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David Obst, "Saving Ourselves from Big Car" (Columbia Business School Publishing, 2025)
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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Alfred Marcus, and this is on the cusp between strategy and ethics, where we explore how organizations navigate the tensions between performance, innovation and responsibility. Today I'm speaking with David Obst, an investigative journalist, editor and media producer. Lou's new book, Saving Ourselves from Big Car, has just been published by Columbia University Press. The book is vivid, often unsettling in its history of what he calls big Car, the interlocking system of automobile manufacturers, oil and gas companies, insurers, media and political actors that has shaped mobility, cities, and even democratic institutions for more than a century. We'll talk about how Big Car came to wield such influence, human and environmental costs of car centric societies, and what experiments in mobility might finally offer a way out. David, thank you for joining me. You open the book with the claim that Big Car is a living threat that kills hundreds of thousands of people a year and that this carnage shows no sign of abating. How did your own professional journey from early work on corporate irresponsibility to your media career, bringing you back to cars is the central story you wanted to tell now.
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A
Well, thank you for having me on. It's been a fairly direct line from when I was young. The very first book I ever did was a book called in the Name of Profiles and Corporate Greed. And it was a collection by top journalists in Washington, D.C. of corporate malfeasance that taken place in various industries. And it did real well because what it showed was these well groomed, well barbered pillars of the community when it came time for them to make decisions between profit or the public's good always pick profit at the cost of really horrendous events happening to the people they're selling to. For example, General Motors made school buses and they realized at a certain point that the school buses brakes were not working properly. And they made a decision that it would be cheaper to pay off fatalities from the crashes than recalling all of the buses. So they left the buses out there for years and countless little children died because they didn't want to make the change. So that's what started me. Also, I did a book early in my career called Echo Taj, which was a cross between ecology and sabotage. And I ran a nationwide contest for the best idea of how you could mess with corporate America. And I got thousands of people contributed to it and we published it as a book. The Wall Street Journal called it the most dangerous book published this decade. I was very proud. And it told stories about how you could do things back to corporations. For example, if they were defiling your local water system, fill up a bucket from that lake, walk into the CEO's office and pour it all over his nice new rug, etc. So I've been a troublemaker for quite a while. This particular book came about because I was retired from. I had been in the movie business and had written a number of hit pictures over my career and was just kind of having a nice time. And I was with my granddaughter in Santa Barbara, California. We were driving down to Los Angeles and we hit one of the internal traffic jams that you invariably get stuck in. And I turned her and I said, her name's Sunny. I said, sunny, I hate traffic. And she smiled back at me and she said, pop up, you are the traffic. And I realized she was right. How did I miss this my whole life that I had been part of the problem? So I was a pretty good investigative reporter. I worked with a reporter named Seymour Hersh who worked for the New York Times for many years. One of the first things I did in my professional career is work with psy. And we broke the My Lai massacre story and won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for that. So I knew how to do investigative reporting. And I said, all right, I'm going to look into how did we get into this situation where we just accept being stuck in these giant multi ton vehicles for hours and hours at a time and don't do anything about it except make roads wider so that even more vehicles can become stuck on it and are there any solutions? And I ended up spending the next four years of my life talking to the most interesting people I could find in the field. And I went all over the place to find them. Some of the most interesting were, believe it or not, in Helsinki, Finland, who had come up with a really good plan of how to use new technologies to inform people as to how they could leave their cars behind and get around with only public transportation. And it's worked very well for them and for other communities also. So the deeper I got into it, the messier it got, until finally I began to hit gold. Big Car is an amalgamation of the automobile industry, the oil industry, the insurance industry, the steel industry, and many others who have worked together in the last 75 years to kill more human beings than World War II did. Wow. It's a staggering statistic. And this is not, when they think about writing a book for Columbia University Press, is they don't let you opine. You have to have sources. So I've got Really strong, verifiable proof that all the things that I'm going to say on your show are true. According to the World Health Organization, more people have been killed from lead poisoning than virtually any other disease over the last 70 years. That was man made. And the reason for this is real clear. And I'll just go into a short explanation. At the beginning of the 20th century, Alfred, the biggest problem in urban America, believe it or not, was the horse. Because each day, for example, in New York City, 120,000 horses would enter into the metropolitan area, each of them depositing 23 pounds of manure and 12 gallons of urine. And the cities just became impossible to live in. So we invent a car. First prototypes for cars were electric and external combustion engines, but those didn't work. So the technology that prevailed was the internal combustion engine. It has to run on gasoline. The engines that Henry Ford and early manufacturers of these cars made didn't burn the fuel, gasoline cleanly. So I'm sure, you know, you're old enough to remember cars backfiring and all of the different sounds that cars made. And what that was was just the engine telling us it's not working. But more importantly is you didn't get very good gas mileage from it. And the car kind of shook a lot when you're driving. So in, in 1927, three wonderful corporations, General Motors, Standard Oil and Dow Chemical form the Ethyl Corporation, which is to build an additive to put into gasoline so that car engines will burn smoothly, not backfire and get better gas mileage. This additive was lead. For the next 70 years, the Ethyl Corporation was able to cover up the effects of lead on human life. Even though it was killing literally close to a million people a year from lead poisoning. They were able to cover that up. Congress didn't go after them, the press didn't go after them. Nobody went after them. And they got away with it by saying that their product was proprietary and they didn't want to let out the details of it. So again, in the name of profit and their breed, these people made enormous fortunes by poisoning us.
