A car-light vision for the U.S.

- Yes, it is incredible. It is such a beautiful city, loved it. I remember exiting from the train station and there were just waves and waves of cyclists, pedestrians, folks getting on and off, light rail

and almost not a single car in sight. - I love it too. I've been a few times the first time when I was about 12. My last time was a couple of years ago. And every time I go, it just blows my mind.

It is so beautiful as you just said.

“It is, I think, one of the most romantic cities”

in the world and I just love it. The canals, the bicycles, everything there is awesome. You know, I think when I talk about how much I like it,

I've never been that good at conveying

exactly what makes it so magical. But we then talked to Cornelia Dinka, she's the founder of Sustainable Amsterdam. (upbeat music) - Sometimes I say it's kind of like this feeling

of almost like floating through the city. Or it's hard to describe. But it is, it's this kind of like magical feeling where it's like the opposite of being in your car, stressed out because you're trying to get to work,

but there's a traffic jam. So it's like if you turn that around eight, 180 degrees, it's kind of like your every commute or every trip in the city is kind of like a moment of inspiration.

- Man, what a great description. I want to float through Boston. - I know, right? I wish I could have floated through DC and that's sweaty public transit trip

I took in our first episode.

And I was in LA for work a couple weeks ago. And everywhere I went there, I kept thinking about Cornelia feeling really inspired by her commute instead of totally stressed out by them. And Yona Fremark, if you remember,

he was on our show a few episodes back. He's the researcher at their urban institute. And he described, if you recall, LA completely differently than the way Cornelia talks about Amsterdam. And if you go out and walk around so many parts of LA,

you'll find enormous arterial streets with terrible pedestrian crossings. You'll find a complete lack of quality, bike infrastructure where people feel safe biking around. You'll find cars dominating virtually every space

you look at in the environment. And when you have conditions like that, no matter how many investments you make in the public transportation,

you're going to be having a society that is structured

around needing to drive because no one wants to not drive in an environment that feels terrible if you're not in the car. - Wow, yes, I remember that tape and I cannot think of a clearer contrast

than Amsterdam in Los Angeles. LA is definitely not floaty. - No, it is not floaty at all. It was a city made by cars. And if you talk to anyone there,

they will tell you how frustrating it is to get across that city. The average LA commuter spends five days a year stuck in traffic and pedestrian deaths have risen steadily in the city

and nationally for that matter for the past 40 years.

“So how did we end up with these totally different outcomes?”

- It all comes back to one simple thing, the car. Or rather, how we built our communities and our cities around the car. We've just gone so far in this direction of car dependence, the only way

to get back to a more balanced equilibrium is to be a little bit extreme about reclaiming these cities. - In our final episode of this season, the car free city. The concept sounds a little radical,

but it doesn't mean getting rid of cars altogether. Rather, it's about reimagining our communities to prioritize people over vehicles. What if most of us didn't have to reach for our car keys before walking out the front door every morning?

- What if we could float more and stress less? - Yes. - I'm Tiffany Chu. - And I'm Andre Greenwald, and this is Mocheft. - A show about the past, present, and future of how we move.

(upbeat music) - So Tiffany, in this episode, we're gonna dig into how cities are designing for people's centric mobility instead of car centric mobility.

But, you know, before we do that,

“I think we should probably give our definition”

of what a car free city or car free community even is. - Definitely. When people hear car free, they probably think about banning cars altogether. - Several cities around the world,

including London, Paris, and Montreal, are looking at ways to dramatically reduce the number of vehicles in its streets. - From Barcelona to Oslo to Mazdaar City in the United Arab Emirates,

officials are getting serious about redesigning their communities for car free living. - Many cities in Europe are floating with banning private cars from the roads, and many more have at least partial bands in place.

- Now, bands or partial bands are one tool that cities are exploring. But, we have a much broader and inclusive definition. What we're really talking about is creating enough alternatives to allow anyone to get around without a car.

