Book Notes: Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek

Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek

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Posted 2026-04-28

Book Notes by John December

This book makes an impassioned plea to re-examine the role of automobiles in our civilization. The authors draw on their lively podcast discussions, lived experience, books, and case studies to investigate automotive impacts. Then, they explore actions to reverse or mitigate the damage cars cause. This book distills its main point into a punch: cars are the elephants in the room, and their smell, waste, outsized presence, looming danger, and inflicted injury and death reveal that we must act now to reclaim space, freedom, and peace in our lives.

The authors describe themselves as "people who have been passionate about the need for safe, clean, and sustainable transportation for a long time" (p. xiii). Doug is a TV producer and writer, Aaron founded Streetsblog in 2006, and Sarah is a journalist and author who joined Streetsblog as a writer. All three work on The War on Cars podcast that started in 2018. They state, "we felt a sense of urgency about communicating one fundamental message: It's way past time to radically rethink and shrink society's collective relationship with the automobile" (p. xiii). This book cites other books and publications and thus provides a concise overview for anyone seeking to understand the role of cars and the changing concepts of urbanism and transportation engineering (see also Verkade 2024; Marshall 2024; Handy 2023; Peterson 2022; Norton 2008; Kimble 2024; Marohn 2021; Mepham 2024; Norton 2021). This book's strongest point is the stories of lived experiences confronting automobiles in American life and history. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wishes to lift the veil obscuring the car-centric world.

The authors state their vision and conclusion:

"We believe it is possible to take the better way, to sustain life without remaining dependent on cars, because we see individuals and governments making that choice more and more often. Humanity is not doomed to car dominance. It is no more fanciful to imagine a world in which the car is no longer king than it was to put this malevolent ruler on the throne in the first place" (p. 228).

This book is organized into three parts. The first part is the sobering story of how we arrived in the 21st century with our cities warped around automobiles. Part II covers the subsequent automobile-emphasis effects on childhood, nature, mortality, society, and justice. In part III, the authors outline a world that might be possible by design, political will, and individual action.

As a car-free person, I cheered this book's emotional, sometimes outraged, slightly righteous tone, which encourages people to find the spark to unravel the role of cars in cities and landscapes. I have lived the underlying issues the authors describe about cars warping cities, the senseless deaths and injuries caused by cars, the harm car drivers cause, and the societal bias towards cars. After reading this book and some of the works it references, I have gained better insight into its main points. In this essay, I discuss the three sections of the book: first, history; then, car harm; and third, what we can do to reverse automotive impacts. In the final section of my notes, IV, I reflect on this book's influence on my car-free experience. I conclude that if cars ruin cities, you can ruin cars.

I. Automobiles morphed from a mode of transportation to a way of life.

The automobile was not always king of the road. In the 19th century, early automobiles showed a tentative but sometimes precarious co-existence with other road users. However, in New York City in 1899, a taxi driver killed a pedestrian, Henry Bliss, and this tragically was the first death in the United States involving an automobile driver and a pedestrian. There came more deaths, so that the headline in the November 23, 1924, New York Times was, "Nation Roused Against Motor Killings." Righteous anger over deaths and outrageous excuses for car drivers who killed people led many to ask, "Why must we sacrifice our loved ones to appease the automotive gods?" (p. 24). These deaths were indeed sacrifices to the decision to put cars first and foremost, not "accidents" as some might say even today. The authors cite There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster - Who Profits and Who Pays the Price by Jessie Singer (p. 12), relating to the misuse of the word "accident." Today, automobile drivers regularly kill people, but the justice system customarily excuses those who kill and maim, sometimes with little or no consequences.

Back in the early 20th century, the anger over drivers killing other human beings was clear-eyed: the blame was on the driver, and this view was rooted in the culture at the time. This cultural grounding led to expressions in stories. The May 1939 issues of Action Comics showed Clark Kent as Superman seizing a radio broadcast booth and shouting out, "the auto accident death rate of this community should shame us all ... More people have been killed needlessly by autos than died during the world war" and Superman goes on to confront auto executives and the mayor to announce a "war on reckless drivers" (pp. 3-5).