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B
Is the Ethyl Corporation still in existence today? And is lead and gasoline still prevalent in the US or elsewhere? I don't think in the US it's.
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A
Not prevalent in the United States. I'll tell you why it's prevalent in the world. We still. If you look up on the World Health Organization website, you will see that still over a million of our species continue to die each year from lead poisoning. And the reason they got Away with it was twofold. One is that it's a very pernicious disease and that it takes a while before it knocks you out. So, Alfred, you come into contact with lead, and it may be five years before you're dead. It. What happens is the lead goes into the atmosphere. The particulates of that lead are heavier than air. They fall to the ground, it's stirred up, you inhale it. It goes first into your bones and then travels up to your cerebral cortex and takes over parts of your brain and replaces the calcium in those parts of your brain. And this may take a couple years, but eventually what happens is you lose the functionality of that part of your brain and you die. You first, before you die, oftentimes become very violent and lose your sense of empathy. So if you look at statistics, which Duke University has done, the amount of violent crime that took place in America over the last 75 years, you can trace the amount of violence in our society and the amount of lead coming from gas in our society. And it's a direct match.
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B
It's been brought to an end. We have lead free gasoline today in the United States.
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A
Yes, this came about because in 1969, here in the town that I'm at, Santa Barbara, they had a horrendous oil spill, right? So much so that the then president of the United States, Richard Nixon, came out to walk the beaches and sympathy for the people there. And it was horrendous. I mean, there were dead birds littering everywhere. There's little stuff everywhere. And, you know, the whole thing was an ecological catastrophe. Nixon knew that the Democratic candidate who'd be opposing him in the next presidential election was gaining a lot of traction in the then embryonic field of ecology. Edmund Muskie was becoming the green candidate. So Richard Nixon, in order to forestall that and to try and make a dent in that, Actually, there's a great quote by Adlai Stevenson. He says, Richard Nixon is the kind of man who would chop down a redwood tree, get on the stump, and then talk about conservation. Richard Nixon comes out to California, sees this and says, I'm going to form the Environmental Protection Agency. You can win a lot of money on bar bets on which president founded the epa. It was Nixon.
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B
I actually did my dissertation about the origins of the EPA many, many years ago.
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A
Oh, so then you know these stories. Well, much to Nixon's surprise and chagrin, the EPA took their job seriously. And in 1970, they have the Clean Air Act. Now, what's great about this is that it is going to change Things, because it specifies in the act that by 1975, they give the Ethel Corporation a minimum of five years. Every new car in America must have a catalytic converter. They feel pretty safe about this because, Alfred, nobody had invented a catalytic converter yet. It didn't exist, and they thought it would take forever before somebody did. But revenge of the nerds, we invent one and it goes into cars. In 1975, every new car now has a catalytic converter built into its engine. The problem is lead kills catalytic converters. It smothers it. The engine dies and the car is useless. This starts happening in gas station after gas station is people fill up with their new cars with ethyl gasoline, and the car dies right into the gas season. They have to drain all of the gasoline out and fill it up with unleaded gasoline to get the car to work. Eventually, gas stations figure out they have to do something about this. And you're old enough to remember is they change the size of the nozzles. So you can insert leaded gasoline pumps into new cars. Anymore, it won't fit. So you can only put in unleaded gasoline. And that's how we got rid of leaded gasoline in America.