So it's actually about giving people more choices not less for a better quality of life.

but car free cities are also leading to a better quality of life. Without cars, there's less smell, less noise, more space to walk, to din outdoors, to play.

“- I think this is a really crucial point”

because there are huge benefits to fewer cars. It means fewer injuries and deaths from accidents. It means lower healthcare costs, lower air pollution, and climate pollution, more space that can be used for green parks or other uses and better real estate values.

But this all only works if it's paired with better transit and mobility alternatives. So let's dig deeper into our definition. Can you say more about the importance of choice, Tiffany? - Yeah, it's about being able to walk out your front door,

have a multitude of different choices to get to where you need to go. And if one isn't available, you can choose another. In most places in the US, folks only have one real choice, their car.

What if you had an abundance of mobility choices and abundance of optionality?

- Yeah, that would be amazing.

And I think if we're talking about, like, where do we start on getting a car free city going? It starts with this abundance of mobility choices. And if you have that in place, then over time fewer and fewer people will drive.

And you can start to impose policies that also disincentivize driving and push more and more people to these alternatives. And over time, can we get to a point where in certain cities we have a much smaller percentage

“of travel by car, like something like 10% of travel by car?”

Not zero car trips, but a very small percentage of what's happening. - Yeah, and however we define it, this concept feels so ridiculously impossible to most people outside of America's biggest cities.

So many of our communities were purpose built for the car with so much of our valuable land used for parking lots, highways and arterial routes. You know, so many people in the US have lived their entire lives around the car.

Can you blame people for thinking there's no way to undo this? - No, it does feel super daunting. You know, and when we think about where do we start an even tackling this problem, we probably need to take a look at some transportation history.

You know, people often point to cities like Amsterdam or Copenhagen as these mechas of car free living

as if they have always been that way.

But Cornelia Dinka, the founder of Sustainable Amsterdam, we heard of the top of the show. She explained how that's not really true. (upbeat music) Amsterdam, for example, actually invested heavily

in car centric design after World War II, just like most cities in the United States. - So Amsterdam has this reputation of being a bike city. So what's very surprising for many people and also for me was to find out that in fact,

this wasn't always the case. This idea that Amsterdam was not always Amsterdam, that if you look at these photos from Amsterdam in the 1970s and 1980s, it was much more like your average North American city, right? So sidewalks were covered in cars, parked cars, double parked cars,

all the beautiful public squares that people really enjoyed today, were basically used as parking lots. A lot of the city was being actually torn down in the demolished to make room for these modernist highways and modernist buildings.

- Traffic experts from the US went to Europe in the '60s and '70s to try to sell this idea of the car centric city.

Their pitch was basically, look, if you wanna be a modern city,

“you have to stop being nostalgic about the past”

and you gotta start embracing the car. And Amsterdam did that, at least for a bit. - I like to say that Amsterdam was a combination of lucky and wise that it didn't go down that path too far. It made some mistakes and we have some of these modernist highways,

actually, one to show, kind of through the city center, which was then also reclaimed. - You know, I had heard about this part of Amsterdam's history and I've seen the photos, but if Amsterdam was already on this route

of redesigning their city for their car, what changed? - Public pressure. In 1971, there were more than 3,000 car-related deaths in the Netherlands and 500 of them were children. And so there was this campaign called "Stop Decinder Mord"

or "Stop The Children's Murderers." And a lot of people in the city started protesting against this car centric vision for the city, including a bunch of kids. (crowd cheering)

- If you look on YouTube, you can find these great clips from 1972 in Amsterdam where children were actually blocking off city streets to cars, to advocate for more play-safe streets. Here they're chanting, "Get these cars out of the way, "we wanna play."

And you see in the footage that Amsterdam looked a lot less appealing in the 1970s than it does today. - Okay, just Googled it. Oh, crazy. This clip I just clicked on is all in Dutch, but there's this kid.

Maybe 9/10 with a classic Beatles haircut and he's walking down the middle of some noisy street

in the streets with signs.

