How a Manufactured Car Culture Blocks Transit

Climate One

News, Earth Sciences, Social Sciences, Science, News Commentary

4.7 • 585 Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2021

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS

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Summary

The United States is famous for its car culture. But a hundred years ago, pedestrians didn’t want cars to take over the streets — and it took decades of pressure and lobbying by car companies to make them feel otherwise. Today, traffic jams, maintenance and pollution make cars more like the cigarette no one wants to quit. Urban areas have grown up and spread out along ever widening highways with parking spaces required for each new building, further entrenching the car into our lives and choking cities with smog. Public transit holds tremendous possibilities for reducing our transportation emissions while better moving people through cities. But there’s a lot to overcome when trying to change the mobility model in most American cities, starting with the lack of good public transit and the high costs of construction. How can we make good public transportation work in America? Guests: Peter Norton, associate professor of history at the University of Virginia; author of Fighting Traffic and Autonorama Eric Goldwyn, assistant professor at the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management; co-founder of the Transit Costs Project Amanda Eaken, director of transportation for the Bloomberg American Cities Climate Challenge at the Natural Resources Defense Council Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	AI is incredible. They can teach you how to fry an egg and even write a poem, pirate style.
0:07.0	But it knows nothing about your work. Slackbot is different. It doesn't just know the facts.
0:14.0	It knows your schedule. It can turn a brainstorm into a brief and it doesn't need to be taught.
0:20.0	Because Slackbot isn't just another AI.
0:23.3	It's AI that knows your work as well as you do. Visit Slack.com forward slash meet Slackbot to learn more.
0:31.3	This is Climate One. I'm Greg Dalton. Getting more people out of cars could do a lot to help slow the
0:37.4	climate disruption evident
0:38.7	everywhere this summer. Transportation is now the leading source of climate pollution in the U.S.
0:45.1	And we need to tackle that by creating sustainable travel choices.
0:49.0	But how do we do that when we spent decades designing most of our cities for cars?
0:53.5	When you are committed to providing a congestion-free driving experience
0:59.5	for the least spatially efficient mode of transportation ever invented,
1:04.4	this is what you get.
1:06.3	And what changes are needed to make public transit work for more people.
1:09.8	There's so many places in this country where bus service stops at 6 p.m.
1:13.6	doesn't run on the weekend. It runs once an hour.
1:16.6	That's not a serious transit system.
1:19.6	How can we make public transit work in American cities?
1:23.6	Climate One's empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency.
1:28.3	The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a $550 billion measure that would make it harder for states to build new highways and incentivize transit instead.
1:38.3	The Invest in America Act would be a big shift away from the highway habit of the last 70 years. Unless you live in a
1:46.1	dense urban part of the country, you probably rely on a car to get around. The culture of car
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