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B
About the connection between catalytic converters and lead, is that still the main purpose of a catalytic converter, to take out lead, or is it. It's more. It's more broad than that, isn't it?
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A
Oh, it's much broader, of course, but no, it wasn't intended to have any impact on lead whatsoever. It's just. It happened. That lead I see killed it. It smothered it. I don't know what the actual technology is for, why it did that, but it sure as heck did it. And that's how we got rid of it here. Now, that's not to say that leaded gasoline disappeared. You can still buy leaded gasoline throughout the Third World. You can get it in Africa, you can get it in Southeast Asia, you can get it in other places. And it's still killing a prodigious number of people as it goes on. The other thing is that batteries that go into electric cars are made out of lead, and they don't last very long. So what they do is they take the little lead components that are in these batteries and they melt them down. And when they're doing that, they release again a fantastic amount of lead into the atmosphere. And this is killing again. Based on the World Health Organization, close to a million people a year.
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B
The purpose is recycling. And this is the main battery. I mean, all cars. The car, the starter in an internal combustion engine, as I understand it, is, is a lead acid battery. But are they in actual electric vehicles like a Tesla or byd? I don't think those. Do they have. Do they have lead components? Is that what it is?
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A
Oh, they certainly do. And one of the big problems that we're having now in California is that we had a big fire in the, in the Pacific Palisades. Right, right. There were more Teslas in that compact area than virtually any other place in Southern California. The impact of those cars burning and exploding and emitting the fumes from their lead batteries has been such that the cleanup is taking way longer than they thought. And as they clean the disposal of dead cars and dead batteries out of there, there's a real health problem, because where do you put all this contaminated material?
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B
What's your view then of electric vehicles? Are they net positive or net negative or neutral or just replacing one poison or anything under poison?
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A
I think that they're not a solution in the slightest in that in order for our species to survive, literally to survive, particularly now that the Environmental Protection Agency has been closed and that all of the health and safety measures that people worked so hard for over the last 15, 20 years have been negated the tragedy. But it's not only a tragedy, it's going to speed up the demise of our species. And we are literally playing on borrowed time right now, Hamilford, of how long our species is going to be able to exist. My favorite thing is last night, it was two nights ago. I still watch network news programs, right. So I was watching NBC Nightly News and they have the head of the EPA comes on and talks about how all of these things are unnecessary and that it's ridiculous. There's no global warming. Look at this snowball I'm holding, right. The next four stories on NBC News that night were on global warming. Catastrophes, fires, flood, hurricanes, and this. And nobody comments on it. Everybody said, well, this is just a once in a lifetime occurrence. But it's not.
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B
You're isolated currentists. They have no connection.
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A
No. And the reason they can't have the connection is because it'll cost big corporations money if you make the necessary changes to provide an environment that is free of the perils of big cars, is extraordinarily expensive, time consuming, and something that the average person is not going to get involved in. Because it's much easier to just get in your car and drive down to the market, pick up which you need and come home. And as long as the convenience of the car supersedes the danger that the car is causing to us. We're not going to get rid of it until it becomes way too late. And we're getting close to that tipping point now to where, I mean, we're kind of lucky to be older men in a sense that we're not going to get to watch the tragedy. But I sure wouldn't want to be our grandchildren.
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B
You're not helpful. Is there a way of reversing this situation or is.
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A
Of course. But the thing is, people have to then do two things. First, they have to realize the existential threat that Big Car is causing them. And then they have to change their lifestyle to accommodate that. So there are. In my book, I have the last chapter is. I turned the book in in Columbia University, said this book is just a total bummer. It is true.
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B
It is true.
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A
I added a chapter at the end of the book where I went around the world and found exemplars of communities that are trying to come up with alternatives to privately owned automobiles. And so cities like Taipei, Helsinki, Salt Lake City, Tempe, Arizona and others are currently doing really interesting social experiments about how to replace the private car with community transportation. And it's just a question of. We have become so used to the ease and luxury of using a car, we don't mind sitting in what is one of the great false statements. Rush hour, right? Nobody ever rushes in rush hour.
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B
We thought about that. It's an oxymoron.
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A
It is a total oxymoron. And another is Big Car is the only industry that talks about their deaths and gets away with talking about their deaths as accidents. They're not accidents, Alfred. They're giant pieces of metal crashing into frail human beings or having frail human beings in them and killing them. So it's not a car accident, it's a car execution.
