Which is, for example, that when you decide to have a new block of flats built in Portland or you have London or Milan or Singapore or anywhere, there will need to be in most cities, some parking provision in the planning request. And that parking provision has the effect of pushing up the cost of each housing unit. So actually making space for cars, giving homes for cars is making more expensive homes for people. And we need to start thinking about how to organize our cities around people rather than around cars, particularly because in the countries of the global north, the cost that people find really difficult to manage is their housing cost and the combination of their housing cost past their car cost is extortionate. And then when you add on top of that your energy cost, part of which is included of course in the question of the fuel you are using in your car, particularly if it's electric. So you have a whole series of ways in which the car is actually making us poorer in the city than it needs to. So it's pushing down the quality of life in so many ways, some of which we're not always well aware of.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (40:11):
Yeah, that's a great segue into what I want to talk about next. And one of them that you talk about in the book also, that's a huge problem in the US is we have all these cars and we don't necessarily even own them. And the way that cars are financed, there are so many people in the US who are underwater on their car loans, which means they owe more than their car is even worth at this point. And it not only is making us poorer from a standpoint of making our housing costs more expensive, but the people cannot afford the cars that they have in general. But I wanted to talk about sort of imagining the city of the future and how we can think up new possibilities and open our eyes to possibilities that really don't exist yet, but maybe are starting to have effect in different cities around the world. So you guys have a lot of ideas in the book, but maybe is there a couple you would like to highlight or maybe we could also, are there some categories that you have that we could kind of put a broad stroke on for the purpose of the podcast?
Arthur Kay (41:18):
Yeah, so it's worth saying up top here that the cities of the future that a lot of us grew up imagining were defined by the car industrial complex. So there was an amazing exhibition at the New York World called Futurama, and yes, the cartoon was named after that. And this was sponsored surprise surprise by General Motors. And this looks uncannily like our cities today. There's large motorways with tower blocks around it, and we do a side by side comparison of Dubai and Futurama. And this is kind of the world in which we are now living. What we are trying to do in the book is to say you can either resign yourself to live in the city that the car industrial complex wants you to live in, or you can imagine a new kind of city which puts people at the center of it rather than cars at the center of it.
(42:09):
And so in it, we come up with over a hundred different approaches, solutions that you can start thinking about from this. And I mean we break it down into a few different categories. One is urban design. Thinking around this is probably more for planners and policymakers, but thinking about our urban fabric, the kinds of homes we build, the space between those homes, because again, as designers we typically focus for a lot on the buildings rather than what happens between those buildings. And we usually think get architects through this bit and then we get transport plans through this bit, but there's no one particularly knot it together. We talk a bit about how we can provide a much better service and options for public transit and active travel because again, I think a big issue we've anecdotally heard in terms of pushback is there's not a good bus route or not a good alternative to it.
(42:56):
And there's a whole bunch of complex reasons by lettings around public spending around it. I mean, the example I've given in the past is that my grandmother who lives in Dublin just outside the center, she walks out of her home and there's no pavement. So the only way for her to get around is either take her life into her own hands and try and at 92 walk up a steep hill at night in the short days of island and risk life and limb or to drive. And so it's a bizarre thing that her exact neighborhood is designed that there's no particular ways for her to get around her city policy interventions and economic measures. We subsidize the car vast amounts. And so we make some recommendations there in terms of how our governments and our local governments can think about rebalancing some of those pieces as well.
(43:41):
And more car sharing and alternative ownership models, cultural and behavioral changes. So there's a whole range of different approaches to it. And this comes back to the place where we started around the Gordian Knot, around the number of different ways that it touched on. One of the things we looked at, which is quite unusual for this book is the amazing innovations happening in the global south and how we often look to frankly to tech utopia and Silicon Valley for solutions, or we look to the rich Nordic cities of Copenhagen or Amsterdam, but actually so many solutions are actually coming from the mega cities of the global south.
Henrietta Moore (44:13):
Well, one of the solutions is to see what cities are doing because they have less resources. So if you have a lot of resources, then your first thing is you're going to build a road probably, and not just one, but several lane highways. But if you're living in Jakarta, then getting around on an electric scooter or motorbike is the way you want to do that. And so they have invested money in setting up all these battery swapping stations so that you don't have to charge, you don't have to plug in, you don't have to wait. You simply turn up, switch the battery and on you go. Right? And that's providing a way for ordinary people to move around because they're jumping on the backs of these scooters or motorcycles and off they go. And of course in that situation where you've got a lot of people moving on two wheels and they have a history of moving on two wheels, they enjoy that exactly the same in China.
(45:07):
I mean obviously the number of cars in China is growing at the moment, but equally the number of people who move around on bicycles or in other two and three wheeled forms of transport are very, very high. And in places like Kenya or Indeed in Mexico City, you have ways in which local authorities are trying to improve the sort of communal small scale bus systems that have pickup and drop off points as you want to. So you're not actually walking miles to get a transit connection. You are actually able to know when it's coming, jump on and off it as you wish and pay whatever you want. So if you can't pay all the way, then you get off and walk the last bit. But you have a number of different kinds of options. And those cities are thinking much more about this question of how you mix multiple modes of transport in order to get where you want to go.
