TEASER: Cars as a Virus with Hermann Knoflacher
The War on Cars
The War on Cars, LLC
4.9 • 937 Ratings
🗓️ 5 January 2022
⏱️ 4 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
***This is a preview of a bonus episode. Become a Patreon supporter of The War on Cars for ad-free access to this and all our exclusive content.***
Perhaps you've seen pictures of a person walking around in a large, wearable wooden frame meant to illustrate the space taken up by one person in a private automobile. That's the gehzeug — or walkmobile — and it was invented by the Austrian civil engineer and professor Herman Knoflacher.
Professor Knoflacher, 81, is the head of the Institute of Transportation at the Vienna University of Technology. Long before the current global pandemic, he compared cars to a virus. It's a provocative analogy, but Knoflacher makes a compelling case. And rather than searching for vaccines and other ways to fight this particular threat, humanity has actively helped the spread of cars, much to the detriment of the built environment, children's health and safety and even our future on this planet.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Doug Gordon. This is a short preview of a bonus episode just for |
| 0:17.8 | Patreon supporters of the War on Cars. It's my interview with Hermann Noflacher, the Austrian engineer, professor, and inventor of the |
| 0:27.6 | Getzoy, or the Walkmobile. That's a wearable wooden frame that can be worn by a person to represent the spatial inefficiency of cars. |
| 0:37.0 | Professor Noflocker is also a writer and an influential philosopher about cities, he is of course a fierce critic of cars |
| 0:46.3 | and has compared them to a virus. |
| 0:49.0 | And hear why you will have to listen to the whole episode. |
| 0:52.6 | To become a Patreon supporter and get access to this |
| 0:56.1 | and all our other ad-free bonus content, |
| 0:59.2 | go to the War on Cars.org and click support us. We have awesome rewards including stickers and |
| 1:06.4 | water bottles and we'll also send you a handwritten note. Thanks. they can behave in ways that we outside of the car experience as |
| 1:25.0 | sociopathic and yet we also hear that people love to drive. |
| 1:29.0 | So, you know, setting aside car dependency as the thing that forces people to drive, how would you explain why people love to do something that is so harmful to them, to the built environment, to the natural world, and to other people. |
| 1:44.2 | The easiest way to explain it is that the feeling of power, the feeling of freedom, |
| 1:51.9 | and the environmental conditions we have provided for the car gave them very short benefits. |
| 1:59.0 | But all the other things you mentioned before which is damage of the city, |
| 2:04.1 | damage of the local economy, damage of the noise environment, |
| 2:09.4 | the air pollution and something like that. |
| 2:12.1 | They don't have direct feedbacks about this. |
| 2:15.9 | One things are happening too fast. |
| 2:18.0 | We don't have the senses and the receptors to understand what we are doing because the things are happening out of our |
| 2:26.4 | evolutionary experience. Our evolutionary experience is a pedestrian experience, |
| 2:32.2 | but we have prepared a world, not for people, we have prepared a world |
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