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B
My grandfather, I recall when I got my driver's license, he said to me, an automobile is a lethal weapon. You have to remember that.
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A
It's true. But we don't because, you know, you're late, you want to get someone, I can make this light. I can do this, I can do that. You know, and also because of the heightened tension in our world now is road rage is really something that is pervasive throughout our species. And you just look at how people drive in places like Bangkok or Los Angeles or New York, and it's life threatening every day to go out.
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B
Can you talk a little bit more about these experiments in the communities and a lot of social Experiments that make the world better do work on a small scale, but they don't get scaled up.
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And that is of course, the problem is how do you achieve this to scale? And I think the only way you can take it to scale is that if you have an informed public, and the only way you can have an informed public is by laying out as clearly as you can what the problems are and what the solutions are. That's why I did this book. Anybody who reads this book will want to find other people in their community who feel likewise and begin organizing. Because the only way you get anything done is through organization. You can and people have in places like Tempe, Arizona, build a community where you can't have cars, where you work, where you shop, where you socialize is all within a walking environment of where you live healthier.
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B
If we walked more and used bikes.
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A
They'Ve done the same thing in Salt Lake City. They've created car free zones which you could spend a whole day in downtown Salt Lake City and not see a car in certain places. In Taipei they decided they would replace the car with a bike. And so there's millions of bikes everywhere. There's in Helsinki, public scooters available in any corner that you get off of a tram or a bus so that you don't have to take a car to get to your next place. All of the solutions exist. It's just a question of the will of the people to use those solutions. And it's just too easy to jump in the car and, you know, do your thing.
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B
There are today in New York City congestion pricing and everywhere you go in the world you find these alternative mobility bikes and sometimes electric bikes. I wonder about the electric bikes as to their overall impact, but it really, there's no coercion or incentives necessarily to use it. It's totally voluntary. And people get annoyed with bike la, including myself at certain points.
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A
Yeah, of course. And the reason for that is lack of knowledge as to why they're necessary and inefficient. Introduction of these alternatives so that you know why people are doing that and support it. Because any rational human being who sits down and looks at the impact of Bighar and where we're going to be five, ten years from now can't help but want to do something for their children or grandchildren that will save them from the catastrophes that are about to befall us.
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B
Some other topics that are related to this. I'll start with Copenhagen, which is a city I recently visited and it is amazing. There's virtually no Traffic, at least in the downtowns. Although I was told by some people in Copenhagen, if you go out in their highways, they do get a lot of congestion. But in the downtowns, it's just amazing. Everybody's on a bike. There are like thousands of bikes.
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A
Copenhagen is one of the cities that I highlight in the end of my book as one of the exemplars of a city that's working, but correct. If you want to go from Copenhagen to Brussels, good luck.
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B
So I wanted to also bring up, what's your view of autonomous vehicles? Would that make us. Is that just another scheme for corporate takeover? Or does that have some possibilities of rationalizing the system so that people.
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A
It won't help at all, because as the autonomous vehicles become more and more prevalent, they will inevitably segue into the same problems that current vehicles have. Of too many vehicles, not enough street size. The average person spends an exorbitant amount of their life sitting in traffic jams.
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B
It's time to listen to podcasts or talk to your wife and have some positives.
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A
But, you know, people have just gotten used to it and inured to it. And again, they don't think, you know, and they harken back to what my granddaughter said. Pop up. You are the traffic. So what I would suggest in the few people who really want to take a stand on this is find other people in your community. There are groups that have formed organizations such as Mobility as a Service MAS maas. They have found each other and formed international committees to work together to try and come up with alternatives to everybody just using their own private car. Because until we stop using our own private cars, we're going to just keep over and over and over the same thing. And the people who are supposed to be watching over us and taking care of us, that is the engineers, the city officials, the people in charge of transportation, they're logged into a system where they get paid way more to service big car than they do to service car efficiency.
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B
An autonomous vehicle system was based on public ownership rather than private ownership. So it would be a form of public transportation. So you go on your phone and you say, I have to go X and that. And the autonomous vehicle appears within a certain amount of time. And it.
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A
Was. It's a wonderful idea, except that as more and more people do it, the autonomous vehicles will clog the roads the same as regular cars do.