(46:03):
And they're also thinking much more about how to bring in sustainable electric transport quicker than we're doing it in the global north. And that's extremely interesting. And there's been quite a number of studies on this, including a set of publications by this collection of cities, which is called C 40, which some of your listeners may know about. And you can go there and look at some of these solutions that are being proposed. And then we have of course lots of things that are emerging in Europe and in the United States. So things like Virtuo and Touro, which are different ways of being able to smart rent a car when you need it. So it's on demand, but you don't need to own it. And if you don't need to own it, then you don't need to park it. You don't need to insure it, you don't need to repair it, you don't need to spend all that money on it.
(46:56):
So there are lots and lots of ways in which you can use a car when you want to use a car, but have multiple choices as to whether you get on your bike a bit like you and your family getting on your electric bikes and lots and lots of ways in which people are now thinking about how to reclaim the street from the car. And we've got lots of things which we already understand. So we already understand that in many cities of the world there's something called residence only parking, but in Barcelona where the super blocks they've been thinking about not just residence only parking, but also having only residents in addition to deliveries and emergency vehicles driving through their area. So you have to be a resident in order to do that. Everybody else has to go around and that immediately reduces the number of cars on the street. It immediately gives you many more green spaces, it gives you many more seating spaces in the street, and it changes the way in which families can use the street, especially in the evening.
Arthur Kay (47:57):
And this point around the massive opportunity that big cities in the global south have enabled to leapfrog some cities in the global north, I would think is one of the big, big unwritten stories of the 21st century. I mean, if we look at, I mean in the US roughly 94% of households have access to a car in a place like India, the most populous country in the world, in the world's biggest democracy, roughly 9% of households have access to a car. Now that's for a whole bunch of quite sad economic reasons. Most of those people are not able to afford a car. They may well want one, but are not able to afford one. However, through a number of these innovations that we touch on ranging from how you design a street through to staying on two wheels rather than moving to four, thinking about walkable neighborhoods, thinking about shared mobility.
(48:47):
So if you do need a car, you're able to borrow one or rent one by the hour or by the minutes. These are the kind of things which in the same way we use it as an analogy in the book, mobile banking in Africa, where a lot of the banking infrastructure was not established. It was going to be incredibly expensive to build out bricks and mortar banks, the JPMorgan chasers, the Bank of America all over Africa. And a lot of what then happened was huge amounts of innovation in the digital economy and FinTech economy to mean that mobile banking rates in countries like Kenya and Ghana and Nigeria are much, much higher than they are in places like London or New York or Stockholm. And so this is where we think if you are a government in a place like India, in a place like Kenya or South Africa where it happens to be, you can avoid trillions and trillions of dollars of investment. And this is not me being bol. It will be trillions of dollars of investment to invest in the EV charging hubs, the roads, the bridges, the tunnels, let alone the car factories, the massive health costs in terms of doors. So you can avoid all of that costs and you can leapfrog the rich cities of the global north. And you'll be laughing all the way as you make your populations richer and healthier than we, as we're stuck behind the wheel.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (50:05):
Yeah, that's a great vision for the future. And I think a good note to end on, I wish of course that we could go on for another hour because there's so many things in this book that are so interesting and I think people should read it. So it's called Roadkill unveiling the True Cost of Our Toxic Relationship with Cars. And I think when this podcast is out, I think it'll be released here in the US on September 16th if I'm not mistaken. But I just wanted to give each of you maybe a last word if there's anything that you wanted to touch on that I didn't ask or just tell people how they can find your work and how they can find the book
Henrietta Moore (50:42):
As a final point. I would say that when we think about the freedoms that the car has brought us just to go anywhere at any time, I would urge everyone just to see that as the freedom of the 20th century, the freedoms of the 21st century are going to be around having livable cities, having no carbon in the bodies of your children, having no chance that your area is so toxic, it'll be increasing your risk of dementia. These are much greater freedoms and these are the freedoms we should be directing ourselves towards.
Arthur Kay (51:14):
A huge thanks having us on. It's a real honor to be here and to talk to your audience. If people are interested in finding out more about the book, they can go and visit us online at our website, which is get roadkill.com. And we are going to be doing a short but sweet book tour of the United States. We're going to be kick-starting it at New York Climate Week, which I think will probably be around the time this comes out. So I think we're there from the 20th to the 30th of September, and we'd love to meet any of your listeners who are in that part of town there. But yeah, it's been really great to be on Jonah, and thanks very much for having us.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (51:53):
Well, it's been an honor to have both of you, Arthur and Henrietta, thank you so much for being on. We Are Not Doomed. Thank you for listening to We Are Not Doomed. I'm ; with Puddle Creative, and thanks so much to Henrietta and Arthur for being on the podcast today. To find more episodes of the podcast you can go to, we are Not doomed.com. You can also find show notes there where we're going to put the link to the article that Arthur mentioned, as well as their website and other resources. You can find us on Apple Podcast, Spotify on your favorite podcast app. Until next time, have a great week.