“It's kind of incredible, as a public servant,”

I've been thinking a lot about protests and how cities should react or not react to various protests that happen. But it feels like they worked. (crowd cheering)

- Yeah, they were definitely a big piece of the puzzle. There was this other movement called the cyclist union, which built on the momentum and pushed for more support for bikes. And then in 1973, we had the Arab oil crisis

and that forced local leaders to seek alternatives to gas fueled cars, which further turned the tide toward redesigning the city. And they seem kind of protests. We're actually happening in the US as well.

They just never made it into the history books.

- In almost every city, certainly every city where I've checked. And also a lot of small towns and suburbs. People, especially mothers of children, blocked streets demanding that the authorities step in and slow the vehicles down so that their children

could go outside safely so that their children could go to their friends' houses safely and so that they themselves could walk around the street safely too. - This is Peter Norton.

He's the University of Virginia Professor. We met back in episode one. And Peter says that from the late 1940s to the 1970s, a lot of women in the US weren't loving the shift to car centric living.

- From their point of view, this idea of a city where you can drive anywhere at any time was not a utopia. It was a dystopia almost. - And so they started protesting and not just well to do white women, Peter explained that middle

and working class women of all ethnicities took to the streets. - These protests took the form of blocking the local streets to get attention. The reporters would come and ask what's going on and they'd tell the reporters, we want to stop sign,

we want to traffic light, we want the cars slowed down, we want some speed enforcement. And very often they would get results. This is another illustration of how we have selectively omitted part of our history.

And it's a very crucial one because it compels us

to question the story that says, "Everybody welcomed this transformation." - This is fascinating. I remember in the first episode, Peter talked about how it was the automakers

and the other industry players who aggressively lobbied for car centric policies. And then you also have these pockets of resistance in the US to car dependency. But why were there such different outcomes

in the Netherlands versus the US?

“- I think it comes down to a combination of culture and geography.”

You know, America built the first math produced car. It's also a very big country. So it spent decades building new cities around the car after World War II, Amsterdam, which is in a country that is quite flat geographically,

already had a rich bicycle culture. And that made it a viable alternative when the moment arose. - It was absolutely not a walk in the park. It was not cumbaia, this transition

and Amsterdam by any means. It took more than a decade of campaigning and lobbying and this kind of gorilla activism and all kinds of initiatives. Again, Amsterdam had kind of adopted

or was on that path to some extent, but a lot of people could still remember a time when they would have bike to school as children themselves or played in the streets with their friends. So there was this collective memory

that we can go back to a different time that is actually a more inspiring way to live. - So that idea of having a collective memory of a more inspiring way to live really hits me. I had a great childhood.

I was really lucky daughter of Taiwanese immigrants who was born in Flushing Queens, but then I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey in the '80s and '90s, the definition of my parents American dream.

And to get anywhere, I had to hitch a ride with my friends or my parents. And so I became a part of a suburban generation

that never knew any other way of moving around.

“- And that brings us to another important historical point.”

Your experience as Americans experience the suburbs pretty much squashed any dreams of car-free living from about the 1950s on. - Post-war suburbs becomes an absolute federally-sponsored, mass development project really designed

to kick start the economy after World War II. - This is Ellen Dunham Jones. Ellen teaches architecture and urban design at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. And one of her claims to fame,

she is known as the Dead Mall's expert. - Yeah. When the media need a professor to verify our malls dying and what's happening to them, I often get the call. - She actually manages a database of dead malls,

but her expertise, it's not malls per se. It's what those dead malls tell us about the suburbs. Their history, their impact, and how we might change them for the better going forward. - In the early 2000, early very early 2000s

and more than 50% of the US population live in the suburbs.

- And is it still the case today

“that more than 50% of Americans live in the suburbs?”

- Absolutely, yes. - I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about sort of the growth of suburban malls, how that connects to the growth of our card dependency in the US and are those two connected?