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B
What. What about China itself? Like, I think I visited China about 25 years ago, and everybody was on a bike. And today, China is the biggest market for cars in the world. And I did notice, even when I was there, they were building superhighways at a very rapid level. And so. I mean, they're also aware of the problem.
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A
Yeah. It's also built more high speed rails than any other country in the world. They've done 22 million miles of high speed rails throughout the country to transport people. As opposed to the United States, where we can't even get one. High speed rail from San Francisco to Los Angeles. That's true.
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B
Is railway and subways. Is that then a big part of the solution? Are subways ultimately better? I used to, when I lived in Minnesota, I had made a 25 minute commute and I used to always get stuck in traffic and I hated the commute. And I can get on a subway here in New York and sit there for an hour and just play with my phone and watch the people and I don't get annoyed. It's a very different experience. I don't know if it's for everyone.
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A
You're also a smart guy, Alfred. Most people don't think it out. They just get in their car and do it over and over and over and over again because they don't see any representations of it. In my book, what I show is how big car was able to seduce us all into becoming car junkies. In that we are just like a person who's dependent on a drug. We're dependent on these cars. And like a druggie, we say, I could stop anytime I want, I don't really need it. But it's not true. People can't stop and they do need it. And until we find. And there's some really smart people who just have to find enough of us to work together, who are looking for alternatives. And if we don't, and if we don't fairly quickly, I. Your grandchildren are going to be riding donkeys again.
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B
I remember that when I turned 16, it was so exciting to get a driver's license. And the freedom, you know, life, liberty and the. And the right to drive. That's kind of the American ethos and.
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A
Well, absolutely. And I have a whole chapter.
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B
I.
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A
Have a whole section of the book as to why the benefits of the car were so appealing to our species. In 1939 in New York they have the World's Fair and the largest exhibit and most densely populated ride that anybody went on was General Motors had exhibit called It's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow. And what it was is a depiction of what Los Angeles would look like in the year 1960. You can still Watch it online. I would urge your audiences, just type in 1939 World's Fair, General Motors exhibit, and what you'll see. This is a world that you want to live in. And I watched that and I said, boy, I sure would like to live there. And say, wait a second. I did live in Los Angeles in 1960 and it was nothing like this.
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B
I remember I lived in, grew up in Pittsburgh and I had an uncle who lived in la and we took a train ride across the country and I thought Pittsburgh, Louisiana was going to be gorgeous and it would be beautiful. My memory of that trip was smog. My eyes feeling watery from the smog.
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A
Yeah, well, because it's in a basin and none of the car exhaust can escape and so it just hovers and then just. Yeah, no, it's not a healthy place to be.
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B
Do you think young people today are showing impatience with cars? And that's a symbol of kind of plateau in the love of cars? I think a lot of them find cars annoying rather than liberating.
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A
Well, two of my best, I mean, my best friend's daughter is now 21 and she hasn't got a driver's license. My granddaughter is 19. She refuses to drive. But it's not because they're anti car, it's because they're lazy and have other people who provide chauffeur services with them. But no, I haven't seen any movement or grassroots inception of wanting to try and stop cars.
- [39:17]
B
I mean, there's so many. Like, instead of driving now to go shopping, we used Amazon. Is that net positive or net negative?
- [39:27]
A
Well, it's neutral in that you may not shop. But unless Amazon uses delivery drone to deliver your materials to you, it's still using its trucks and clogging up the arteries or cities and our streets and spewing out pollutions.
- [39:53]
B
The automobile business itself today is not a great business to be in because there's so much competition and the world demand for automobiles actually has saturated. It's kind of plateaued since in the last 10 years. Is that a positive sign or.