The authors cite Peter D. Norton's book, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (2008), for this early history (p. 8) and the awakening of motordom. Norton's later book, Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving (2021), showed how this led to a technofuturistic vision that has kept automobiles at the forefront of transportation planning through a series of empty promises and hype. The book Why We Drive: The Past, Present, and Future of Automobiles in America (2013) by Andy Singer also brings an emotional punch to this issue through editorial cartoons.

The authors describe a critical, seminal marketing slogan that is repeated so often it is today presented as truth. In a television show called "Merrily We Roll Along" on NBC in 1961, Groucho Marx hosted and described America's "love affair with the automobile," a slogan invented to appease advertisers (p. 22). An advertising slogan repeated enough becomes stuck, and today, many see a "love affair" with cars as a defense for a car-centric bias.

Working against car bias and pushing back against cars runs into a problem: "Resistance to any design of policy solution that deprioritizes cars is almost always fierce" (p. 31). The authors further observe a deeper anger that they call "bikelash," particular to bicycle use, which is "the negative and outsized reaction of car culture to change" (p. 31). Either lash cuts deep, even when the objections to deprioritizing cars and accommodating bicycling follow amusingly predictable statements such as "[This] Isn't Amsterdam") (p. 33), "I Like Bikes, But.. (p. 35), or the moral panics that erupt over designs such as accommodating pedestrians with Leading Pedestrian Interval (LPI) at traffic signals (p. 36-46). The authors conclude, "Every city that pushes back against car dependency experiences something resembling bikelash, even if bikes have nothing to do with it. It's a normal part of imagining a life after cars. There's more support out there than you might think. Find your people, and together you can make it through" (p. 46).

This worldwide advocacy and activism rethinking cars faces challenges: "There's just one thing every advocate for a better, less car-dependent future always finds standing in their way--the culture" (p. 25). The authors cite the work of researchers Walker, Tapp, and Davis (2022) and their article, "Motonormativity: How Social Norms Hide a Major Public Health Hazard," which describes how automobile bias remains an unexamined force that introduces environmental and health hazards (see also Miner et al. (2024), "Car harm: A global review of automobility's harm to people and the environment"). Dealing with this car-centric culture, its embedded design priority in the landscape, the harm it causes, and what you can do about it is the theme of the rest of the book.

II. Automobiles warp human development, habitat, health, society, and justice.

Having touched on the historic changes in transportation and the cultural turmoil that question automobile-centric designs in Part I, the authors go on to show "How cars ruin everything": childhood, nature, health, society, and justice.

Cars ruin childhood by removing children's autonomy to walk or ride a bike for their mobility needs to school, activities, or friends. Marooned in car-dependent landscapes, kids miss out on everything their journey toward greater autonomy requires. They don't experience gradual independence in movement, such as walking or bicycling. The authors state, "Cars have stolen a fundamental part of childhood from children: their ability to experience the world independently." (p. 54). Certainly, modern parenting (p. 55) plays a role, and serious misconceptions about risk and the deadly nature of cars (p. 56) also do.

The authors identify heroes who work to reverse the automotive theft of childhood autonomy, such as the Montclair, New Jersey Bike Bus (p. 49). The Bike Bus gathers kids together to ride their bikes to school in a big pack, with adults (shepherds) guiding them. The Bike Bus shows how children can learn how to meet their mobility needs. When children live in a place where they can walk or bike, they state, "I just walk there" as a solution. Children, when given the chance to walk or bike to destinations, know the value of being self-directed rather than the suburban value of car-dependency (p. 68). The authors ask, "What will it take to center the needs of children at all levels of urban planning and design?" (p. 69) It may be the emotional and visual appeal of the bike bus, as Sam Balto of Portland, Oregon, describes, which "could be the spark that ignites the flame" (p. 69).