And what the consequences of that have been? - Both the development of malls and the development of this just card-dependent model of suburbia, both of them come out of that same drive by the federal government to sort of use suburbanization

as a way to kickstart the economy. - With a population being spread out thinner than the city proper, there was a crying need

for a new concept in retailing.

Some place where Mr. and Mrs. Suburbia could plot their car easily and then take care of all their families needs. - This idea of one stop shopping was translated into the shopping center. - The government built highways,

soon followed by shopping centers. Even the museums, the magazines, the TV shows, they all promoted Suburbia as the ideal of modern living. And I think we ended up then using the tool of zoning to segregate out, okay, houses on big lots over here,

houses on tiny lots, here over here, oh, apartments, you're way over there. And the government centers over here, retail over there,

“business center over there, the only way to get around”

to all these different uses was high-high speed roads.

- But this plan to use Suburbia to grow the economy,

it ended up creating a whole new problem. - Most people in Suburbia, most people everywhere. They have a car, even though it's parked 93% of the time, they feel they have to have this expensive object for when they have to get around.

And they can't rely on transit, it's too far away, they can't rely, they don't have enough alternatives. - So this is really the crux of the issue, isn't it? The majority of us, whether we live in the suburbs of Brisbane or New Jersey or Central LA,

just don't have enough options that aren't a car when we need to get from point A to B. And this goes back to episode one when Peter Noron said, this is a result of very clear decisions that made the system this way.

- Right, so for us that even imagine a car for a city or car lights cities in the US,

“we have to create options that are more appealing”

and more accessible for people than firing up the car. And in the US, that does feel like a hard lift. - Yeah, even in San Francisco, when I was on the congestion pricing advisory committee, a city as progressive as San Francisco, people were so fearful

of something that was about taking their beloved automobile away because it was a symbol of freedom. And I'm curious, did you ask Ellen about this? Given our deep connection to the suburban lifestyle, how realistic does she think the car for a city concept is

for the US? - Well, she's making it work for herself. She gave up her car seven years ago and she's been getting around the Atlanta area by walking, biking, and via public transit ever since.

And I asked her what she thought it would take to change our collective thinking. - Most of the places that our car free or have gone car free are places we love to go as tourists. So, you know, whether it's congestion pricing in London,

15 minute cities in Paris, superblocks in Barcelona, not providing parking in new neighborhoods in Freeberg, Germany. I mean, these are just the European examples. In the US, there are, at least it doesn't, car free island resort areas, such as Fire Island.

And if we could just get more people to say, "Hey, why is this so pleasant?" Why couldn't we do this at home? I would say right now, it depends on what are those backups that you have.

How close are you to transit? How many options do you have? - Here we are back at this concept of options. And how do we provide those options for people? Well, you know, one way is, as we've talked about in this series,

is that there are new technology tools that have come online over the last few years that are creating more mobility options, both in cities, and suburban areas, and rural areas, like. - Right.

So, there was Caroline Rodriguez from Episode 3, and she helped start up a new transit agency in rural Utah, using an on-demand system, making it possible for people living in a county of almost 2,000 square miles to get anywhere they want to go without a car.

- And then there's the mayor from Valdasa, Georgia, who was in that same episode. He launched an on-demand transit service for his city that ended up getting something like 40,000 more rides

and they were anticipating. - And there's also all these startups who are using computer vision and license plate readers

and mobile phone apps to basically do versions

of congestion pricing not only in London, Singapore, Stockholm, but other cities are exploring these new technology tools as well. And because of these new tools, we're now able to connect people

to diverse mobility options while making transit planning more efficient.

“- Yeah, and I think we have to be willing to use”

every single tool that we have in the toolbox to move things into better direction. And Alan reflected that a bit in her comments. I think there's a number of reasons why car-free even in suburbia.