- [40:11]
A
Well, it's always been a cutthroat business. At the beginning, there was the Ford and the Model T Ford. Up until the late 20s, if you wanted a car, that was what you got. Alfred Sloan, founder of General Motors, realizes we can make different models each year and that will change the paradigm that works. Then they begin changing the colors and the shapes and the forms. All of that propels cars into the atomic age, where cars then begin to look like rocket ships. And I'M sure you're old enough to remember giant tail things. And the other thing is, you know, I mean, Thurston Vemlin pointed out that conspicuous consumption is something that our species is very fond of. I the Marcus family couldn't put their new washing machine in their driveway for everybody to drive by their house and go, oh, they're doing really well. But they could put their Cadillac El Dorado in the driveway. And everybody going by the house goes, oh, the Marcuses are doing really well. Right. So it was a way of showing social status and still remains so today. It also was very liberating for young people, particularly our generation when we were coming of age, because media was controlled pretty much by the elders of the family. In your home, if you wanted to watch TV or listen to the radio as a child, you didn't get much access to the remote control or be able to switch the channel, but switch channel when you got into a car, you suddenly had total freedom to listen to whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted. More importantly is you get laid. And so this is a big problem for kids in the 68 when after the pill comes out of sexual freedom becomes rampant. Most kids can't afford to go to a hotel room or hope that their parents are out of stuff. But cars are perfect places. And the drive in because also known as a passion pit, becomes just a really convenient place to go and snuggle up into the backseat and do whatever you wanted. So the car had tremendous draw on kids. The other thing is the car is one of the only businesses, aside from now the personal computer, that was able to penetrate into American classrooms. I guarantee you, where you went to school, where I went to school, there were driver education programs. Yes. Okay. There is not washing machine education programs or vacuum cleaner typing.
- [43:43]
B
I remember typing through.
- [43:45]
A
There is. Yeah, there is typing. But. But basically. And. And the new technologies with computers obviously supersede when they're. But driver's education and being part of the car culture was an easy thing for Big Car to pull off. I'll give you a quick example. By the 1930s, American streets were being well populated by automobiles speeding down the roadway. People who were not used to this, particularly small children. And a staggering number of young bodies were mangled and killed by cars each year in our cities to the point where it was really becoming noticeable. People were grumbling about maybe having hearings about it, et cetera, et cetera. So Big car comes up with a brilliant idea. They work with the Boy Scouts of America and they invent the crime of Jaywalking, which hadn't existed before. And what they did was they put the onus of people being hit by a car, not on the car, but on the foolish pedestrian being in the street. And so crosswalks are invented, traffic lights are invented, and the Boy Scouts are sent out with little booklets and whistles to spot people on the streets who are crossing at the wrong place. The Scouts would frantically blow their whistle and give the people a ticket.
- [45:31]
B
Today, the number of people who die annually in the United States is what, like 40 to 50,000? And that's been about.
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A
We lose. For every 5,000 cars you see on the road, one of the people on those cars will be dead.
- [45:48]
B
Wow.
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A
Okay. We lose close to between, as you said, 45, 50,000. Through traffic fatalities. Not traffic accidents, traffic fatalities. They're just killed because the average car today has got as much armor on it as the Sherman tanks had during World War II. I mean, these are big machines, and particularly now, wherever it's moving up into vans and trucks, they're big, heavy machines. And it's just no contest between humans and metal. Metal always wins.
- [46:32]
B
Globally, I think it's a million people a year dying. Automobile.
- [46:37]
A
It'S not quite that high, but it's pretty high. More people still are dying from lead poisoning than from actual car crashes.
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B
That's interesting.
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A
According to the World Health Organization, what.
- [46:50]
B
Is the actual number globally then? In the.
- [46:54]
A
In the United States, it's generally between 45 and 50,000 globally.
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B
Do you have, you. Do you have that on the globally?
- [47:03]
A
I don't know what the total was. That's probably in my book, but I.
- [47:07]
B
Have a. Yeah, I think it's close to a million, but I could be wrong. We should. We should check.
- [47:14]
A
A lot of people drive the.
- [47:16]
B
The other issue, I think is that there's so much employment associated with automobiles. From salesmen to McDonald's being set up for drive in restaurants, to truck drivers. I mean, people who make all the. It's not just the automobile companies employ, but there's all the associated industries, the suppliers to the automobile industry that.
- [47:44]
A
You're absolutely right as we've. We've predicated our economy on fossil fuels. And these fossil fuels are used for everything to making gasoline, to help making the steel and the implements that go into a car. And so they really are holding us captive. And the only way I can see our breaking free of this is again, people realizing before it's too late that they have to find alternatives. So, for example, where you live, you could easily get a group of People together and create a car free zone, okay, in which you, using the new technologies, you could call for an electric van to come pick you up at your house at a prescribed time. It'll take you to a communal hub in your city. At that hub you will know exactly when the public transport of electric buses, trams, other vehicles are going. Or there would be bikes or electric bikes for you to take. You can take that alternative way of going to spot a where you were or where you want to meet somebody for coffee.
- [49:17]
B
There are such apps, I think right now which connect bikes, public transportation.