In the Bike Bus, I see a physical, emotional, and visually vivid experience of cooperative action, not an abstract concept or theory about density, walkability, or transit modes. People can see the Bike Bus and smile about hundreds of kids on bikes being shepherded to school and know that something important is going on because the children and adults are learning, with each kilometer of travel, about cooperation, health and exercise, their city's landscape and streets, and the value of self-directed mobility for growing up incrementally. Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet narrate similar interventions in their book, Movement: How to Take Back Our Streets and Transform Our Lives (2024).

Cars ruin nature by branching out into the full spectrum of landscapes, including urban, suburban, rural, and wild, to the point where the noise, exhaust pollution, tire chemicals, and crashes spread into the environment and kill or harm biota. This destruction can be emotional: a worker driving a Central Park Conservancy vehicle killed a beloved owl, Barry, in Central Park (p. 71). This enroachment of roads throughout the landscape to a density of impact that warps ecology is called traffication (p. 75), a term described by Ben Goldfarb in Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet (2023). The damage includes habitat loss, noise, chemicals, fumes, pollution, disruption, and isolation (pp. 76-87).

Through advertisements, absurd imagery portrays cars and car drivers as protectors of nature and as a doorway to environmentalism, when the opposite is true. Notable is a Kia SUV ad showing a driver of a Kia SUV revving his vehicle's wheels in beach sand and dragging a rake as a "Beachomber" saving the planet. The driver is obviously disrupting the delicate beach environment with his huge vehicle, scarring the sand with his rake, polluting the beach, no doubt crushing thousands of organisms, and spewing engine noise, exhaust, chemicals, and destruction all with an arrogant self-satisfaction and a Jesus-like beard and countenance (p. 88). This absurd ad has become known as "Kia's Sea Turtle Jesus."

While many people are smart enough to see through Kia's misdirection, they still have a soft spot for little creatures and sometimes forget about humans. The authors beg the world: alongside caring for Barry the Owl and the Sea Turtles Saved by Kia Jesus, still care about all the effects of vehicles on all species, including the human species (p. 93). The moral mandate of road ecology must extend to human populations in cities suffering under the stink and pollution of interstate ramps in their neighborhoods.

Car drivers have been killing people and wildlife for more than a century. Through tragic crashes of all magnitudes and severity, car drivers have been dealing out death and injury that has been staggering in its extent. Ralph Nader wrote Unsafe at Any Speed (1965) and pleaded for attention to the rising death toll of automobiles. He wrote: "For over half a century the automobile has brought death, injury, and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people" (Goodyear, p. 95).

Today, the staggering loss of life due to automobiles (pp. 96-100) is truly astonishing, mainly because it is accepted. Wes Marshall (2023) calls out the transportation engineering profession for ignoring this failure. While tragically, opioid deaths now exceed automobile deaths, all people are immersed in car-oriented city and landscape designs and traffic (p. 100). The direct harm of cars (Miner et al. (2024), "Car harm: A global review of automobility's harm to people and the environment") includes air pollution (p. 102) and health (p. 105) effects.

It was a health crisis that may have shown us a way forward. The global COVID pandemic disrupted so many human activities that its emergence in the spring of 2020 is called the "Anthropause" (p. 107), and air pollution reduction was dramatically apparent (I noted this in my streetcar blog). This cessation of traffic, as well as the use of public transit, was the most dramatic, simultaneous disruptions of global transportation in history.

Reworking cities and their relationships with cars, drivers, and pedestrians has continued in recent decades. In New York City, the 14th Street busway has been successful since 2019 (p. 111). Work in Oslo, Bogota, London, and New York City (pp. 112-113) faced the usual pushback and rage for its de-emphasis of automobile dominance, but has been a success. Similarly, new rules that consider people outside vehicles (and not just in vehicles) for safety have likewise rewritten the dominance of car drivers in safety considerations (pp. 113-114). The authors observe: "All the evidence tells us that reducing the number of cars, and the number of trips we take in cars, would significantly lengthen our lives and improve the quality of those lives." (p. 114).