It's the heavy lift, we know, but trying to do car-free in suburbia. I think now is exactly the right time to try to deal with that. I think I know a lot of folks that would actually welcome having micro-transit options that much more convenient

and easy for them to access and they have them feel safe with that. So everything sort of from looking at the demographics, understanding the changes in technology, the new forms of mobility,

and really think fresh about, what is it? That promise of suburbia is sort of city out your front door, countryside out your back door. Are there ways that if we really significantly reduce the car, we can reimagine new ways of delivering versions

of that promise? OK, so we're taking this optimistic, inclusive approach to the car-free concept. But this whole idea of car-free or car-like communities can really scare people off, too.

Yeah, right, I mean, if you just hear the phrase,

like the first thing that might pop to your mind

is that there's gonna be some policy that's gonna take my car away or make it impossibly expensive to drive around. And that's the only option I have today to really get around my community. So I totally agree.

“I think, you know, Cornelia Dinka, when we were talking”

or her, she definitely honed in on this question of communications and messaging. I'm not necessarily a huge fan of the whole car-free city concept per se, because it's a little bit absolutist. It's a little bit too extreme, if you say,

no cars at all, it's a little bit too extreme. And it's also saying too much what you don't want to compare to spinning it around and talking more about what you want in city. So you can talk about a kid-friendly city, yeah.

So can children walk or buy to school on their own or play in their streets without parents having to worry about the street, for example, right? So I think it's good to talk about all these other things you get in the city when cities are not so car-dominated

and car-dependent. You know, the reason we have to use this kind of terminology is just to even make people aware and to be able to put on the agenda kind of these alternative imagery of what cities can be like

if not every trip was dependent on the automobile. (upbeat music) So whether we call them car-free or car-light communities,

“why aren't we seeing a more rapid push behind the concept?”

What's holding us back? - Yeah, I think there's a lot of factors. I mean, as we've dissected our political system is deeply tied to cars, that reflects our culture, we love cars, we associate them with personal freedom.

We don't like the idea of giving them up. I don't think it's widely understood. The impact of our car dependency is having. And so, you know, Cornelia, she's not even American and she gets it.

- So people act like, you know, the car is like their first born child and if you tell them they can longer park in front of their house, they get very angry and mad and emotional and so on. I mean, you basically said it, right?

It's this idea of, you know, it's our culture, the North American culture, the American culture is so closely linked to the automobile. It's, yeah, there's nothing we can do about it, right?

And I always like to push back on that idea

because I think culture changes all the time. And I think, again, this is what we've seen in Amsterdam in the 1970s and in the 1980s is that culture can change. It could change from this much more

by friendly culture to a car, dominated culture. And then it could also change back again. You know, I'm hearing some optimism there. Even though change is very tough, it's possible. - Absolutely, you know, we just have to keep talking

about the Bible alternatives and then step by step show how they can work. You know, otherwise people, they won't think there's any other way. - Quite often we tend to think like, okay, streets are made out

of stone and out of asphalt and we can change them. And in fact, we can, but if you don't have any good or recent examples or if there isn't a discussion or a dialogue or a collective process

then it's very easy to think, well, there's no way to change. So having this massive system change is what is very paralyzing for people very often. (upbeat music) - Our entire lifetimes in the US, right?

We've lived in a country that's dominated by the car. So, you know, Tiffany, do you think this concept of a car-free community or communities across the country? Is that even possible here? - Well, not only is it possible, it's already happening.

In places like Fire Island, in New York, there's a cool startup in Tempe, Arizona right outside of Phoenix, called Colta Sack, where a good friend of mine Ryan Johnson's trying to start a new car-free community.

And we can always look to places like Europe,

like Venice, city centers in Barcelona, again, this is so possible, it's just a matter of political will.

“- And I think, you know, it's also interesting, right?”

That New York City is likely to very soon have congestion pricing, and they pass a lot of do that. They're just kind of going through the approval process with the federal government. That'll be the first city in the US to start to charge drivers

for, you know, driving into congested areas of Manhattan. And, you know, the reason, even though super politically difficult to get that accomplished, the reason that's even, you know, only possible in New York is because there were great mobility options in place, you know.