- [49:23]
A
And yes, people are experimenting with this and it's working, but nobody's been able to. Except ironically enough, in the Middle east. The best alternative to public transport are taking place in things, in places like Qatar and Saudi Arabia and other places because they know and what the future holds for them.
- [49:58]
B
A world less dependent upon cars would depend also greatly on people living in more dense areas, concentrated areas, and it would require the expansion of public transportation. Many people in Manhattan don't have cars because it's just too expensive. It doesn't make sense. And there are good, good public options, public transportation options, but they're not complete. I mean, subways don't go everywhere and they're very expensive to build. How do you see this all evolving? Especially given people in suburban areas and rural areas are. It's very problematic for them.
- [50:43]
A
Is that your staff?
- [50:45]
B
Yeah, that's my staff.
- [50:48]
A
I don't know what the alternatives are going to be. One of the things that I'm going to be working on in the upcoming months is I'm working with the city of Santa Barbara, with the University of California at Santa Barbara School of Public Health and with people in our department of Transportation to try and start to create small car free zones in the community that people can use. And by testing the efficacy of that, we can then expand it to wider and wider constituencies to where we can show people you really can get to point A. You really can get from your house to your work, to shopping, to eating back to your house without ever having to turn on your car.
- [51:47]
B
Cities, now, many of them are car free in the central part of the city. What's the last things that you'd like to say to my listeners about this issue and how we can change it? And it sounds like you're not that hopeful, but you're trying, but.
- [52:10]
A
Well, what I'm going to say is that any kind of social movement is dependent on people realizing their best interest is to participate in it. And what I'm Pleading with people is get a copy of this book just so that first off, you know what the problem is. And then secondly, find other like minded people in your community that you can work with so that you can come up with small solutions for your area of how to become free of this addiction to big cars that we all have. Because until we begin to do that on an individual basis, Big Car is just going to dominate us.
- [52:55]
B
Government dictates that you can only drive a certain amount per year and if you want to get more, you'd have to pay for it. And you set up a market like.
- [53:06]
A
That and even taxing that all either happened because government.
- [53:13]
B
Yeah, yeah. But in an ideal situation, government would have to play a role, I think, in making this transformation work.
- [53:21]
A
Well, it has in cities like Taipei and in Copenhagen and in Helsinki is there's been state intervention in be able to get legislation passed that necessitates you having to become free of the car in certain areas. But those are outliers. They're not the model. And in America, the problem is that it's very expensive to get elected to political office in America. One of the largest contributors to public elections in America is Big Car. They give an average of $500,000 compared to less than $10,000 from conservation groups to political candidates. You know who's the biggest recipient of Big Car largess and gets the most money in Congress?
- [54:25]
B
It's people in Detroit. They're upper staff.
- [54:29]
A
Chuck Schumer.
- [54:32]
B
Interesting.
- [54:34]
A
So you know, Big Car is very smart about how they use their money and they have more money than anybody.
- [54:41]
B
I mean, we didn't even talk about Big Oil, which is the other contribution.
- [54:46]
A
Big Oil is part of Big Car?
- [54:48]
B
Yeah, that's the way you define it. Yes. It's a whole. Yeah.
- [54:52]
A
No, Big Oil, Big Car, Big Tire. I mean the number of tires that we dispose of is a crime. There's a lot to tear your hair about. But we mustn't give up is we have to become educated on this stuff. The only way we're going to be able to break this addiction is to realize what the alternatives are and go into a kind of car rehab mindset so that we can do this without making our species extinct. Because if we continue on this for another, even a decade, it's going to be too late to pull back.
- [55:38]
B
We're still pretty much trapped in a car culture. So many, so much of it is completely embedded. We could talk for a long time, but we probably should bring this to an end.
- [55:53]
A
Thank you so much for your audience and for taking the time to think about this. And again, I don't want to sound like the sky is falling. The sky is falling, but the sky is falling.
- [56:07]
B
Falling. Yes. So, David, thank you for joining me on the Cusp. For listeners interested in how strategy, regulation, and ethics come together around something as every day as the car and as consequential as climate and public health, the book is Saving Ourselves from Big Car from Columbia University Press. Thank you all for listening to on the Cusp on the New Books Network. If you have comments or suggestions for future podcasts, please contact me@amarcusmn.edu. amarcusmn.
- [56:44]
A
Eduardo Sam.