Cars ruin society by disrupting the patterns of living and mobility that the human species has relied on for over 200,000 years. In exchange, an experiment in car dependency during the twentieth century created numerous, overlapping, and severe flaws in the resulting car-centric way of life and almost all aspects of human relations and mobility to the point where people have become subservient to cars. The authors ask, "What if our ability to relate to the people around us is determined... by the cars that roar past our homes... [the] amount of time we spend looking at the world through a windshield? ... What if cars are literally driving us apart?" (p. 115). The urbanist Donald Appleyard in Livable Streets (1981) showed "insight into just how destructive cars are to the patterns of urban human socialization that had endured for millennia before the age of the automobile" (p. 115).

Cars ruin society by disrupting human relationships through isolation and polarization. We see increasing loneliness (pp. 119-123), motor mania (p. 123), and paranoia surrounding an unfounded fear of "taking away cars" (p. 130). The authors refer to the philosopher David Hume, whose "Is-Ought fallacy" essentially states, "it is that way, therefore it ought to be that way," to justify an eternal focus on automobiles as the zenith of transportation and city design (p. 125). This car dominance leads to the rare walkable lifestyle as a "luxury good" that few can afford (p. 136).

Cars ruin justice because they warp human mobility around the fundamental need for access to a personal vehicle. Vehicles warp cities around their needs for conveyance (roads), priority (expressed as traffic deaths), and storage (free, cheap, or illegal parking). The result is that the human being is left out. This leads to a magnification of disparities for traditionally disenfranchised and excluded people of color, people with disabilities, children, older people, and women (the majority of the population) to the point where "our transportation system is stacked against them... our autocentric way of life exacerbates and magnifies the inequalities that already exist" (p. 137).

The paradox is that the utopia that car culture promised has never came to pass:

"Cars promise freedom and agency for everyone. But too often, they have proven to be a more reliable vehicle for reinforcing the power of those who are already powerful. They impoverish those who are already poor, disproportionately endanger the most vulnerable among us, and widen the already yawning gulf that separates the haves and have-nots in our society" (p. 154).

III. We can remake our neighborhoods, cities, and regions to support human peace and freedom.

In the book's last part, the authors describe how people can, individually and collectively, move toward a life after cars. The authors frame the stark choice (p. 157) facing us:

Work to enable freedom of movement, mobility, and safety for all people; or
Continue vehicle-oriented land use and car-oriented bias in all decisions; this relies heavily on multilane arterials and the isolation of people within cars for mobility.

The authors observe that choice #2 "is still being made every day by the people who dole out money for transportation infrastructure" (p. 157). The choice for emphasizing urban highways leads to the "Highways to Hell" interstate highway system (p. 172):

"Urban highways are the most aggressive, obnoxious, destructive infrastructure that car culture has to offer. A freeway going through a densely populated neighborhood is as brutal as a punch in the face and as pervasively poisonous as an oil slick. In the short term, its construction erases communities and displaces people; in the long term, it radiates toxic pollutants and unhealthy noise levels... it assumes an air of inevitability... determining the fate of hundreds of square miles around it... If what we build shapes us, freeways distort and deform the human social world as surely as they do the natural world." (p. 174)

The authors quote City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways (2024) by Megan Kimble (p. 176) and the idea of induced demand (p. 175). (See also: Todd Litman, "Generated Traffic and Induced Travel" and Transportation for America 2020, "The Congestion Con: How more lanes and more money equals more congestion".) The core of a criticism of car-oriented transportation is the spatial needs of automobiles and the lack of spatial management: "Our transportation infrastructure is a complicated web of cause and effect that is, for the most part, determined by the insatiable need of the motorcar for space. Space to park, space to drive, space to idle while waiting to park or drive. Every human aspiration and desire is pushed aside in favor of the car" (p. 177).

The authors point out that "designing for nondrivers helps everyone" (p. 160) and cite When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency (2024) by Anna Zivarts. Disability rights give rise to curb cuts, which help people using wheelchairs as well as all street users (pp. 158-160).