So I think, you know, I think if we can start to build those mobility options elsewhere, it opens up the opportunity to generate, you know, funding to do even more. There are a bunch of people in the US who are living in communities

that are effectively, you know, car-free or car-light. And that is really important. Even though we're talking about a much broader vision and this being in many more communities across the US, people are living this experience today of getting around

their community without a car.

“And so, you know, I think, again, it just comes back to choice”

and other options to get around. And, you know, as Peter Norden says, framing this all around choice,

it's that critical piece of the American identity.

Right now, Americans don't have choices, most of us. And when I say choices, I don't just mean the theoretical possibility of getting a bus or the theoretical possibility of riding a bike. But the attractive equivalence of that choice,

in other words, is riding a bike as inviting and as safe to you as riding in your car. And this is a country that has often stood for valuing individual liberty, individual choice. And if we really value choice,

then maybe that fact can help us to ensure that people who choose not to drive have that choice, not just as a theoretical possibility, but as an attractive opportunity. Jerome Horne talks about this too.

He's the transit expert we've heard from a couple times this season. And Jerome thinks there are a lot of shared values that can make the car free concept more attractive. - We just don't have to beat people where they're at and appeal to core values with folks about,

you know, don't you want cleaner air, don't you want to save for community, you know? And I think once you begin to have conversations with people about what their values are, we find out that a lot of us are very similar

and what we want. We want to make the world a better place. We want to reduce, you know, crime and violence, and particularly death from being struck by automobiles for a lot of pedestrians, but how we get there, it's messy.

It's a little complicated, it's ambiguous, but I think, you know, beginning to build that bridge with, hey, if we allow more people to get around their community, walking, biking and taking transit, you know, for those who still want to or will continue to drive,

their experience will be better. (upbeat music) - I gotta say, after this series, I feel like we can get to a place in this country where cars will one day feel optional,

not mandatory. (upbeat music)

“- I do too, and I think it's important to remember”

that this won't all come at once. You know, there's a lot of steps along the way that can have a massive positive impact on people's economic mobility, their health, and their quality of life.

And I ask Sean Kanon, the planning expert at HDR who you've heard from in this series, about what it'll take to move the ball forward. And his answer, it felt like an appropriate place to close. - You know, to those that asked that question,

I challenged them to pivot their thinking slightly, because in this country at least in most of our cities,

one third of the population is too young to drive,

one third of the population is too old to drive, and half of the working population might not be able to afford a personal vehicle. The challenge for us is to realize that for that swaths of today's population,

the city's already a car free city, but not by choice.

as seamless as possible to day,

with investments we can make to day. To not only make their lives better,

“but also to improve society for all of us.”

So my challenge to the policy makers is to focus their intent on those populations to day that don't have the luxury of dreaming

of a quote unquote car free city.

We'll get there, we'll get to a place where we don't need to make these immense personal investments and infrastructure to get around. But we have a lot of stuff we can do this afternoon

“that doesn't require us to wait 40 years.”

Amen. (upbeat music) To not waiting. To not waiting.

That concludes our sixth and final episode of this season.

Thank you so much for sticking with us. And if you like what you've heard this season, please share a link on social media with the transit nerd in your life.

“MoShift is produced by VIA in partnership”

with PostGrip Media. VIA's technology enables partners to create and to end transit systems from planning better networks and streets to operating efficient equitable public transit.

Learn more at ridewithvia.com. This show is hosted by me, Andre Greenwald. And me, Tiffany Chu. The show is produced by Stephen Lacey and Bailey Sessley Maison Martinez

and Dalvin Abouaje of PostGrip Media. It's also produced by Francis Cooperman, Andy and Brushes, and Andre Greenwald from VIA. Sean Marquan composed our theme song and mixed the show. - Thanks, Tiffany, for being my co-host

for this awesome season one of MoShift and to all our listeners. Thanks so much for sticking with us. (upbeat music) Are we done?

- I think we're done.