Book Notes: Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

Places Discussed

USA
World

Posted 2023-06-13

Book Notes by John December

In Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It, Daniel Knowles takes us on a rollicking ride, relating stories of the crush of cars on highways, the destruction of cities and economies, and the astonishing 140 years during which automobiles transformed the world in their own image. Knowles' enthusiasm and immersion in his topic erases any pretense of journalistic objectivity, but his book works well to raise awareness of his title metaphor--Carmageddon--the historic and ongoing process of pervasive automobile dominance--and its powerful hold on the entire world.

Knowles takes us from the snarled traffic on the Jane Byrne Interchange outside his home in Chicago to the the "insane" Katy Freeway in Houston. He relates his terrifying automobile rides in traffic in Mumbai, where he was assigned a driver, to Nairobi, where he worked for three years as a correspondent, and many stops in between--Japan, England, India, Africa, and more. He relates the poignant tragedy of lives and liberty lost in cities around the world--from Detroit to Birmingham (UK)--as cities changed from places where people could walk, bike, take buses, or ride trains routinely and efficiently to reach many destinations to landscapes where car-oriented development stretched apart and severed productive areas of cities from each other. He describes how the remaining scraps of urban fabrics that served walking or public transit were pulverized in a uniform effort to serve the prime directive of automobile-dominance of not just transportation, but housing, individual lives, local commerce, national economies, and ultimately our freedom and humanity.

Through an examination of history, living conditions, economics, and experts in a variety of fields, he reveals this Carmageddon as so pervasive that most people do not recognize it. He states: "..we have been making our world revolve around our wheels" (p. 4). This book opens the eyes of readers who may not have questioned this dominance.

For veteran followers of the topic of the history of the automotive transformation of the world, Knowles treads familiar ground:

Knowles aptly cites Peter D. Norton, author of Fighting traffic: the dawn of the motor age in the American city (2008) and Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving (2021) in the historic rise of the automobile in 20th-century America.
Knowles makes a pilgrimage to the "lovely, green expanse" of the University of California at Los Angeles campus to visit Professor Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking (2005, 2011) and Parking and the City (2018), to talk about the way parking economics has twisted cities and urban land use (p. 123).
Knowles pays respectful but critical homage to Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) and Dark Age Ahead. (2004), for the courageous way she turned the tide against the Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX) in 1962 (p. 75). Knowles acknowledges that contemporary criticism of Jacobs as "a gentrifier is the most biting... because it was true." (p. 75). Knowles points out that "she was not exactly clear on how to adapt cities." She showed the value of NIMBY opposition and set in motion the methods of NIMBYism used today to encase cities in bad form. Jacobs had spot-on criticism of the city planning of the time, but very little articulation of how cities could adapt, so that her Greenwich Village now is not working class, but a site of wealth hoarding (see also The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class-and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida).
Knowles talks with Jeff Speck about roads where the main problem is that drivers feel safe driving unsafe (p. 161).
Knowles treads familiar ground also on induced traffic: "Traffic engineers cannot resist trying to fix congestion with one more road. The reason is exactly why you should not put engineers in charge of social problems, like how to get people around. " (p. 117). (See also: Charles Marohn in Confessions of a Recovering Engineer and Strong Towns, where the elevation of engineering to a technologically-deterministic directive leads to inhumane city design.) (See also: Litman, "Generated Traffic and Induced Travel"; and, how by failing to address induced demand, widening highways creates induced demand which leads to further highway capacity problems (Transportation for America, 2020 "The Congestion Con: How more lanes and more money equals more congestion").)

Knowles takes us on an engaging journey, and he makes his preferences for urbanism known: "I unapologetically think that big, densely populated cities are the best places for most people to live, both for them and for the planet." (p. 230). However, Knowles' main conclusion on page 230 is a reasoned plea, hard won by the insight of his book: "The problem is not cars themselves. It is privileging cars over any other form of transport, so that they are not a luxury or an occasional necessity, but rather something that we are forced to rely on, day-to-day."

I enjoyed reading about the author's experiences in cities as a correspondent. I also appreciated that he brought out some ideas with a fresh viewpoint and emphasis:

"Bionic duckweed" is a term for promised, all-powerful solution that cancels any attempt to solve that problem with an existing technology. The term's origin is from a quote by a British railway engineer who rejected using current methods for rail electrification because a proposed bionic duckweed would make hydrogen widely available, which could then run trains on hydrogen fuel (which never happened) (p. 102). This type of technofuturism is covered by Norton in Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving (2021) and is a powerful technique of rhetorical closure used to delay solving problems in urban transportation. Similarly, Elon Musk's follies with Teslas in tunnels demonstrates the illogic of increasingly complicated tunnel construction delaying and detracting from proven transportation solutions (p. 110).
Knowles basks in the quiet of Tokyo and how it can teach the world about the balance between cars and transit (p. 187). The "strange calm" he found within the largest city in the world exists within a historic urban fabric melded with a balanced economic treatment of roads, car ownership, and transit, making possible all modes but favoring none (p. 189).
Knowles critiques "elite motorhead syndrome"-- in which a massive highway bypass is built around a thriving and growing city, and the minibusses serving workers are banned from a city center in favor of the cars used by the rich. (p. 86).
Knowles highlights the Dutch Model of giving priority in city streets to users in relation to their vulnerability (p. 231). I have seen this concept before, but Knowles reminds us that this approach is a simple, straightforward way to improve city life. He also touches on Low Traffic Neighborhoods (LTN) in Moseley, a suburb of Birmingham, UK (p. 201).
Knowles provides a broad overview of the alarming replication of a car-centric development model in rapidly-growing countries in Africa, India, and around the world.
Knowles weaves into his account the factors supporting NIMBYism, wealth hoarding, discrimination, and a lack of specific patterns supporting the transformation of urbanism from car-centric to people-centric.

In the end, this book serves as a wake-up call for people who might not otherwise have paid attention to the author's concept of Carmageddon. He concludes: "As I hope this book has illustrated, cars get in the way of our freedom to move around easily at least as much as they help it, by creating cities where everything is farther away, including opportunity." (p. 230).

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

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Book Notes by John December

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