Reworking space in cities for cars includes viewing curb space as a commons (p. 163). By freeing up curb, we can get "protected bike lanes.. bike parking.. dedicate bus lanes... curbside dining, parklets, school lay streets, loading zones for deliveries" (p. 171). Other innovations include curb extensions (bulbouts, neckdowns) and mid-block chicanes (pp. 171-172).

Parking Reform is part of enabling freedom of mobility for all, and the authors draw ideas from the Parking Reform Network (p. 166). In many areas of the world, like Tokyo, there is no free parking (p. 168). The authors cite Donald Shoup (p. 162). (See also: Rethinking Parking (2024), The High Cost of Free Parking (2005, 2011) Parking and the City (2018), Parking Reform Made Easy (2013), Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It (2023), and Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (2023).)

The authors contrast that, at the same time, "We are capable of making good choices about how our streets are configured. Bringing our cities and suburbs back to a human scale is something we can do by design, if we decenter the car. It's already happening in some communities around North America and the world." (p. 157)

The authors observe that change comes from the very real decision-making process, risks, and dynamics. The first key is recognizing that better decisions can be made to quickly change the role of autos in a city. Ghent, Belgium, proposed pedestrianizing the innermost part of its historic center. Before this decision, there had been massive protests, and someone had even mailed a bullet to the mayor. Eventually, on Monday, April 3, 2017, the city made the changes, and it worked: people loved it and praised it as if they had been for it all along (pp. 180-187). The lesson was that noisy, violent protest will confront anyone questioning car dominance, but in the end, change is often widely acclaimed.

In Paris, France, Mayor Anne Hidalgo took office in 2014 and instituted a program of bike paths and green space along the River Seine, which had been an expressway for cars. She faced extreme anger and bitter opposition from the "well-organized motoring lobby" and backlash (pp. 191-195), but she won re-election in 2020. By the time of the Paris Olympics in 2024, the city celebrated its "enormous pride in showing off the 'new' Paris" (p. 194).

In Meryville, California, "America's Bike Mayor," John Bauters, elected in 2021, found success with an Active Transportation Plan. At first facing opposition, Bauters stated, "political will is probably the biggest barrier" (p. 198).

The shift from automobile-centric to active and multimodal transportation faces an entrenched cultural bias toward cars and very noisy lobbyists, industry groups, and individuals who stoke fear and misinformation. The authors challenge the reader to step up to the challenge to work against this bias:

"Those of us who want a human-scale world where we can live in health and safety must push back against the automotive imperative at every level, from the parking space to the interstate. We must raise our voices above the malevolent hiss of the freeway traffic and make them heard..... we must demand that planners design for the people in a community, not for the cars" (p. 177).

The advice the authors give in the end is a practical list of things you can do (pp. 231-233):

Learn to see cars: The biggest impact of this book is raising awareness of what is considered so obvious about most of our contemporary environment that is completely ignored: "As big as they are, cars have become essentially invisible to us because they are such a deeply ingrained feature of the modern world.... So start looking harder. Try walking in a place you would normally only consider driving... allow yourself to feel the magnitude of the damage cars cause..... listen... look at the car storage.... walk ... Once you see the true nature of cars, you won't be able to unsee it."
Engage with local government:: Nothing changes without reworking laws that keep car dominance in place: "Go to those planning meetings..." If you can't, send a written comment. Call your local representatives and elected officials, and "know which elected officials in your area are open to a less autocentric way of life and tell them you support them when they take a stand. Local government can be very responsive to squeaky wheels. You can help to make sure that the squeaks aren't coming just from car wheels."
Find your people: Use social media networks to follow and learn nationally and internationally. Find local bike store group rides. Join a local pedestrian, cycling, or transit advocacy group or a local parks conservancy. The main thing is this: "It can be a real relief to connect with others and confirm that the problem isn't with you--it's with the cars."
Preach to the unconverted: Many people are like fish in a bowl that don't fully realize that they are swimming in water: "Most people have an intuitive sense that a life without cars, or with at least a lot fewer of them, is better." Look to world examples: strolling the Marais in Paris, biking in Amsterdam, and even visiting car-free theme parks: "Talking about and sharing the relatable joy we find in societally approved car-free or car-light spaces like European cities or theme parks can be the beginning of that guy becoming less oblivious to the harm cars do. Use every opportunity to sneak in the idea that maybe, just maybe, we don't have to organize our lives around the care and feeding of automobiles" (p. 233).
Believe change is possible: Understand that "This is not a sequential series of steps. It's a cycle in which we continuously rediscover the inspiration that can keep us going. It's a way of life, in which we have to keep renewing and refreshing our belief that things can be different and better. Look to the examples of positive change that are popping up every day around the world and around your own community."
The authors conclude:
"Above all, remember this: You're not alone in wanting a better world, one in which cars are relegated to their proper use. Cars are tools that can be useful at certain times and places. They are not gods. They are not the foundation of our society. They should serve us. We should not serve them." (p. 233).

