PREVIEW: Hanging Out with Jonathan Maus of Bike Portland
The War on Cars
The War on Cars, LLC
4.9 • 937 Ratings
🗓️ 30 December 2025
⏱️ 6 minutes
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Summary
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We were out in Portland, Oregon, for our book tour in November, and spent a lot of great time hanging out with Jonathan Maus, the legendary founder of Bike Portland. We sat down with Jonathan in his backyard shed/studio and talked about how a great bike city can get even better, the importance of transit, and how media is an important part of the movement for more human cities.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What you're about to hear is an excerpt from a conversation with Jonathan Moss of Bike Portland. |
| 0:07.8 | If you want to hear the whole thing, you can become a Patreon supporter by going to patreon.com |
| 0:13.7 | slash the War on Cars Pod. |
| 0:16.5 | I heard you say something about, there was a chapter in the book that was really life-changing for you, the chapter about nature. Yeah, I think a lot of people might not make that connection. |
| 0:26.0 | I've got to say, one of the funniest things about the book that I appreciate is how direct the |
| 0:30.1 | chapter titles are. Literally chapter names, cars ruined childhood, cars were in nature, |
| 0:34.9 | cars are killing us, cars ruin society, cars are unjust. |
| 0:38.1 | You're very reasonable with these. But the nature one, right? That's what you said. So tell me more |
| 0:42.4 | about how that was such an important chapter for you. I'm the kind of person that I really love |
| 0:46.9 | being in nature, despite the fact that I'm a native New Yorker, really loves the urban life. |
| 0:52.9 | But I still have spent a lot of my time pursuing the outdoors |
| 0:58.4 | and as wild as possible. And so I really value wild space. And one of the reasons that I think |
| 1:04.9 | this movement is so important is land use and preventing greenfield development and endless sprawl that takes |
| 1:12.9 | up all the space that we have and kills everything. So, I mean, I already was aware that that land |
| 1:19.5 | use pattern of endless suburban expansion was really bad for natural areas. But it wasn't until I read |
| 1:27.3 | Ben Goldfarb's book, Crossings, which I highly |
| 1:30.1 | recommend to everybody, that I started to sort of open my mind to all the different ways |
| 1:37.4 | that cars are hurting nature. And then we also interviewed Paul Donald, who wrote a book |
| 1:43.8 | called Traffication. He's a UK researcher. And then we also interviewed Paul Donald, who wrote a book called Traffication. He's a |
| 1:45.2 | UK researcher. And he, too, really breaks down all the ways that this is happening. And it's just |
| 1:54.4 | really pretty much everything that cars do. I mean, the ways that cars strike animals, including insects. I don't know about you, |
| 2:04.5 | but when I was much younger, you would drive through the countryside. There would be a lot of |
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