PREVIEW: We Know What We Read Last Summer
The War on Cars
The War on Cars, LLC
4.9 • 937 Ratings
🗓️ 29 July 2025
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This is a preview of a Patreon-exclusive bonus episode. For complete access to this and all of our bonus content, plus ad-free versions of regular episodes, merch discounts, presale tickets to live shows, and more, become a Patreon supporter of The War on Cars.
While we were researching and writing "Life After Cars" last year, we read and pulled information from dozens upon dozens of books. There were also a handful of books that caught our attention but that, try as we might, didn't quite warrant inclusion in our own. In this Patreon exclusive, we talk about two of these books: "Road Safety: How to Reduce Accidents" by T.S. Skillman (1965) and an anthology called "He Rides Beside You" (1957). For very different reasons, both are fascinating examples of the mindset of people who knew a life before cars and, more than halfway into the 20th century, were grappling with the reality of life during cars.
Become a Patreon supporter of the podcast for access to the entire episode.
Pre-order our new book, Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile, coming in October from Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Random House. And catch us on tour this fall and beyond. Tickets for live shows are on sale now!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everybody. I'm Doug Gordon, and welcome to a special preview of a Patreon bonus episode. |
| 0:18.4 | In this one, Sarah and I talk about a couple of weird but fascinating |
| 0:21.9 | books that we found during the course of researching and writing our own book, Life After |
| 0:26.8 | Cars, which will be published by thesis and imprint of Penguin Random House on October 21st. |
| 0:32.9 | If you want to hear the entire episode, you can support us at patreon.com slash the war on carspod. |
| 0:39.6 | And now is a great time to sign up as we're running a summer discount. |
| 0:43.5 | You can save 20% on annual memberships with code summer 20. |
| 0:48.6 | And please pre-order life after cars and get ready to see us on our book tour. |
| 0:53.6 | We have stops in Brooklyn, Seattle, |
| 0:55.9 | and San Francisco that are on sale now, and many more are to come. You can check out |
| 1:01.0 | lifeaftercars.com for all the latest info. Thanks. I do want to ask because I think in the spirit |
| 1:07.5 | of like this meeting could have been an email. How does he go on for |
| 1:11.8 | what I'm assuming is around 250 to 300 pages with like what's in there in terms of prescriptive |
| 1:18.1 | ideas for how to bring down our road accident, road death rates? One of his ideas is to make, |
| 1:26.5 | and this is appendix 17, discurtesy as an indictable |
| 1:32.0 | offense. Like literally legally indictedable? There is much to be said for making discuracy itself |
| 1:38.3 | an indictable offense. As part of a demerit mark system with relatively mild penalization, this surely would not be too |
| 1:48.0 | difficult to administer once there were an adequate system of patrols. |
| 1:53.7 | So this is like Black Mirror Social Credit sort of ideas of like, and there literally is a Black Mirror episode about this, or like, |
| 2:03.6 | you cross the wrong person, you say the wrong thing, and you get a demerit, and eventually |
| 2:08.3 | you could be cast out of society. |
| 2:11.1 | Yeah. |
... |
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