IV. I reflect on the larger picture: You can ruin cars.

I've been car-free for decades and haven't ridden in a car for over six years. The biggest revelation I have is this: cars are embedded in our civilization in ways that go largely unnoticed. People swimming in a car-oriented environment can't see the supporting automotive claim on space, infrastructure, laws, policies, biases, and the car impacts that have become invisible by their ubiquity. People are the "fish swimming in water who become blind to the water," a metaphor originating with Marshall McLuhan writing about media environments.

How this can change is up to you. The authors do not state it like this, but I see it this way: If cars ruin cities, you can ruin cars. Here are ways to do this, based on the ideas from this book and others:

The first way to ruin cars is to reveal car dependency to drivers.
Tap into the metaphor of making the water visible to the fish that swim in it. Sarah Goodyear points out that "Just as water is invisible to the fish, hardly any of us can perceive the swirling sea of cars and car-centric infrastructure around us" (p. 209). She quotes Marshall McLuhan, writing in War and Peace in the Global Village (1968), who wrote: "One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in" (Goodyear, p. 209). Reveal their environment and then an alternative anti-environment for car drivers.
Ruin cars by revealing double standards.
The authors draw attention to double standards and the treatment that cars automatically receive. They use the example of a bridge collapse on I95 in Pennsylvania (p. 203). The Governor immediately declared a state of emergency, repaired the damaged roadway so that a temporary fix was operational within 12 days, and permanently replaced it with an 8-lane-wide opening less than a year later (p. 203). This shows the high-priority infrastructure and swift action that is possible for cars. Reveal this level of priority for alternatives to cars to decision makers.
Ruin cars by reclaiming the space they steal.
The spatial toll of automobiles is immense, yet unseen: the need to have cars take up space in all their uses, driving, idling, storing, is raised to an imperative, superseding space and time for all other uses, such as for pedestrians, bicycling, public transportation, local businesses, and housing for people. It seems no amount of loss of life, loss of treasure, efficiency, health, livability, or peace is ever enough to satiate the need for cars to steal space.
People can take a range of actions to raise awareness (pp. 205-209). Some signs raise awareness and declare "CARS RUIN CITIES" (p. 199-202). Other actions include tactical urbanism, such as creating your own bike lanes or holding a parking day (p. 213). You can drop an orange cone on a roadway to reveal a safer route (pp. 220-221), call your elected officials, show up at a meeting, donate, volunteer, or talk with people. Reveal the space cars that have stolen. Carlos Moreno, in The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet (2024), describes how the design of cities can place people proximate to their regular needs, and essentially erase the large space separating places where people live, work, and gather.
Ruin cars by overturning the lie that cars bring freedom.
Car-centric transportation plans and policies become a kind of religious idolatry and an unquestioned fealty to the priority of cars. This is measured by motornativity and is known as "car-brain" or auto-centricism; it constitutes a belief system. It is a like a religion that judges nonbelievers harshly and mocks or disparages public transportation, for example, as for people who are "poor and uneducated." This religion demands sacrifice: death to young people in great numbers, death to pedestrians, and the decimation of urban neighborhoods in favor of mobility for people who do not live there. The ignorance of this car support and its consequences is part of what the war on cars is all about.
The authors point out that "The freedom of the open road isn't so free when the road is jammed with traffic... and there's no sidewalk or bike lane that might at least give you the notion of choosing a different way" (p. 221). Wes Marshall makes this point about freedom in his book Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies Our Transportation System (2024).
Ruin cars by rejecting car-centric technofuturism.

The science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, in his short story "The Pedestrian" (1951), paints a chilling picture of authorities hounding a man simply for walking (p. 225). Bradbury's story, partly based on his own experience in Los Angeles being confronted by police in 1949 for walking, reveals a future that could be possible.
Today, we are "standing at a crossroads" (p. 225) where we could "double down on the catastrophic car-brained choices of the last 125 years" (p. 226) in the form of a technological fantasy of electric, self-driving utopia (p. 226), but this rejects the fact that cars are still hulking material vehicles and take up space and warp the space of cities. The authors state, "The problem of cars can't be solved with different cars" (p. 228). I would also add that electric, self-driving cars don't change the spatial use of car-oriented city layouts or the geometry of streets.
Peter Norton's book, Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving (2021), shows how rhetorical closure, technological determinism, lack of awareness of a systems approach, motonormativity, and public transportation technofuturism contributed to extending car dependency. This has led to a vision that seeks to keep automobiles at the apex of transportation planning through a series of empty promises and hype.
Ruin cars by looking around.
Follow the advice of the late, great Yogi Berra, who said, "You can observe a lot by watchin.'" Gain an understanding of where cars have taken over and reveal a different set of choices possible. The authors explain how so many cities and nations have begun to turn the tide (p. 229). We can see examples of dense centers with restricted auto traffic in Milan, Brussels, Berlin, Barcelona, London, and Seoul (p. 229). Voters and planners have worked to eliminate minimum parking requirements in many cities (p. 229) (See the Parking Reform Network.) Other examples show alternatives to cars, such as making public transit more widely accessible, as with the German Deutschland-Ticket for €58 a month, which allows unlimited use of local and regional public transport in the country, including buses, trams, trains, subways, and other modes (p. 229). The authors also cite Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town (2021) by Charles L. Marohn Jr. and Curbing Traffic (2021) by Melissa and Chris Bruntlett, for their innovative views.
Ruin cars by celebrating life itself.
The author's title of this book is "Life After Cars." Accordingly, the authors ultimately take a celebratory tone: overcoming the problems and harm cars bring is possible, and a fuller life not lived under or behind the wheel of a car is joyous. (See: Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (2013) by Charles Montgomery.)
I've seen how being car-free is possible, as I've been doing it for decades. However, I know that complex work or family obligations often require car use. Being car-light is possible. But many cities and suburban areas, as policy, build landscapes that reinforce a car-centric belief system, making car-free or car-light living impossible or very difficult. Of course, choices can always remain for people who yearn to be car-dependent, but this is important: a yearning for car-dependency should not trump other choices and freedoms people have to live car-free.

My time of being car-free has extended for decades, and has included years of not riding in a car at all. Some people can live car-free if they can locate close to their daily needs and have alternative transit available. However, I do not think we should eliminate all automobile use. Cars remain useful to many people and for many reasons, and this should continue. However, what I have come to know, and the point of this book, is that we don't have to give our living environment over to automobile dominance. We can allow multiple choices, including for those who wish to live car-free or car-light.

This book helps show that life itself is inherently diverse and complex, and that freeing up our lives, neighborhoods, cities, and regions for multi-modal, human-scaled mobility is possible. Ultimately, the authors provide an inspiring motivation: "There can be life, a world, after cars--and for ourselves, our neighbors, our children, we must keep moving toward it, one step at a time." (p. 233)